Cookie Now, Market Later: Veruca Salt and The Power Of Retargeting

When you have big news about your band to announce, make sure you don’t miss out on retargeting pool opportunities. The earlier that you get your retargeting pixels in place the sooner you can start putting users (fans of your band) into your retargeting pools.

Guest Post by Chandler Coyle on The Coyle Report

Your website and clicks on tweets/posts will see a huge spike during the first 48 hours after your initial announcement. So, you want to place retargeting pixels on both your own website, but also utilize url redirects that enable you to cookie traffic you send to 3rd party sites.Let’s take a hypothetical example using a real band in a real-world situation. Veruca Salt has reformed with all four original members and have recorded their first album in 18 years. They had recently announced plans for a tour with the reformed original members, but on Tuesday this week they launched their new album pre-order via PledgeMusic.Now, PledgeMusic is a 3rd party site and Veruca Salt cannot place pixels on their PledgeMusic campaign page. So, under normal circumstances Veruca Salt would not be able to cookie users they sent to their PledgeMusic campaign page. Meaning they wouldn’t be able to build a retargeting pool for later Facebook advertising campaigns.However, if they were to send their fans through a url redirect service like found.ee. The band could install some Facebook Custom Audience pixel code within their found.ee account. Then, instead of sending their fans from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube (or any other service they don’t control) directly to their PledgeMusic campaign page (another service they don’t control) — they create a shortened url like found.ee/vs2015.When a fan clicks on the found.ee/vs2015 url, to the fan it feels just like a normal shortened url as it seems like they get whisked directly to the Veruca Salt PledgeMusic campaign page. However, behind the scenes, found.ee cookies the fan’s browser before it redirects to PledgeMusic. This means the fan is now part of Veruca Salt’s retargeting pool (or Facebook Custom Audience). The band can later decide to target ads to fans within that pool.Here’s a visual representation of the process: