A visitor lands on your site, looks at your services, compares your prices, then closes the tab without doing anything. That is not a commercial failure. It is normal behaviour for the vast majority of visitors on a first visit.
Why most of your visitors leave without acting
Nobody buys a website, an SEO engagement or a marketing programme on impulse. Your prospect compares, hesitates, asks a partner's opinion, comes back later (or never). The problem is not necessarily your offer. It is that most of the time you have no way of reaching them again once they have left your site.
Hold on to this simple rule: a visitor who leaves without acting is not a lost prospect, it is a prospect who needs a reminder at the right moment.
How retargeting lets you reach them again without starting over
The principle is simple. A small piece of code installed on your site spots the visitors who came by, then lets you show them a targeted ad when they browse Facebook, Instagram or Google afterwards. You no longer pay to reach strangers who do not know you yet; you pay to speak again to people who already know who you are. How the pixel works is set out in the Meta Business help centre, and the logic of remarketing campaigns is explained in the Google Ads help centre.
- A visitor who looked at your pricing page without contacting you
- A basket or a quote form abandoned partway through
- A blog reader who never visited your service pages
- A former client worth approaching for a new piece of work
- A visitor from a Google Ads campaign who did not convert
Beware the classic mistake: showing the same ad twenty times to the same person in a week does not convince them, it irritates them and damages your company's image. Effective follow-up is limited in time and offers something other than the same offer seen over and over: a client testimonial, a case study, an answer to the most frequent objection.
Free tool worth knowing: Meta Pixel Helper (a Chrome extension) and Google Tag Assistant let you check in two minutes that your tracking is correctly installed, before spending a single euro on advertising.
Good news for a small company: retargeting generally costs less than going out for a stranger, because the audience is smaller and already qualified. If you are still hesitating over the overall budget to devote to online advertising, our article on Google Ads for a small company on a small budget helps you set the right figures before you start.