How Retargeting Works for Cannabis Advertising Platforms - and Why It’s Important

If you’ve ever shopped for something online, added it to your cart, and then seen that same product advertised on a different website, you’ve seen the power of retargeting - especially if you made the purchase. 

Retargeting can be broadly defined as serving ads to a consumer based on an event or action that they took - whether they abandoned a cart, entered a certain area, received an email, searched for certain keywords, and more. 

Retargeting works the same way for cannabis advertising: if a customer adds a pack of pre-rolls and a bag of edibles to their cart, but leaves the website before placing the order, retargeting can help bring them back. That’s easy to do with a cannabis advertising platform.

The Surfside Ad Platform can help dispensaries and cannabis brands retarget cannabis consumers to bring them back to your website or even drive them to local retail locations.

It All Starts with the SURF ID

As the leading ad tech platform for cannabis, Surfside’s technology is directly integrated with point-of-sale software, ecommerce platforms, cannabis websites and other marketplaces. When we place a pixel on your website, that pixel will create unique SURF IDs for every visitor. The SURF ID is enriched by the Surfside Experience Graph, which measures customer activity across devices to understand the complete customer journey. 

By aggregating behaviors, demographics, interests, purchases, devices, and visitation data into a single unified ID, the Surfside Ad Platform can serve ads based on many different campaigns. \ Here are are six types of campaigns you can run with Surfside: 

1. Abandoned Cart Retargeting.

 The average shopping cart abandonment rate is almost 70%. - that can add up to a lot of missing revenue for dispensaries and cannabis brands. 

Surfside can show ads to cannabis consumers who visited your site and filled out a cart, but didn’t buy something. Serve ads with the specific product that’s already in the cart or show new offers to get consumers back to the website to complete an order. 

2. SMS Retargeting.

The average open rate of a text message is estimated to be 99%. But that doesn’t mean that every consumer in your SMS dispensary marketing campaign is clicking the offer. 

Since the SURF ID connects the devices and combines customer data into a single user profile, Surfside can reach customers who receive SMS campaigns and serve ads across other channels, like websites and mobile apps. By combining retargeting with SMS, you can build a better loyalty program and drive more revenue. 

3. Location Retargeting.

 Location retargeting ad campaigns can help dispensaries reach cannabis consumers in the area and drive them to stores. Surfside helps create campaigns based on zip codes, counties, states, and other factors to make sure you’re showing ads to only relevant customers. You can even retarget consumers after they see a billboard or after they visit a store or competing location.

By adding your first-party customer data to Surfside, you can reach your best local customers across web and mobile channels. You can also reach tourists and travelers by targeting groups of net new device IDs that recently appeared in the area. 

4. Website Retargeting.

 Want to build a group of consumers who have visited specific product pages? Or net new customers that found your website and then left? 

 Website retargeting allows you to specifically serve ads based on web activity, ensuring that the ads are relevant to the audience’s interests and most recent interactions with your company. It’s also incredibly effective - website retargeting campaigns can increase conversion by 43%. 

5. Behavioral Retargeting.

Cannabis is personal - and everyone is looking for something a little different. With Surfside, you can retarget groups of consumers based on 25K+ customer attributes. That means you can build audiences and serve ad campaigns based on product preferences, purchase history, and other factors. \ Serve ads specifically to customers most likely to buy pre-rolls, or retarget consumers who are loyal to a specific brand, strain, dosage, and more. 

6. Purchase Frequency Retargeting.

Purchase frequency is a fancy way of saying “how often people buy.” 

This can vary dramatically in the world of cannabis - from once-a-year tourists to weekly flower buyers, purchase frequency can tell you a lot about what different customer segments are looking for and when they’re ready to buy. 

The SURF ID identifies the different levels of purchase frequency among your audience. By targeting groups that are most likely to visit once a week with one campaign and then launching another ad campaign that targets infrequent or lapsed buyers, for example, you can customize the offers and messaging to each potential customer. 

 Advertising, Audiences, and Attribution

Whatever tactic you choose for your cannabis advertising campaign, make sure that you can measure what happens next. With Surfside, you get one clean dashboard view of ad performance. The results are tailored to your campaign goals, giving you the chance to really see what’s important: from overall return on ad spend and how much revenue was generated by Surfside ads to metrics like store visitation data and web visits. When you can easily view everything in one place, you can also start building even better ad campaigns for the future. 

Want to see Surfside in action? Register for a demo!