Last week we gave you some insight into retargeting ads and how they can transform your pay-per-click advertising campaigns. At the same time, we noted that marketers have to be careful with the way they put retargeting to use, as the bigger returns can be offset by higher expenses when campaigns aren’t set up and managed correctly.

To show you why that is, and what you need to look out for, we're sharing a few of the ways you can accidentally ruin your retargeting ad campaigns without even knowing it:

Overwhelming Searchers With Too Many Impressions
The biggest benefit of retargeting ads is that they let you have multiple chances to make an impression on someone who is looking for the products or services you offer. However, it’s important that your ads not show up too often, for too long, or in too many places. When you’re overly-aggressive with retargeting, it can annoy searchers and actually turn them against you.

Being Too Stingy
On the other hand, if you don’t bid highly enough to generate multiple impressions, then what’s the point of trying retargeting advertising in the first place? You want to be careful with your ad budget, of course, but being too stingy can result in having your ads fail to display long enough to make an impact… and virtually ensuring that potential customers won’t notice you.

Forgetting to Test Ads
Although having multiple chances to impress the same potential customers is handy, it doesn’t guarantee that they’re going to return to your website or decide to do business with you. You need the creative elements of your ad to convince them to take the next step, and you should always be trying and testing different versions of your message to see which ones buyers respond to.

Using a One-Size-Fits-All Approach to Customers
Retargeting—like any form of Internet advertising—is all about targeting your message to the right audience. In other words, you shouldn’t have the same campaigns in place for all of your products, services, or landing pages. Instead, tailor them specifically to a certain type of visitor (and the content they’ve seen so far) to achieve the biggest returns.

Taking Your Eye Off the Metrics
As we’ve already mentioned, retargeting can get expensive if you aren’t careful. Smart marketers make the most of their campaigns by keeping an eye on things like bid prices, click-through rates, and conversion costs. You can’t optimize your Internet advertising without keeping a close eye on the metrics.

The retargeting model of advertising offers a huge improvement over old single-exposure pay-per-click methods. That said, if you aren’t careful about the way you manage your campaigns, you can easily ruin your results just as you’re getting started.