Retargeting, the process of targeting consumers and prospective clients based on their previous Internet actions, has become one of the more popular forms of online advertising lately. On top of it being wildly effective, it's also a great way of delivering a branding message to a specific set of visitors. Why do I recommend it? If you want a huge ROI, retargeting is the tactic for you.

The most common way of doing this is to retarget the audience of your entire site by putting in a cookie into the footer of your webpages or on every page from which you wish to collect people to retarget. Those of us who are more experienced in this field even have multiple batches: one for visitors who have already made a conversion, and one for those who haven’t yet, but will be encouraged to make conversions based on pages they have been to, by showing them custom ads. For more info SEOmoz’s JoannaLord Has a great post on this you should read.

Today I'd like to share with you a simple hack to allow you to retarget your users in a buying cycle, a process that works really well with repeat business. Say you’re selling widgets that people re-order every two weeks because they run out of widgets during that time span: how do we stop showing them retargeting banners for the two weeks after they’ve bought widgets and start showing them again after the second week is through?

By using Adwords, you can make this happen. Create a retargeting Campaign and add a negative cookie for all sales that have taken place (buy tracking the confirmation page).

Now create a second adgroup which you retarget only people who bought from you in the past 60 days then make a negative cookie of people who bought from you and set the length of the cookie for two weeks, thus giving you a retargeting buying cycle of two weeks.

(So for example SEOmoz may choose to use this to show Pro members on a trial that have not logged in for say two weeks to check them out again with a banner saying we miss you!)

This can be used in all sorts of ways and timings to create a progressive campaign. What are you waiting for? Get busy taking your retargeting campaigns to the next level and let me know how you plan on using this strategy by commenting below.

David Konigsberg - David Is the director of search for Optimaltargeting.com and focuses on PPC, SEO, and Social Marketing