If your law firm wants to take advantage of a 10-20 percent conversion rate, retargeted ads can help. With them, you never say goodbye to your firm’s visitors. 

Retargeting interacts with the basic nature of social media. Everyone surfs multiple types of websites. Facebook in particular is highly popular, and it offers ways to share just about anything in one way or another. 

Ever wonder how items you have been shopping for somewhere else follow you into Facebook ads and other websites? That progression is the product of retargeting –- a strategy that shows you an advertisement on a new site for something you searched for on a previous one. 

Are websites, merchants, companies and law firms colluding to track and share information on your preferences and interests? Fortunately not. They use cookies: the gluten that holds everything explored on the web together. Cookies on websites track users and store information on the their preferences so that they can reappear later on social networks and websites.

Here’s how retargeting works:

• A law firm’s website saves a cookie on a visitor's browser once he or she visits them for information.
• The ad network (Facebook, Google AdWords, or other ad exchange) detects the user's cookie and displays the ad when visiting sites in the ad network.
• That ad has code, text and images embedded in it. It turns the law firm ad into a satellite of its original home, which reads the cookie saved on the visitor's browser before showing the ad.
• The law firm’s ad cookie is able to detect that a user has visited a website selling books -- perhaps mysteries -- and the marketing site allows the firm's specific ad for criminal defense attorneys to appear.

The process is effective because it is based on established interest. Visual repetition frequently drives surfers to convert after they see something in which they have an interest several times over the course of a search. In fact, ComScore and ValueClick Media conducted a study that concluded that retargeted ads generate more conversions (business) than any other targeting strategy.

Facebook has introduced a Custom Audiences retargeting option that is available to all advertisers. Barring the occasional mismatch, retargeting works well. In sight and in mind often produce higher conversions -- and more clients for your law firm.