Whether you like it or not, most of the people who visit, view, or click on your website are typically not coming ready to make a purchase. More often than not, people need to interact with a website or brand a handful of times before deciding to commit to making a purchase. So what happens to these visitors after they leave your page?
Well, have you ever browsed a website or product online without making a purchase only to later receive an email or see an ad that was perfectly tailored to the content you previously viewed? If so, you were most likely being remarketed to.
What is remarketing and why is it so important?
Remarketing is a marketing strategy function that utilizes online tags and tracking tools to follow up with people who have previously viewed your site or products and provide them with targeted incentives, special offers, or reminders of the solutions and products they may need through targeted ads or emails in effort to convert past visitors into paying customers.
Remarketing ads are usually displayed across search networks like Google and Bing or on social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. While there are various remarketing competitor networks such as Facebook and Bing, Google Display Network is the most commonly used remarketing network platform for a number of reasons.
Here are a few of them:
- While having a social media giant like Facebook as a competitor can seem daunting, Google Display Network maintains the upper hand of having a far wider audience base as it harbors a much larger percentage of internet users on the platform than Facebook does.
- Google Display Network enables remarketing campaigns to be more customizable in many ways such as device type, geographical region or location, mobile ads, languages, and more. The platform makes it possible to create customizable ad designs that are both user-friendly and easy to build that maintain the integrity of your company’s brand voice. Doing so makes it easier to align your ads with that of your broader marketing strategy vision and campaigns.
- Google’s platform offers tracking codes that can be placed on Google Ads which provide insight on which of your remarketing strategies are performing best, thereby maximizing your efforts in the most cost effective manner by prioritizing the best performing channels, methods, and audience segments.
- Lastly, it’s affordable! Studies show that remarketing efforts and ad placements made through Google have much lower price points for paying businesses than that of other remarketing channels, ensuring that you’re getting more bang for your buck. Who doesn’t love that?
Now that we have a better idea of what remarketing is and the networks it can be executed through, let’s walk through some of the benefits that remarketing has to offer and why it’s an important marketing function.
1) The first answer is something we all think about when it comes to shaping our marketing strategies: Remarketing saves you significantly more money than traditional PPC methods. Remarketing campaigns have proven to reach the same amount of people for lower costs than PPC ads placed on search engines do, saving you hundreds or thousands of dollars when it comes to your marketing spend. Saving money here also means you can dedicate more of your money towards your best performing tactics and strengthen your overall business and marketing strategies.
2) You can reach out to people who are already interested in your products or services in personalized ways, which can incentivize them to take desired actions. For example, sending a special reduced price offer to a website viewer who abandoned their cart before leaving your page provides higher incentive for a hesitant visitor to later return to your site and finalize his/her purchase, effectively leading to more overall sales conversions!
3) People who are remarketed to, whether it be through ads or emails, are ten times more likely to respond by clicking through and converting than they are with a generic Google search ad.
Again, remarketing involves people who have already viewed your website and content and are therefore already more likely to be interested in what you have to offer than people who have never visited your website or heard of your brand. Remarketing increases your brand recognition and reminds previous visitors of the services and products they’ve already expressed interest in, making them highly likely to convert once being reached out to once more.
What kind of remarketing campaigns can I utilize?
There are many remarketing campaign strategies that help you reach your target audiences, based on your specific goals.
4 common remarketing campaigns include:
1) Email Remarketing is one of the most common remarketing campaign types as it allows personalized ads or messaging to be delivered directly to your email subscribers and displays specifically catered ads to those people. In order to execute this campaign strategy, you’ll need the email addresses of your previous visitors in order to serve them with the ads you want them to see.
2) Dynamic Remarketing – This method of remarketing is extremely personalized in that it creates specifically crafted messages or ads that target past website visitors based on how they spent their webpage visit. Dynamic remarketing calls for a code from Google AdWords that builds lists based on which of your web pages were viewed by your visitors.
3) Standard Remarketing – Shows past visitors your ads as they browse through other websites, search engines, and social media platforms that also use the Google Display Network.
4) Mobile app: Displays your ads to people who have visited your mobile app or mobile website.
Ready to get started?
We’ve covered the basics of remarketing and why it’s important, so now what? It’s time to learn how to take the reins for your own remarketing efforts.
Here are a few quick tips on how to set up your very own remarketing campaign:
Before launching your remarketing campaigns, it’s imperative to critically evaluate your lists, as you want to tailor your ads to reach the people most likely to convert, not just anyone and everyone who’s ever visited your website.
By refining your audience lists, you can ensure that your content is reaching visitors who have had quality interactions with your website pages while eliminating visitors who don’t meet specific criteria or thresholds like time spent on the site, visitors who bounced, etc.
Similar to many other principles in marketing, it’s very important to make sure your efforts are reaching the most qualified people and leads. However, granulating your audience segmentation too much can limit the overall reach you have, so the key is to create a target audience segment that’s well balanced in both size and likelihood of converting.
Both Google Analytics and Google Ads provide ways to refine and optimize your lists, but oftentimes the best lists are built by your own trial and error testing methods. Developing highly specific ads for your target audience can improve your conversion rates as the content is specific to what they need to see and click on.
What kind of tests can you conduct to see how previous visitors are responding to your remarketing campaigns?
- Test your ads by distributing various versions of an ad, but only making very slight changes to each version so you can attribute any differences in audience response to each change. You can experiment with graphics, colors, ad copy, ad text, and anything else you can think of that may be engaging for your target audience.
- Frequency Cap Testing is a remarketing best practice that allows you to decide how frequently you’re displaying your ads and remarketing campaigns to your audience. For example, you can choose to set monthly, weekly, or daily limits that will control the amount of impressions your target audience will engage with.
- Further specify your targeting to further narrow your audience reach, especially if you’re a business operating with a smaller budget. You can do this by targeting specific factors such as gender or demographic aspects. Here, you can also bid on certain groups you want to target more, which can ultimately help your bid testing capabilities, bid adjustments, and mobile bid adjustments and show you whether or not your bids are contributing to improvements in ROI.
- Post-Click Landing Page Testing is extremely important as you want to synthesize the copy and messaging of the page that your retargeting ads lead to. If the post-click landing page is well aligned with your brand and your previous messaging, it can lead to higher conversion rates. It’s important to continue testing elements such as copy, design, and messaging of the post-click landing page in order to optimize your conversion rates.
Click here for a step by step guide on how to set up a display remarketing campaign in Google Adwords and here to learn how to tag your website for remarketing.
