Using Ad ReTargeting In Google Adwords
Written by Kyle Pearce on August 27, 2010
An example of Ad Retargeting code in Google Adwords.
When Google launched Adsense in 2003, it revolutionized online advertising by contextually matching content with relevant ads. This made online pay-per-click and cost-per-impression ad campaigns extremely cost-effective for businesses and led to a significant overall increase in click-through rates for online ads.
In 2010, the online advertising industry is again being revolutionized by a new ad-matching technology called Ad Retargeting.
What Is Ad Retargeting?
Ad Retargeting is a way to re-engage people who have previously visited your website. Let’s say someone clicks on one of your online ads, visits your website for a few minutes to browse your product and then leaves without making a purchase. In most cases, this potential customer will not return to make purchase and you will have lost a potential sale. What ad retargeting allows you to do is direct ads specifically at potential customers who have already shown interest in your products by browsing your website.
As you can imagine,the possibilities for re-engaging these people and gaining their business with ad retargeting is huge. You can target them with ads specifically tailored to the products they were viewing or you can coax them with a special offer to return and finally make a purchase. They see these ads while they are surfing the web, searching on Google or browsing another website.
The result is that ad retargeting is hugely effective at increasing conversion while minimizing your cost-per-click. It is already proving to be one of the biggest advances in online advertising since contextual advertising went mainstream earlier in the decade.
Ad Retargeting With Google Adwords
To make it easy for online advertisers to take advantage of the possibilities of ad retargeting, Google is now offering it as part of its Adwords platform (although Google calls in remarketing). I highly recommend that all online advertisers include ad retargeting in their marketing strategy.
To get started with Adwords Retargeting, you need to embed remarketing tags (a small snippet of code) on your homepage and important product pages. Google Adwords then adds this information to the browser-based “cookie” of your Adwords visitors, allowing you to retarget messages specifically to people who have visited the individually tagged pages on your site. To attach an audience to each remarketing tag, open the Audience tab in Google Adwords and there you can segment your different audiences and ads for your retargeting campaign.
Now, when these potential customers visit a website that has Google Ads from the Google Content Network – which are everywhere since it is the largest display ad network online – you can target them with another ad or a special deals to give them an incentive to return and make that purchase. It’s as simple as that, but remarkably most online marketers don’t include this under-utilized technique in their marketing strategy.
Marketing studies have shown that it results in up to 500% increases in click-through rates on your retargeted ads and a significant reduction in your overall cost-per-conversion. Try it out for yourself and the results from ad retargeting will speak for themselves.
The Fastest Way To Increase Your Traffic and Generate More Leads
Written by Kyle Pearce on August 20, 2010
Deciding which keywords to target for search engine optimization can seem like a daunting task. To simply this often complicated task, I’m going to show you a simple and fast method to increase your traffic and generate more leads for your business.
Instead of searching for brand new keywords to compete for, the easiest way to increase your traffic is to work with keywords you are already ranking well for on search engines.
To get started, you will need a Google Analytics and a Google Webmasters account that has a least of month of data for you to examine. If you have e-commerce tracking or conversion goal tracking already set up, then it will be easy to identify the best keywords to target for search engine optimization. For example, here at SmarttNet we track our website’s lead generation with two Google Analytics conversion goals that are triggered whenever somebody completes our Contact Us form and Website Consultation form.
To see which keywords are sending you quality traffic, open your Google Analytics account and navigate to the keywords report under the Traffic Sources menu. The initial keywords report will show the top 10 keywords that sent you the most traffic in the last month. Now, I want you to choose 3 keywords in this report that we will focus on for search engine optimization (if you have goals setup, you can use the Goal Set 1, Goal Set 2, etc. to see which keywords are generating the most leads). For our website, I’ll choose three keywords that send our website quality traffic.
Next, I want you to open your Google Webmasters account. On the Webmaster dashboard you will see a list of your website’s most popular search queries. Click on the “More » ” link to view the entire search queries report. Here you will find some keyword data that will be very useful in analyzing how much of an increase in traffic and leads you can generate by optimizing your website better for these keywords. For the 3 keywords I choose this is the keywords impressions data provided:
As you can see, we are only realizing a small portion of the potential traffic these keywords could be sending us. By focusing our search engine optimization on these three keywords which are already sending us quality, converting traffic we can easily increase our website’s lead generation. Even small, incremental increases in our search engine rank for these quality keywords would result in an increase in our traffic. The question, is how much more traffic would a slightly higher rank result in? To answer this question, we have some actual data from a 2006 study that analyzed 36 million queries on AOL’s search engine:
Source: Predictive Marketing
This click-tracking study provides useful data to gain a rough idea of how much more traffic we can expect from an increase in ranking for each keyword. Keep in mind that this study focus strictly on clicks on the organic search engine results page (SERP) and that about 10-15% of people will click on Google’s Adwords ads.
The easiest way to increase your traffic is to modify your Title Tags and Meta Description Tags to more prominently feature your keywords on the search engine results page. In the example above, the click-through (CTR) for keyword #2 is much lower than the other two keywords and the reason for this is that the keywords text is not nearly as prominently displayed in search engine results page (description/title) as they are for competitor’s websites.
Once you’ve made the basic modifications to your Titles Tags and Meta Descriptions Tags, the next step would be to create new content around these keywords and build some incoming links with the keywords in the link anchor text.
By focusing your search engine optimization and link building resources on high quality keywords that you are already ranking for, you can easily calculate the potential increase in traffic and lead generation by using the click distribution chart above. Rather than guessing, now you can analyze all the keywords currently sending you traffic and easily cherry pick the most valuable keywords that should be the target of your next search engine optimization campaign.
Re-Design of the National Association of Automobile Museums (NAAM) Website
Written by Kyle Pearce on August 19, 2010
We are proud to announce today that we were awarded the web development contract to re-design the National Association of Automobile Museums (NAAM) website. We look forward to working with the team at the National Association of Automobile Museums and promoting the museums they represent across the United States.
