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.
Advertising Online
Written by Smartt Team on June 2, 2009
Advertising online is nothing like advertising offline. In fact, the two forms of advertising are so different they don’t even resemble each other anymore. Traditionally advertising has taken the form of “interruption advertising.” Advertisers compete for people’s attention through television, radio and print ads. The goal of this form of advertising is to grab viewers’ attention away from whatever they were watching, reading or listening to and make them pay attention to your ad.
Interruption advertising worked for a long time, especially for large corporations. Now, however, the game has changed. And the internet had a major role in this change. People no longer respond to interruption in the same way they used to. In the olden days you could run a commercial on TV and viewers would race to the store to buy your product. Now, interruption advertising is so commonplace that viewers have found defenses against all the unwanted interruptions. The result is that this form of advertising just doesn’t work anymore.
Just like television commercials and print ads are losing their effectiveness, so are most forms of advertising online. Banners, skyscraper ads and flash videos don’t capture people’s attention these days and actually have the opposite effect of annoying people.
Nowadays, advertising needs to be much more subtle. It’s no longer about shocking people into paying attention. Rather, it’s about providing useful and relevant information that is going to solve some kind of problem. This is not direct advertising. In fact, it’s a very indirect form of adverting. Instead of telling people what they need, it’s about building relationships with people and gaining trust.
Effective online advertising includes the following components:
- Article writing campaigns- articles should provide information that is relevant to your business and useful to your customers. “How-to” articles work well along with articles that give expert advice. An important point to keep in mind about these articles: Do not sell. This isn’t the time or the place for selling. No one wants to read a 500-word sales pitch. Focus on adding value and helping people. It will build trust.
- Blogs- blogging has become one of the most effective and important tools for advertising online. A blog is like an online opinion column and has an informal tone. Basically, it’s one person sharing what they know with the world. They generally should not contain any sales pitches, except for once in a while when something special and exciting is coming to the market. One major advantage of blogs is that they tend to rank well on the search engines. This helps customers find your site and boosts your SEO.
- Google AdWords- these four line advertisements are becoming one of the most popular and effective ways to promote your product. They only appear when someone searches for one of your keyword terms so ads are targeted. When people are looking to buy something, they appreciate getting a targeted ad that helps them find what they’re looking for. When using AdWords, it’s important to test your ads to make sure they’re effective. Run two ads simultaneously to find out which one pulls in the best results. Then, improve upon it and run it again alongside your improved ad. Working this way will help you achieve optimum results.
