Increase Your Click-Through Rate by 500% with Remarketing
Written by Martin Wong on March 28, 2012
Today we revisit remarketing. Our first blog on this topic was in 2010 “Using Ad Retargeting in Google Adwords.” Despite the proven effectiveness of retargeting, companies don’t seem to take advantage of it as often as they could. Remarketing or retargeting, whatever you call it, taking this additional step can increase your click-through rate by 500% and it’s available at no extra cost as part of the Google Adwords platform, so why not do it?
In this blog post, we review some of the benefits and present some retargeting tips collected from our client experiences over the past couple of years.
What is remarketing?
If you use Google Adwords, remarketing allows you to target website visitors by continuing to display your ads at appropriate times later, when they browse elsewhere on the Internet. You are in effect identifying visitors who have come to your site and then showing them tailored ads on sites throughout the Google Display Network. A little bit of retargeting code on your web pages is all you need to remarket to those visitors.
Visitors? Which visitors? You set up your target visitors via an “audience list”. You have several targeting options: from blatantly repeating your ads everywhere the visitor browses to more focused placements based on topics, keywords, ad placement, or timing. If you want, Google can help you increase your audience list by automatically adding visitors who have landed on your site through organic search or direct access.
If you haven’t done so already, read Google’s tutorial on remarketing.
What kind of business could use remarketing?
When remarketing first came out, we felt it was best for products with a longer buying cycle, where customers need to do more research or price shop. In addition to staying visible to customers while they are making up their minds, the constant reinforcement of remarketing helps drive customers from the point of feeling this product is a “wanna-have” to rather than “must-have”.
But actually, most visitors to your website won’t make up their minds right away. So any business can benefit from remarketing to reinforce your brand and remind users to come back. B2B remarketing can be very effective, especially when you combine remarketing with custom landing pages that feature different messages to target different audience segments.
Keep an eye on your results with Google Analytics, and it’s easy to track the success of your remarketing campaign, whether your goal is conversions or the engagement level of returning customers; this helps you make decisions that control your AdWords bid pricing and maintain ROI.
Six Tips for Remarketing ROI
- Create a ‘just purchased’ list. Visitors who followed through with a purchase are good targets for cross-selling. If Rita just bought some great evening shoes, she may respond well to a remarket ad for evening bags, with a discount if she makes the purchase within the next 7 days. You can set up this campaign to target this list for up to 7 days. You can also use this list to make sure you’re not remarketing to Rita with ads for more evening shoes.
- Create a dropouts list. Work those audience lists. Create a list of visitors who started adding to their shopping cart but then dropped out. These are high potential prospects who had second thoughts. Perhaps they didn’t like the shipping costs, or felt they had to shop around some more, or perhaps they just got distracted during the purchase process. Remind them about your site and help them reconsider with remarketing ads that offer discounts, free shipping, or a bonus.
- Remarket by brand or product type. If you carry different brands of product (shoes) or sell a range of products (shoes, handbags, and accessories), put remarketing code in pages by brand or by product type. Therefore, if Joe has been to your Nike page, whenever he navigates to another Nike page or sports footwear page, he will see your ad for your Nike sports footwear. If Jessica has been on your handbag pages, she will continue to see your ads for purses. It’s especially effective if your remarketing ads offer specials.
- Offer an incentive. It costs less to attract a repeat customer than to capture a new customer. Take some of those savings and give customers a better reason to come back.
- Experiment. Be relevant. Try different messages and campaigns as well as different combinations of audience lists. Stay current with trends or seasonal product opportunities. There is no such thing as a silver bullet but you will be able to find some messages that resonate better with certain audience lists. Keep on trying until you know what works.
- Create custom landing pages. Custom pages or micro-sites are a real help when your main website is constrained to certain designs or too difficult to manage for quick response to marketing campaign needs. When you remarket, you can zero in on a slice of your target audience, so why not invest in a micro-site or custom landing page that speaks directly and more personally to that customer segment?
Blog Your Way to Success
Written by Martin Wong on November 23, 2011
We always recommend blogging to our clients because it delivers proven results. A good blog increases credibility with your target audience by positioning you as an expert in the field. In addition, blogging helps your SEO results, social media visibility, and increases website visits. It’s an essential component of digital marketing.
As a result, clients frequently ask us, “How should we blog? What are some best practices when it comes to blogging?”
The best business blogs provide regular, valuable information to their target audience. This means you need to determine:
- Who are you writing for?
- What topics will you write about that will keep readers coming back?
- How often will you blog?
Read more…
Let Your Customer Sell for You: Case Studies
Written by Martin Wong on November 15, 2011
When a company wants an effective sales tool, there are few types of collateral that deliver as much impact as a well-written case study. A case study offers these benefits:
- It’s a customer testimonial.
- It helps prospects relate your product or service to a real-life situation.
- It can be used as content for a website or newsletter.
- It can be pitched to publications as a feature article.
- If published, the magazine reprints make an even stronger selling piece because it implies editorial approval
Starting a Case Study
The best time to start is shortly after your solution has been installed and the customer is seeing results. Their impressions will be fresh, and they will be as eager as you to promote their success. If you wait too long, that team or manager may be transferred to another project; you’ll be speaking to newcomers who lack knowledge about the original reasons for bringing in your solution and who may not be as positive.
Writing a case study is rarely a smooth, uninterrupted process; the stars that need to be in alignment are often outside your control. So before you hire someone to work on your case studies, take a look at the project workflow—in an ideal world, of course.
Read more…
