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?
How to Build User Registration that Helps Conversion
Written by Martin Wong on March 27, 2012
There is no doubt that websites offer companies many opportunities to gather information about their visitors. When users ‘register’ they give away contact details to make a purchase, download a white paper, or watch a webinar. But are you actually losing conversion opportunities by forcing visitors to register? Is your registration process too difficult?
Online retailers like registration because they can maintain a purchase history and suggest other products the customer might enjoy – a service many customers appreciate. Registration brings other benefits to returning customers: check out faster, avoid re-entering the same shipping and billing information, or use discount coupons. Enterprises like registration because they can capture names to add to their prospecting database, and in return, customers gain access to useful information. For some sales managers, the rationale is that registration qualifies the visitor. Only someone who is really interested would go through the steps of registering.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? Or does it?
Are you losing conversions because you’re too insistent on collecting customer information? In a now-classic case study titled “The $300 Million Button”, a retailer found that 75% of shoppers who got to checkout never completed their purchase, dropping out when asked to register before committing to the purchase. The web designers changed the checkout process to make registration optional and put it at the very end, after the user completed purchasing. Within a month of making this change, the completion rate increased by 45% and revenues by $15 million. This ended up adding $300,000,000 to their revenues over one year.
Your conversion goal might not be a product purchase, and the payoff you look for may not be so dramatic, but here are some things to keep in mind:
Monitor the analytics: if you haven’t set up conversion goals in your analytics to track how well your forms are working, do it now. There is no other way to collect the objective data you need to help you decide how to refine your registration process. Create a trustworthy presence : what have you done to make a user trust you with his information? Privacy concerns these days make it that much harder to convince users to part with their contact information.
- Make sure your website is designed to convey a professional and trustworthy image.
- Make sure your own contact information has very clear information about how to contact you in case of privacy concerns.
Provide a benefit: Think of it as a fair trade. What does the user get in exchange for his information? Depending on your business, it could be:
- Retailer: a discount coupon for the next purchase, notification for upcoming sales. The convenience of not having to re-enter your information again, alas, is not that much of an incentive. Take a look at the Tim Horton’s site, which a good example of a page that provides lots of good reasons for registering a Tim Card.
- Corporate: download of valuable content, access to premium content, ability to ask questions or contribute to forums, receive notification of conferences or events, or receive a discount to attend valuable events. The key here is “valuable content”. If you would give it away at a trade show, it’s promotional. A candidate for required registration is information which cost you an investment: proprietary surveys, significant white papers, or webinars.
Keep it minimal: only ask for as much as you truly need. If all you want is to add the user’s email address to your newsletter list, just ask for name and email address. Resist the urge to dig for job title, company name, city, or which transit system they ride to get to work.
The more you give, the more you get: as a corollary to the above, if you are swapping something really valuable for the user’s contact information, you get to ask for more. This is why contests get to ask a lot of questions about you. You know and they know that a big reason for the contest is to collect audience demographics. But they’ll do it for a trip to Hawaii. Or even a gift card for coffee.
Is your registration form driving them away? Once you’ve nailed down what you’re providing to the user in exchange for however much personal information, take a look at your form design. Keep the flow logical and the design simple. Here are two examples, one short and one long. Both examples are minimalist and convey clearly to the user what to expect.
Here is the Speedly sign up for a free trial. There’s no doubt about the purpose of this page. The information they collect is minimal – not even a credit card number at this point. Not until you’re ready to make a commitment. This is a pretty safe way to go for Speedly since their implementation lets users play around and test indefinitely – until the they are ready to start taking real payments from real customers.
Here is the Litmus sign up for a 7-day free trial. Instead of one big long form, note how it’s broken down into three sections, each clearly titled so you know the reason why you’re filling out the section. Litmus does ask for credit card information but makes it very clear with a message below that the first 7 days are free, with a clearly-defined closing date.
So turn on those analytics and take a quick audit of the forms you use to collect user information. Whether or not a purchase is involved, this helps determine whether your current registration process is defeating your conversion goals. Then take a hard look at what you’re asking for in exchange for what you’re giving. Finally, make sure your forms are well-designed and walk the user through a simple, non-disruptive process. Let us know how it goes!
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?
