Remarketing is a powerful tool which can help you to secure more customers and keep your website in the view of people searching for services and products like yours. We’re going to give you a rundown of how remarketing works and how it can work for you.
So what is remarketing?
You might have noticed that when you visit a website, you can sometimes then see adverts for that website following you around the web. This is because your browser is being targeted following the initial visit to a site.
This is a great method for some businesses but not for all. If you have just sold a product to a website visitor, chances are they’re not going to want to buy the same product again so soon after a visit. Paying to advertise to these people with products you’ve just sold them wastes money and may affect the quality score of your ads.
Likewise, if you sell a wide range of products, you can’t exactly cram them all in to an 300×250 pixel advert, meaning that your ad ends up being so generic as to be useless.
So how can you make it more effective?
Lists.
You need to figure out what specific actions will warrant a remarketing campaign.
Create a list of all the actions that users carry out on your site.
Analyse which ones warrant an advert.
Create a list that captures these individual groups.
Create ads aimed at these groups.
Let’s look at an example to really understand this.
Shopping Cart Abandonment
People abandon online shopping carts at a staggering rate of 78 percent according to research from seewhy.com. This could be because they simply weren’t ready to buy the products, or because they wanted to compare prices.
Using remarketing to target people that have abandoned a cart can be an effective way to get them to re-engage with your site and with the products that they were after. You can try to entice them back with a discount or with free shipping.
You can express the shopping cart abandonment idea like this.
Existing Cookie Page Expiration Date Positive /shopping-cart 30 Negative /thank-you-page 30
Existing cookie is the rule that you set for the cookie. The positive/negative sets up whether they are on your list. Positive sets it so that you include people with the cookie from the shopping cart page while the negative says you don’t want someone who has the cookie from the thank you page after they have purchased something. The expiration date is the rule you set for how long the ads will appear for.
In Adwords, this will look like this:
You can use remarketing for a whole host of targeted ads, including setting it up for blog readers, people who read reviews, service reminders, event promotions, and more.
Remarketing obviously shouldn’t be your only strategy; likewise, it should definitely be part of your marketing mix.