Remarketing or retargeting (both mean the same thing) is in my opinion one of the best methods of digital advertising available to businesses. If your business is not using remarketing then you should read on and see the benefits that it can offer.
What is remarketing?
Remarketing is a method of digital advertising that allows you to advertise to and communicate with customers or potential customers who have previously visited your website, even though they may not have purchased anything or contacted you through your website. You can target these visitors for up to 540 days after they visit your website.
Companies such as Google and Bing offer remarketing but for this article we will focus on Google Adwords remarketing because it is the most popular search engine in Ireland. Google Adwords remarketing, using cookies, allows you to segment website visitors into “lists” based on their demographics and their behaviour and/or activity on your website. Through the Google Display Network and or Google Search (Google.ie), “lists” more effectively allows you to personalise advertisements and offers to each customer list. For example, did you ever visit a website, looking for a certain product or service, and over the next period of time you see lots of ads, for that product or service, on other websites. It feels like that ad is following you around and in essence it is but usually the ad is non-intrusive and many times the ad is offering you a discount to return to the website to make a purchase.
How To Use Remarketing
The key to effective use of remarketing is in identifying your website visitors intent and understanding what stage they are at in the customer purchasing decision journey. You can then tailor your advertisements to entice past website visitors to become customers. It is essential that any business using Google Adwords should be supporting it with Google Adwords remarketing campaigns. The following are two examples of how you could use remarketing.
Example 1
A solicitor’s firm is running a Google Adwords campaign targeting first time buyers with a “First Time Home Buyers” package. They will support this with a Google Adwords remarketing campaign.
Campaign Goal
The aim of the campaign is to attract to their website first time buyers who are searching for: legal advice about buying a home or a solicitor to help them buy their first home. The goal is to get them to fill out an enquiry form on the Contact Us page. Each completed enquiry form is called a conversion.
Campaign Set Up
For the Google Adwords campaign, they have created on their website a landing page outlining the offer. A landing page is a page, on your website, which is linked to the advertisement and it is the first page a person visits (lands on) on the website. The landing page contains one clear call to action a “Get In Touch” button which when clicked brings the person to the enquiry form on the Contact Us page.
Remarketing Campaign
The Google Adwords campaign has a conversion rate of 1% but after analysing the website traffic it is clear that a large number of website visitors clicked the “Get In Touch” button but they never filled out the enquiry form. This would suggest that these customers are interested in the package and with the right incentive they potentially could become customers.
A sample of one of our web design ads.
A good remarketing strategy would be to set up a “list” based on website visitors who visited the Landing page, and clicked the “Get In Touch” button and/or visited the Contact Us page but didn’t convert, i.e fill out an enquiry form.
The remarketing advertisement could offer an additional % discount on the package or the solicitors firm could use a reminder ad about the package.
Example 2
You own an online shoe shop. One day a man visits your online shop searching for formal shoes to match his new suit. He visits the “Suit Shoes” category on your website and he looks at various pairs of shoes, he adds one pair to his shopping basket and he proceeds to checkout. On that page he abandons the process and leaves your website.
Remarketing Campaign
In reality when someone is shopping online at work or at home they can easily get distracted but you know from the level of engagement on your website this customer is more than likely very interested in purchasing shoes.
A good remarketing strategy would be to target customers who visited the checkout page of the website with dynamic personalised ads based on what was in their cart and or additional incentives such as a short term 10% discount.
Conclusion
I have only given you a couple of remarketing examples but with remarketing the opportunities to segment and target website visitors is endless. If you are currently using Google Adwords and spending a lot of money bringing high quality and qualified visitors to your website it is essential that you support it with Google Adwords remarketing.
Remarketing is a very powerful advertising tool than can really increase your return on investment from your advertisement campaigns and I would highly recommend it for your business.
Featured Image: Peggy Marco / Pixabay.com
I hold an MSc in Digital Marketing from Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, UCD and I am Google Adwords Certified.
If you would like to discuss what we can do for your business you can contact me on (083) 1026964 or email: cathal@www.www.enablemarketing.ie
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