The Extensive Guide to Successful Online Remarketing: Part 1
You’re part of a savvy business that recognizes the importance of getting people onto its website, but have you heard of online remarketing?
You’ve helped the development team create an aesthetic and informative experience; put your name, products, and services on the web with targeted advertising and social media; created content that dazzles and awes all who are fortunate enough to experience it, but still, people are visiting your site and they’re not converting.
They are not signing up, they are not purchasing, they are not trying to contact you. Do you give up? No, you try online remarketing.
A Forrester Research report highlights the hard truth:
96% of people who visit a website leave without completing the action the marketer would have liked them to take.
In addition, on the eCommerce side of things, a report from the Baymard Institute puts average shopping cart abandonment at 68.53%. Yet hope exists, and it lies in recapturing your visitors’ attentions.
We’re going to create a second, third, fourth, and even fifth (maybe a bit overboard) chance for these visitors to convert. We’ll do this with an online remarketing or retargeting strategy, and by the end of this post you’ll have the knowhow for the creation of your own strategy. Let’s look at what’s covered:
Part One
1. What is Online Remarketing?
Remarketing is the process of targeting past visitors of your website with advertisements that aim to reengage them with your brand, products, and/or services.
These ads are often visual, and, with AdWords remarketing, they take advantage of the Google Display Network.
The technical implementation of online remarketing is simple too—a small bit of code is placed on your website. In turn, this piece of code will place a cookie on a unique visitor’s browser. This cookie will follow the visitor elsewhere on the web and will allow you to show them ads all over the internet.
The best part is that they might not actively be searching for you again, and you can still reach them. They will be reading a relevant blog, exploring a similar site, or browsing their emails, and then your advertisement will pop up with a reminder about an action they failed to take the last time round, or a new offer that will convince them to make that conversion.
We’ll get into more detail on how this actually works in the next few sections, but the main benefits of remarketing are:
- The transformation of bounced traffic into converting traffic
- Top of mind brand exposure: your ads will keep your brand in their thoughts
- Encourage visitors to come back and re-engage with your content or services
- Aid in your SEO as more visitors return to your web pages and content, offering another chance for them to make links
- Better ROI: You’re more informed on who your visitors are, and you can approach them with more targeted ads, increasing the likelihood that they’ll convert
Online remarketing can be considered conversion rate optimization, or CRO, as it looks to optimize the efficacy of your existing marketing resources.
Initial conversion rates might seem subpar for your PPC, content marketing and organic campaigns, but with remarketing you can harness the fact that these visitors were interested enough to visit, and re-engage this interest with another opportunity for conversion. These extra opportunities, when successful, create higher conversion rates for your overall campaigns.
Here’s an example of a remarketing ad. After recently browsing denim, this ad appeared in the Facebook news feed. This reminder of a past interest keeps brands top of mind and can help push a potential customer further down the sales funnel.
2. Why is Online Remarketing Right for You?
Remarketing strengthens your online advertising. If you spend money on getting potential customers to make that initial visit and they do not convert, you don’t worry.
As stated earlier, online remarketing creates a second, third, and even fourth chance for a conversion on your website. Retargeting is taking advantage of the marketing effort you are already making; the potential customer data you have gathered.
It’s a bargain
Online remarketing campaigns cost less than search marketing campaigns. A quick case study by Eric Couch reveals that:
“Remarketing accounted for 16.61% of all conversions over the past six months, at only 12.93% of the total cost. It has only 81.36% of the average click cost, and only 77.82% of the average conversion cost.”
This affordability equates to improvements in your ROI.
It’s personable
Remarketing ads can be customized for whichever page of your website a potential customer last visited, e.g., someone visits your project management software page, but they do not convert. You can then show this person an ad detailing the advantages of your software, what they are losing without it, and how you can make it the right deal just for them.
You can sell more
If the previous example converts the first time through your sales funnel, you can still take advantage of online remarketing. Perhaps you offer an additional program or an upgrade. You can target this customer with a personalized ad that makes your other services, products, or upgrades a great opportunity.
Being able to up-sell and cross-sell elsewhere on the web is another benefit of online remarketing
You target organic traffic
With online remarketing, you can now target visitors of your website who have arrived there through organic listings. Showing ads to these visitors can be extremely profitable as you did not have to pay for their initial visit.
It works
Remarketing ads maintain a higher CTR than other generic Google Display Network ads, and they do this even as users are repeatedly exposed and ad fatigue sets in. This graph represents research conducted by Larry Kim.
Higher CTRs mean lower costs. From the same research, “every 0.1% increase or decrease in the CTRs of your ads, your click costs will go up or down by 21%.”
3. Where do Online Remarketing Ads Show Up?
With AdWords, your remarketing ads show up on the biggest global ad display network, the Google Display Network. The reach of the network:
The network serves a trillion impressions to over a billion users every month. Most importantly, the Google Display Network (GDN) encompasses over 2 million sites, including YouTube, Gmail, and the AdMob network (mobile applications). This spectacular reach means that your remarketing ads display across a vast spectrum of the online world.
Additionally, two other notable networks, which exist separate from the GDN, are Bing and Facebook. Both of these networks offer online remarketing within their own advertising platforms.
In short, your remarketing ads can be shown almost anywhere. You just have to decide who, what, where, and when.
Until Part Two
After reading this you should definitely consider how you can implement or improve your own remarketing strategy. Stay tuned for the next part of this guide and PPC fundamentals series. In part two we’ll go over some mechanical setup details. And we even throw in some warnings that’ll help you avoid remarketing malpractice.
If you have any more questions about remarketing, or would like our advice on your strategy, feel free to contact us for a PPC consultation.
Read the previous PPC Fundamentals series article here: PPC Advertising in the Mobile Online World
Read the next PPC Fundamentals series article here: The Extensive Guide to Successful Remarketing: Part 2
