Online marketing clearly has the upper hand in performance tracking when compared to traditional advertising and marketing methods, due to the accuracy of analytics data. Cost-efficiency is the name of the online marketing game, however, and you don’t need much data to know that your bounce rates and cart abandonment rates aren’t making things easy.
This is where retargeting or remarketing comes into play.
The Case for Retargeting (or Remarketing) is Undeniable
Remarketing is exactly what it sounds like: another attempt at marketing. It’s a method to deliver display ads to users who’ve bounced from your landing pages or abandoned your carts, presenting two distinct advantages:
- Matching pre-qualified users to the most relevant display ads – After all, they either went to your landing page or almost purchased something. These users were already in your sales funnel and are more susceptible to display ads because they’ve already established interest.
- Maximizing the efficacy of display ads – On their own, display ads are not very effective for a general populace thanks to a phenomenon called “banner blindness.” Retargeting changes this because each ad served is relevant, bringing value to the users targeted.
Furthermore, if you already use PPC for your online marketing, Google’s AdWords program makes use of retargeting to maximize its ad network. When you set up your My Client Center account and link up your AdWords with Analytics, you’re also setting up the foundations for remarketing.
Cross-Channel via Google is Simply Practical
Activating remarketing via Google means you’re effectively using cross-channel marketing, incorporating multiple channels into an integrated effort. This is another benefit of remarketing: it maximizes your reach.
Remarketing is a standard of many other channels of marketing, including Facebook. Brands have experienced great success using remarketing on Facebook – to the tune of a 400% CTR boost and 10 to 20% conversion increase. Of course, today remarketing is more common. Starting a PPC agency today, you’d immediately factor in remarketing; around five years ago, it just wasn’t as widespread.
Whichever the case, doing cross-channel marketing with Google simply makes sense, especially if you’re a Google Partner, and retargeting is a significantly lucrative effort you need to look into if you haven’t already. Just take a look at some of the strategies you can use:
Use-Cases for an AdWords Retargeting Campaign
We’ll go for some broad campaign examples and drill down from there so you can see how useful remarketing can be:
- Remarket specific product categories – If you want to boost the sales of specific products or product categories, you can launch a constant effort to remarket to your visitors showing only the above products (better recall).
- Reach out to failed conversions – It already takes a lot of effort to pull users into your sales funnel so when they fail to convert, don’t give up: use retargeting to pull them back in either by showing the exact same product they showed interest in (dynamic remarketing) or showing something else that’s relevant.
- Reach out to existing customers – Even if users already converted, you can use remarketing to cross-or up-sell to them. You can even set your campaigns to display ads to them a certain timeframe after they made their purchases to rekindle their interest.
Retargeting is a sound investment, but like understanding PPC quality score (excellent resource about the topic here), you’ll need to get the hang of it. Especially the technical back end stuff. Don’t let that stop you though: a lot of our target market who had second thoughts are just waiting for another nudge.
