Ann Stanley of Anicca discusses remarketing strategies, their advantages, limitatoins and what to be aware of when creating your own remarketing campaigns.
Remarketing Strategies for Search, Social & Display
In the past, if you had a bricks & mortar store as well as an ecommerce website, there was offline/online aspect to the management of your customer’s journey towards a conversion.
However, with the diversification of the way your customers shop online, the ‘online’ aspect of this journey has become significantly more complex. Ecommerce managers are now able to merchandise their products through Merchant Centre and Google Shopping, Ebay, Amazon and CSE’s (comparison shopping engines).
Adding remarketing into the mix create a whole new layer of the conversion process.
The Basics of Remarketing
It doesn’t matter which channel your user used to reach your website, you can remarket to them via search, display and social media channels too, creating a whole web of interaction with your potential customers.
Typically, display ads work on a CPM model (paying per thousand impressions), while other methods work on the more efficient CPC (cost per click) model.
Ann touches on a more advanced method of remarking to your customers; dynamic retargeting. This is where ads are dynamically generated based on the specific products customer’s browse on your website, rather than a more generic brand display ads.
Why Should I Be Remarketing?
Remarketing gives users a second chance to visit your site. If you’re dealing with a less web-savvy audience it may be that your audience doesn’t even realise they’re being retargeted.
Typically, ecommerce sites that use remarking methods experience a huge uplift in conversions. However, a typical mistake marketers make with remarketing campaigns is being too general.
Targeting everyone who has visited your website in the last 180 days is more likely to annoy them than make them want to re-engage with your website. Target users who spent a specified amount of time browsing or only those who abandoned the shopping cart for example, is the key to remarking success. The more advanced option in Google Analytics (as opposed to using AdWords remarketing lists for example) provides the functionality for this kind of segmentation.
Other Thing To Consider
Cross-device Remarketing
When you apply a remarketing tag to your website, you are tagging the device not the user. In a world where users, browse on their mobile, abandon the cart on their tablet and then finally convert on desktop this can obviously present a problem for marketers.
But there is a silver lining to this rather big cloud and that is the cross-device remarketing. As long as the user is logged in across devices, platforms like Facebook DO recognise that they are the same person. This also applies to remarketing through Google when users are logged in to their Google accounts, but bear in mind this may not be the care when using remarketing on alternative platforms.
Google Tag Manager
If you’re adding multiple tags to your website you’ll want to consider using Google Tag Manager. This keeps all your tags in one easy-to-manage place and means you don’t need help fro a developer every time you want to add a tag to your site.
Being More Advanced With Remarketing
RLSAs
RLSAs (or remarketing lists for search ads) allow you to build a search campaign that only applies to users who have visited your site before. This means you can target search terms typically generated by user’s further in the sales funnel, or bid more competitively on phrases you know are likely to convert.
Note that RLSAs are available for shopping campaigns too – a feature that not many marketers are aware of!
Making Audience Lists More Targeted
Using targeting and remarketing across channels can be a powerful tool when filtering audience lists.
One example Ann uses in this talk is a method that could be applied to a high value or ‘luxury’ product; firstly create a Facebook campaign targeted to only ‘high spenders’ or those with a higher than average income, then create a Google Analytics remarketing list of only users who have clicked through from this campaign. What you now have is a list of users who you know are likely to be high spenders, but they’ve also previously engaged with your brand.
Using Custom & Lookalike Audiences
A further remarketing method is to use custom audience functions to create remarketing lists and lookalike audiences, for example using your email list or the email address of previous converters. Custom and lookalike audiences used to be available just in social media platforms but this functionality is now available for display and YouTube campaigns too.
If you believe your business can benefit from remarketing, you can read more on the Impression blog or contact our PPC team, who offer services in dynamic remarketing, targeting your customers using social media, using remarketing in search and using custom and lookalike audiences.
