Remarketing is this: A visitor walks through your businesses front doors, ask about a product of service you offer, then leaves without even a goodbye wave. Later, you send your salespeople to follow that person around wherever they go to remind them you exist and how you can benefit them.

If this happened to me in person, I’d probably be really creeped out. Fortunately, this only happens online, and it happens all the time.

Such a large percent of companies add remarketing to their digital repertoire for many reasons, here’s why.

Why Remarketing Actually Works

First and foremost, there are tons of big stats skewed in favor of remarketing that are re-hashed by lazy marketers all over the internet. Here’s a breakdown of what those stats are trying to say, with our own numbers.

Here’s a look at why remarketing works:

These numbers show the vast disparity between the cost we pay to get a conversion with our remarketing campaigns vs the cost we pay to get a conversion in conventional search advertising.

By targeting those who know who you are and what you can offer, the chances of them coming back to buy what you have to offer are drastically higher, so conversions are where remarketing really shines.

So essentially, if you’re thinking about advertising on Google or another platform with remarketing like Facebook, beginning with remarketing is a great place to start.

Okay it works, but how is it so successful?

When it really comes down to it, remarketing is limited by one major bottleneck.

Landing pages, landing pages, landing pages.

It is impossible to stress this enough. Here are the things we see companies do wrong all the time.

1. A deal mentioned in the ad copy not found in the landing page (Boom, bounce rate!)
2. Cluttered landing page
3. Redirecting the click to a services/product/homepage as the landing page (seriously, why??)
4. No clear click path
5. No form or clear contact point
6. Inconsistent branding or styling with ad and landing page
7. Poorly constructed value proposition

You can tweak your ad copy all day and have no improvements in conversions if your landing pages are suffering from one of these fatal errors.

With this said, ad copy does matter.

Good ads have a specific set of rules they abide by to not be annoying and drive customer away.

Instead of coving every single thing you should do, here’s the big no-no’s in remarketing.

How to address “annoying remarketing”

• Use a frequency cap on your remarketing ads to show viewers less than a certain amount of times. We choose 7 as our maximum.
• Don’t use distracting or irrelevant pictures.
• Never use heavily animated ads or ads with sound.
• Address what the visitor wanted when they first visited your site as directly as possible. This means don’t flood your ad with unnecessary jargon.
• Offer to solve the problem for the ex-visitor instead of simply promoting yourself.
• Set up “negative remarketing” lists to detect users who have already completed the desired conversion to not waste budget and annoy the visitor.
• Offer relevant deals, discounts, and promotions.

Just looking at the length of this list should tell you that remarketing has huge potential to be annoying. It is our sole responsibility as marketers to not pollute the internet with awful, intrusive, and irrelevant ads. Not only this, but helping the people who really need our product/service is infinitely more rewarding in terms of revenue and customer satisfaction.

We’ve been studying and learning from our remarketing decisions every day.

If you think you’re ready to begin remarketing, talk to us here.

Image credit: http://www.brivo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Businessman-walking-into-office.jpg

Now that you know what remarketing all about, you might also be interested in knowing “5 Remarketing Facts That Will Improve Your PPC Strategy”

When someone walks into a store only to walk out a few minutes later without buying anything, they’re likely gone forever. But not with the internet. No sir, we can tap into the ability to retarget them with visual display ads on Google, Facebook, and Twitter to name a few.

If you’re on the edge of the fence trying to decide if remarketing is a good lead generation strategy, consider some of the following facts.

• Consider Who and Where you’re Targeting

With ads spread out over a number of platforms over the years, we’ve found Facebook and Google’s Display Network to offer the highest overall ROI. Google of course reaches extremely far with about 85% of the entire internet users reached at some point. Facebook has the largest active user base of any social network at 1 billion users interacting with it every day.

After you’ve found the right platform, remember that you can leverage incredible targeting tactics with remarketing. Here are some examples:

• Advertise to those who have abandoned a cart with an ad made especially for them.
• Show a specific ad for those who land on a service page.
• Rotate to a specific ad after a prospect left the landing page they hit from a different remarketing ad.

And finally, if you end up on Facebook, remember that the clickability of your ad is directly responsible for the cost you pay to run that ad. The more Facebook users engage with it, the less you pay. So focus more on great creative rather than the technical and you should find success.

• Consider the Cost

First of all, remarketing clicks always cost the advertiser 2-100 times less than a search ad. Yet search ads convert clickers just about 10% more often remarketing ads do. So remarketers pay way less than search advertisers but receive 10% less clicks. That’s already a good deal, but it gets a whole lot better.

And to drive this home, here’s a bit of our client data with the brands removed for privacy.

• Consider the Branding

Never, ever take for granted the opportunity remarketing gives you to leverage your brand. And it isn’t only about creating a positive brand image, there are actual numbers to support this claim. Generally a visitors stops by your site, then leaves and forgets your brand forever. But not when you’re using remarketing.

To test this, we paused our branded remarketing campaigns for two months. After the time was up, we doubled down on the budget and let the campaigns run for two months. At the end of the period we noticed a 74% increase in searchers that directly typed in our website URL into their search bars. This proved that the brand recall for our company name was massively increased by remarketing.

• Consider the Conversion Rate to Impression Count

Here’s what we found after scraping data from thousands of different ads. The potential conversion rate of users who view an ad actually increases overtime as they see your ad multiple times. Here’s the data.

This shows that you’re generally safe to run ads up to the 6^th or 7^th impression for maximum returns. We set our frequency cap at 6.

And remember, “ad fatigue” exists but the rumor of remarketing being creepy is incredibly overblown, as this data should show.

• Consider the Efficiency of Search Ads Vs Display Ads

Here, efficiency refers to the rate at which display ads fatigue vs the rate at which search ads fatigue. And as it happens, people tune out search ads a lot faster than display ads. Here’s the data.

Important to note here is that you can rotate different ads to the same user, thereby negating the effect of ad fatigue.

With the incredible opportunity the internet presents us to recapture lost customers, it’s simply up to the individual to accept and conquer remarketing. if you could remind every customer that’s walked out your doors only to completely forget about you that you still exist and can solve their problems – why wouldn’t you?

There’s a lot more to remarketing than this though! Here’s more about the best practices of remarketing here.

Tags:- ad landing pagesadvertising on Googlenegative remarketingremarketing ad campaigns