More advanced remarketing strategies!

Last year I did a post on remarketing which, for those that missed it, talked about how remarketing works and some advanced strategies you might consider when marketing online. 

Just to recap the basics, remarketing is a product Google offers which enables you to market to people who have previously visited your website. Its integrated into AdWords and it can be pretty powerful.

In reality, Google hasn’t invented anything new; it’s been around for ages. The technique was first dubbed “behavioural advertising”, before other marketers decided that sounded too spooky and re-named it retargeting. Google then productised it and called it remarketing.

In fact, a couple of weeks ago the Reseo team and I headed up to Sydney for our annual pilgrimage to SMX (Search Marketing Expo 2011) and I was lucky enough to speak on Retargeting (remarketing) and Facebook Fan Pages and Facebook Ads. It was pretty amazing that such a small amount of search marketers in the audience only about 5-10% were using Google’s remarketing tool.

Just as an aside, I was also very privileged to speak alongside the world’s premier expert on Mobile Marketing (Cindy Krum) and Facebook advertising guru Marty Weintraub from Aimclear.

Anyway, I thought I’d share some of the ideas I presented on remarketing here on SmartCompany. Hopefully you’ll get inspired to give it a try. If done right, it really will help your online sales and/or lead generation.

Probably the trick to setting up remarketing is to build and create different audiences for different pages on your website. So for example, if you’re an online retailer, you should put one audience script on your home page, different ones on your category pages, one on your view cart page (if you have one) and another script within the checkout.

Finally, pop a script on your conversion page.

Google allows you to combine and customise audiences, which, as one example, enables you to remove people from an audience who have previously bought from you so you don’t have to try and sell to existing customers.

So if someone exits your site from the checkout, you could show ads to those people with a special offer enticing them to come back. Remember the only people who will see these ads are just the people who have left your website.

Here’s an example (I created using Display Ad Builder – it’s not real).

(By the way, just to reiterate, I made this ad up, it’s not real, just an example! Please Dell, don’t sue me…)

The other thing about creating different audiences is the astonishing results you get from each one.

In the next screenshot, you’ll see that people who drop out deep within a sales funnel are much more likely to respond and convert in response to remarketing ads than those who don’t.

As can be seen above, the conversion rate from people who abandoned the cart (and didn’t purchase) is sitting at 10.11%. The conversion rate of people who left the home page converted at just 1.23% – they’re obviously much less engaged!

Take note of the View-through Conversion column too. View-through conversions are ones where someone was exposed to a remarketing advertisement at some point, but even though they didn’t click on it, they still came back and converted. They are really ‘conversion assists’ and I think they should be taken into your ROI conversion calculations.

The online retailer Kogan uses remarketing too. I kinda realised this when their ads started following me around everywhere!

I did some investigation and they have a single remarketing script site-wide so it’s not a particularly sophisticated remarketing campaign.

Interestingly though, they have ads with no call to action. This is an interesting approach as they are probably getting a huge amount of impressions for next to nothing (if they’re working on a CPC model) and are staying top of mind with their previous website visitors. That’s smart.

Here’s an example I saw on YouTube the other day.

I could go on and on about how cool remarketing is and there are so many ways it can be used. But it can also be abused.

Treat remarketing and your audiences with respect; privacy experts are already very concerned about this form of advertising and various international Governments are also looking at it closely too.

As marketers, if we abuse remarketing they’ll take our toys away!

You can see my full advanced remarketing presentation over at slideshare.com here.

For more Online Sales expert advice, click here.

Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.