Engage your Audience with Remarketing Techniques

February 24th, 2016

posted by Nataša Bajić to PPC, Remarketing

Create Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

When it comes to the Google AdWords search landscape, one thing is certain- it is constantly changing and evolving. Gone are the days when keywords were the one and only targeting principle. The perfect example of this is Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA).

The way they work is pretty simple. Namely, when visitors leave your site without buying anything, RLSA helps you reconnect with them once they embark on their search on Google. This amazing feature helps you customize your bids, tailor your search campaigns to be more suiting to your users or even select keywords used when they previously visited your site.

Furthermore, there are two basic strategies for using remarketing lists for search ads. First, you can simply propose some keywords you don’t usually bid on, just for those people that have recently visited your site or converted on it in the past. On the other hand, you can upgrade the keywords you are already using for people on your remarketing list.

Segment your Remarketing Campaigns Effectively

Identifying and splitting up target demographic has always been the holy grail of any digital marketing campaign. However, even though dividing your audience in terms of demographics or location might be great for your SEO, it’s not a priority when it comes to remarketing.

The key to successful remarketing campaign is not treating all your website visitors in the same way. Namely, in order to meet their needs, you need to segment your remarketing campaigns based on numerous factors, such as how much time a user spends on your site, how many pages they view, what pages they visit and so on. Most importantly, you need to always take your sales funnel into consideration during the segmentation of target audience.

One of the most common remarketing mistakes businesses make is targeting an audience of all site visitors for the last 30 days. Although it sometimes might be a pretty decent starting point for a remarketing campaign, you will still waste your efforts, time and resources on numerous users that are not interested in your product at all.

For each group you are planning to segment, you can create different Call to Actions, monitor your conversion rates and create workflow segments to further enhance your prospects to the sale.

Check your content in order to determine what attracts your visitors the most

One of the first things you need to do is to filter the landing pages that have high session numbers, but no conversion. Only by doing so will you be able to detect content that drives the visitors to your site for reasons other than purchase intent.

Let’s illustrate this through the following example. Maybe one of your blog posts or videos went viral and now it drives an immense traffic to your site. Although it’s great for your SEO strategy, those visitors are not of crucial importance for your remarketing campaign.

Therefore, once you notice some non-converting content on your website, you need to create a target group consisting of people who visited those pages and exclude them from your remarketing campaign.

Exclude Sessions Lasting less than 10 Seconds

On the majority of sites, about 50% of sessions last less than 10 seconds, which has practically no influence on your remarketing efforts. Of course, these visitors are simply not into your product or have clicked on it by the accident, therefore they aren’t such good prospects for driving some future conversions.

So, your goal here is to stop wasting money on reengaging users that aren’t your target demographic at all. In order to eliminate these audiences from your remarketing campaign, you could simply create a remarketing list in Google Analytics for sessions that last less than 10 seconds and voila, the problem is solved.

Leverage Affinity and In-Market Audiences

People visit your website for a myriad of reasons, from simply being interested in your products to being in the market for a similar product. For example, you’re selling health insurance online. In order to analyze your competitors, you would spend hours navigating through your client and competitor websites, obviously without any intention of making a purchase of the product they offer. Well, the same thing happens to you every day.

Therefore, you need to separate people who are really interested in your product from those visiting your site for some other intentions. And, the best option for doing so is choosing the “All Campaigns” option at AdWords and then setting your Secondary dimension Affinity Category.
These affinity categories are supposed automatically detect your target audience within AdWords. Of course, you cannot expect them to show exactly why those people came to your website, but they will certainly allow you to eliminate the majority users that have no intent on making a purchase.

Use all resources you have to reconnect

If you have your users’ email address, social ID, app ID or even a phone number, you are given an amazing opportunity to reconnect with them via the multitude of online channels, especially Facebook and Twitter. Just take the example of all those visitors who signed up for your newsletter or intended to buy a product but never finished the purchase. By contacting them this way, you will manage to target specifically those audiences on Facebook and Twitter, whose email address you’ve previously uploaded.

Be Careful when Creating Remarketing Ads

The most beautiful thing about remarketing is that you can reach users with the plethora of ads. Using the display network helps you choose between run text, image or video ads. Here are some most important things you need to keep in mind:

– Your ad needs to be consistent with your branding practices. Always keep in mind that remarketing is all about the users recognizing your brand and getting back to it over and over again. Therefore, you need to stick to your traditional logo, colors and voice in order to attract the potential customers to your site once again. Anything outside your traditional branding practices could significantly decrease your visitors’ likelihood of clicking.
– Use an ad format that can work at every site. Remember, not all websites support every add format. Precisely because of this, you should create images in numerous sizes in order to increase the amount of times that your ads can be shown at sizes that fit each and every site. Additionally, if your ad is animated, always make sure it’s in regular PNG or JPEG format. This way, you can manage a steady message, enable the optimal visibility and give your placement a boost.
– Make it clear what people can expect from your site. Always make your ads concise and clear enough in order to point out the main advantages of your site to the potential customer.

Conclusions

All in all, once you start measuring your performance gains and dividing your audiences as prospects and non-prospects, you will master the basic techniques for detecting the unqualified audiences to eliminate from your remarketing campaigns.