Today we  revisit remarketing. Our first blog on this topic was in 2010 “Using Ad Retargeting in Google Adwords.” Despite the proven effectiveness of retargeting, companies don’t seem to take advantage of it as often as they could. Remarketing or retargeting, whatever you call it, taking this additional step can increase your click-through rate by 500% and it’s available at no extra cost as part of the Google Adwords platform, so why not do it?

In this blog post, we review some of the benefits and present some retargeting tips collected from our client experiences over the past couple of years.

What is remarketing?

If you use Google Adwords, remarketing allows you to target website visitors by continuing to display your ads at appropriate times later, when they browse elsewhere on the Internet. You are in effect identifying visitors who have come to your site and then showing them tailored ads on sites throughout the Google Display Network. A little bit of retargeting code on your web pages is all you need to remarket to those visitors. Visitors? Which visitors? You set up your target visitors via an “audience list”. You have several targeting options: from blatantly repeating your ads everywhere the visitor browses to more focused placements based on topics, keywords, ad placement, or timing. If you want, Google can help you increase your audience list by automatically adding visitors who have landed on your site through organic search or direct access. If you haven’t done so already, read Google’s tutorial on remarketing.

What kind of business could use remarketing?

When remarketing first came out, we felt it was best for products with a longer buying cycle, where customers need to do more research or price shop. In addition to staying visible to customers while they are making up their minds, the constant reinforcement of remarketing helps drive customers from the point of feeling this product is a “wanna-have” to rather than “must-have”. But actually, most visitors to your website won’t make up their minds right away. So any business can benefit from remarketing to reinforce your brand and remind users to come back. B2B remarketing can be very effective, especially when you combine remarketing with custom landing pages that feature different messages to target different audience segments. Keep an eye on your results with Google Analytics, and it’s easy to track the success of your remarketing campaign, whether your goal is conversions or the engagement level of returning customers; this helps you make decisions that control your AdWords bid pricing and maintain ROI.

Six Tips for Remarketing ROI

1. Create a ‘just purchased’ list

   Visitors who followed through with a purchase are good targets for cross-selling. If Rita just bought some great evening shoes, she may respond well to a remarket ad for evening bags, with a discount if she makes the purchase within the next 7 days. You can set up this campaign to target this list for up to 7 days. You can also use this list to make sure you’re not remarketing to Rita with ads for more evening shoes.

2. Create a dropouts list

   Work those audience lists. Create a list of visitors who started adding to their shopping cart but then dropped out. These are high potential prospects who had second thoughts. Perhaps they didn’t like the shipping costs, or felt they had to shop around some more, or perhaps they just got distracted during the purchase process. Remind them about your site and help them reconsider with remarketing ads that offer discounts, free shipping, or a bonus.

3. Remarket by brand or product type

   If you carry different brands of product (shoes) or sell a range of products (shoes, handbags, and accessories), put remarketing code in pages by brand or by product type. Therefore, if Joe has been to your Nike page, whenever he navigates to another Nike page or sports footwear page, he will see your ad for your Nike sports footwear. If Jessica has been on your handbag pages, she will continue to see your ads for purses. It’s especially effective if your remarketing ads offer specials.

4. Offer an incentive

   It costs less to attract a repeat customer than to capture a new customer. Take some of those savings and give customers a better reason to come back.

5. Experiment. Be relevant

   Try different messages and campaigns as well as different combinations of audience lists. Stay current with trends or seasonal product opportunities. There is no such thing as a silver bullet but you will be able to find some messages that resonate better with certain audience lists. Keep on trying until you know what works.

6. Create custom landing pages

   Custom pages or micro-sites are a real help when your main website is constrained to certain designs or too difficult to manage for quick response to marketing campaign needs. When you remarket, you can zero in on a slice of your target audience, so why not invest in a micro-site or custom landing page that speaks directly and more personally to that customer segment?