As technology advances we are provided even more tools and opportunities to deliver better information to our customers, no matter where they are searching. In today’s world, a prospect that visits your website and doesn’t convert isn’t always a lost customer.
Online advertising offers an opportunity to re-engage and capture the attention of those prospects, even after they’ve left your website. Incorporating remarketing into your online advertising strategy can help keep your business top of mind, for those customers that you want to target the most.
If you’re using Google Display Network (GDN) and building your marketing audiences from scratch, the opportunities are endless. Google Display network serves more than a trillion impressions are to over 1 billion users every month.
Within GDN’s Audience Builder you can begin to micro-target your audience. Say for example you’re looking to target the following: Women, ages 35-44, who speak Spanish, located in Milbank, SD, shop on Yahoo between 9am-2pm, use a Samsung Galaxy phone, have visited page X, Y and Z on your site within the last 2 days, spent 7 minutes, 10 seconds on your site and looked at the reviews for product A on your site but didn’t look at the reviews for product.
The options above can quickly become confusing and are enough to give you a digital marketing headache. This post will serve as your audience Ibuprofen, and help alleviate some of the mystery when creating your initial remarketing audiences.
Tip #1 – Let your Goal be your Guide
As with any marketing program, you want to have a clearly defined goal and that goal should take the mystery out of creating your first audience.
The goal should dictate either the pages, visitors, goals and events you’d like to incorporate into your audience. If you want people to take a look at your latest whitepaper or case study, have a broader audience by using all pages on your site. If you want to focus on people that haven’t made a purchase in 2 months, let your goals be the focus.
As long as the campaign goal is front and center, you’re on the road to success.
Tip #2 – Create An audience of Engaged New Users
No mater what you’re goal is, you want that audience to be engageed. Many marketers forget to ask one important question, do these new visitors actually care? Take a look at the bounce rate for your pages or how your visitors are funneling through your site.
There is no point in remarketing to people simply because they land a page. It is important to layer additional filters around engagement with your audiences, i.e. Session Duration or Pages per Session are a great place to start.
This is ensures that you’re remarketing to individuals that are actually interested in what you have to say.
To create this group focuse on the following:
- New User
- They have spent X amount of time on-site or have visited X number of pages
The audience above will isolate New Users who’ve spent at least 60 seconds on the site and looked at 3+ pages.
Google Analytics will give you options for recommended audiences for remarketing, including New Users. We recommend selecting New Users and then layering in additional “engagement focused” custom filters.
Tip #3 – Create a Late Funnel/Nurture Audience
We’ve seen tremdous success by creating audiences focused on consumers that have taken specific actions within a website but haven’t converted.
A good example might be a group of indivduals that have viewed videos, and downloaded a whitepaper but haven’t requested a demo. Perhaps you also have people that have signed-up for a free trial or placed items in their cart but haven’t completed the purchase.
Campaigns that continue to nurture these prospects based on their interests typically have the most success.
For example, the audience below targets consumers that have completed two goals/events on a website but have yet to submit a contact request. It is clear that they have an interest, so now is the time to deploy a remarketing campaign to convert them to contacting our company via phone or a web form.
Here are a couple of other pointers to keep in mind when building out your audience.
- Build your audiences out of Google Analytics, not AdWords . This will provide you with more options and flexibility, for your campaign.
- Use Google Analytics’ pre-defined audiences as the starting point and then begin to customize. There is never a one-size-fits-all solution so make sure that you tailor each campaign for your audience.
- Make sure you have enough people to remarket to. You need at least 100 people in your audience to start serving ads. Micro-level targeting is great; just make sure you’re reaching enough people to make it worth your while. If there are less than 500 people in an audience, begin removing filters and then add in additional filter layers based on performance.
- Let your sales cycle help determine membership duration. The Membership Duration will indicate how many days GA includes a qualified member of the audience in the remarketing group. The longer the duration, the larger your audience. You might want to vary the duration depending on your goal and group but it’s typically to set that anywhere between 14-30 days, with 30 days being the default. If you’re business has a longer sales cycle, you may want a longer duration period. If you’re eComm go with a shorter duration period.
Put These Remarking Tips Into Action
Now it’s time to get that audience engaged and on their feet! If you believe that your organization could benefit from a remarketing or any other sort of online advertising program, contact us for more information.
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