For the vast majority of websites, only a small percentage of site visitors will convert on their first visit to a site. Since the average number of customer interactions prior to a purchase is seven, it is imperative that you reach out to your site visitors at least several times subsequent to their initial arrival on your site. How can you accomplish this? The solution may lie in a technique called remarketing. Below, we’ll discuss some relatively new retargeting methods and other techniques for engaging with people who have visited your site.

Most often when someone visits a site, the focus is on converting that visitor into a customer, opting into your email list, or following you on social media. Nevertheless, a large majority of your visitors are not going to convert. This majority may be as high as 99% of your visitors. The concept here is to find ways to reengage with these visitors since they have already expressed an interest in your product or service offerings.

Remarketing

There are a number of options that have recently been introduced in the online marketing arena that you should be cognizant of. Certainly there is old school remarketing where you follow your visitors around on the web wherever they go. These are the ads that pop up everywhere you go after you visit an auto dealer’s site and you can’t seem to rid yourself of them. However, more sophisticated options are now available for remarketers. For example, if a specific page on your site was visited in the past 30 days, you may want to show these visitors a specific ad using a specific bid price.

Remarketing now offers marketers some much more sophisticated options than it did in the recent past. Your remarketing model can be configured so that it will show visitors different ads based upon the pages of your site that were visited. Therefore, you can remarket to your visitors based upon the manner in which they interacted with your site. There are a number of services you can use to accomplish this, most notably the Google Display Network.

Remarketing Lists For Search Ads

An example of remarketing for search ads may play out like the following scenario:

Linda visits a page on an auto dealer’s site that displays Chevrolet Impalas. Within the next couple of days, Linda does a search for new cars for sale in her area. At this point, we show Linda an ad for a Chevy Impala, since she already expressed an interest in this vehicle.

There are numerous ways in which these types of ads can be customized based upon a visitor’s behavior on your site and the terms they are searching for. Since you are aware of the previous actions of these users, you can make much higher bids on these kind of ads since your click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates are likely to be much higher than you would get on a standard display ad. CTR and conversions are likely to be much higher because these users already have a familiarity with your products and your brand.

Using Emails and Social IDs

If you have a large list of email IDs, phone numbers or social IDs, you can make use of Twitter and Facebook custom audiences to target people on these social platforms whose IDs you have uploaded. There are likely to be a lot of visitors from whom you have captured a social ID or email ID and have never completed a purchase on your site. You can show ads to these visitors using AdWords, Facebook, or Twitter custom audiences. As a matter of fact, Google recently introduced “customer match” for Google AdWords. This gives you the ability to upload your email list and present ads to visitors on Google’s display network,r even when the are executing a search.

Considerations When Executing Your Remarketing Campaigns

• Limit the number of times one user is exposed to a specific ad. Your campaigns will be more efficient if you do this. You can either change the ad or stop showing the ads to a particular visitor after a pre-determined number of views, unless the user visits your site again. This will save you from wasting ad spend that could be more effectively utilized on a different user.
• Make sure that you stop showing ads to a user when they actually complete your checkout process. There is no point in continuing to display ads to a user that has already converted.
• Have a pre-defined period of time in which you stop showing users ads. For instance after 30 days you may find that the CTR for your ads is extremely low. At this point, it may be time to give up on this user.
• Customize your ads based on the behavior of your users. This is how remarketing has become much more advanced. In the past you would market to all people who had visited your site with the same ads. Now, you can display ads based upon specific actions users have taken on your site and tailor your ads accordingly. This can significantly improve your CTR and conversion rates.
• Give partial credit to each touch point on the road to conversion. Giving all the credit to the last click prior to a conversion will lead you to discount other valuable touch points that contributed to a conversion.

– James Conte, PPC Manager