You’ve all had that feeling, you know the one. You’ve visited a website and suddenly it seems like it’s following you everywhere you go from Google to Facebook, news websites to YouTube. No matter where you are, there those ads are! Reminding you what you were looking at and trying to convince you to buy their product or service. No it’s not a coincidence, it’s remarketing!
So how does remarketing actually work and why should you invest in it?
Remarketing is very simple, it can run on both Google and Facebook, and you place some simple code on your website (either on all pages or specific pages depending on who you want to target) which then tracks who has been on your site. These users are all added to your remarketing list and once your list hits 100 users, your ads will begin to serve across the Google display network and on Facebook. You can choose how long people stay on your list as well from 7 days to over 500 days on Google and 180 days on Facebook!
There are so many great reasons why you should invest in remarketing but here are my top 6:
1. Remain connected to your audience
Remarketing allows you to stay in touch with your audience even when they are not on your website or actively searching for you or your services. This is extremely powerful when it comes to improving brand awareness and being front of mind when that person does eventually go make a purchase – hopefully it will be from you.
2. More conversions
It is widely known that campaigns which include remarketing as part of their online marketing strategy have a higher rate of conversions. It is precisely because you are reminding your audience of your products and services that they remember you when it comes time to make their purchase. Just make sure it’s gentle reminding and not constant bombarding and cap the number of times your ad is seen per day.
3. Lower cost per conversions and higher ROI
Clicks on remarketing ads often have a lower cost per click (CPC), and therefore cost per conversion, than clicks from traditional search campaigns. This of course will depend on how competitive your industry is, but generally, you can expect a lower cost per conversion for remarketing campaigns compared to search campaigns. It is important to remember that some of your remarketing audience will come from your search campaigns though so generally it’s not advisable to run remarketing on its own unless you have a decent amount of traffic coming to the website from other sources.
4. Get conversions for free
Yes you read that right. Get conversions for FREE. Someone can see your ad, NOT click on it, and then go directly to your website and convert. These are called view-through conversions and you pay absolutely nothing when using a cost per click model. Brilliant.
5. Niche targeting options
Remarketing also allows you to target specific user groups by narrowing your targeting. This is particularly useful when you have a huge remarketing audience and you want to make sure you are reaching the right people. Want to target people of a certain gender, age group, parental status, by location or only people who haven’t purchased before or who abandoned their shopping cart? No problem.
6. Highly targeted ad text
By targeting people you know have been to your website before, you can create highly relevant ad text or images to help drive them back to your website to make a purchase or get in touch. You can even go so far as to create different ads based on which pages people have visited. Let’s say you are a college offering a variety of courses in different areas. You can create specific ads that target people who looked at the IT courses and different ads for those who looked at hospitality courses. Remarketing is also a great way to promote a new offer, product or service to a new audience. Overall remarketing helps create a greater connection between your business and your audience and who doesn’t want that?
Have you invested in remarketing? How has it worked for you?
Having optimised over 400 websites, Karen Dauncey has seen firsthand the result of maximising online presence: Businesses can and do use their websites to successfully attract new business. Having worked in SEO since 2000, in 2008 she founded Blue Cherry Online Marketing, a boutique digital marketing agency based in Perth. Recently she launched her own personal website Karen Dauncey. She has also created an SEO E-Course, Local SEO Results, to teach businesses how to do their own SEO.
