92% of potential customers who visit a website for the first time are not ready to buy from that business. It makes sense. Wooing a targeted audience member is kind of like dating. No one wants to get married on the first date, and consumers typically don’t want to part with their hard-earned cash when they first visit your site. So, if only about 8% of website visitors are ready to buy the first time they click on your landing page or product page, what’s a business to do to increase their conversion rate? Remarketing campaigns and retargeting campaigns are some of the most effective ways to entice those previous website visitors into making a purchase. Here’s how you can create killer Google remarketing ads to increase your conversions and sales numbers.
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What is remarketing?
Investing in content marketing and creating an ad on Google AdWords is only the first step your business needs to take in the ads campaigns arena. Showing ads to a targeted audience will indeed increase your exposure and can net you some much-needed sales. However, the thing is, that’s only the beginning. Remarketing takes digital marketing to the next level, and Google AdWords remarketing campaigns are some of the most powerful ways to increase your sales numbers. Remarketing gets your ads to display to people who’ve previously visited your website or landing page. Remarketing is also referred to as retargeting in some circles, and the terms are often used interchangeably.
What are the benefits of running a remarketing or retargeting campaign?
- Increase ROI, click-through-rate, and conversions
- Turn website visitors who’ve bounced into leads
- Increase brand recall and branded searches
- Improve SEO and content marketing effectiveness
An AdWords remarketing campaign will display ads on the Google Display Network, or the GDN. The GDN is one of the largest search networks and display networks in the world, showing ads across more than two million sites. Some of the biggest platforms that comprise the GDN are Youtube and Gmail. Your remarketing ads can show up as Youtube videos, video ads, and on social media, too.
How can you get started with remarketing on AdWords?
The first step you need to take to get started with a killer remarketing campaign is to define the specific targeted audience members you want to display your ads to. You can create remarketing lists for a variety of different website visitors. For example, it’s possible to target people with remarketing ads based on what specific pages they’ve visited, or if they have read individual posts on your company blog. Showing ads to visitors based on their previous exposure to your online presence allows you to craft the ads specifically for them.
For example, say you own and operate a pet supply store. You’ve had website visitors who’ve visited a landing page dedicated to dog toys. Chances are, you won’t want to show ads to these people across the GDN that display cat food, right? One of the keys to creating a killer remarketing campaign is to segment your audience with specific remarketing lists, so the ad’s message is on-point for their interests.
So, how do you define an audience for remarketing? In the Google AdWords dashboard, you’ll simply create a new remarketing list. It’s easy too. Google takes care of setting up all the cookies that will track your website visitors across the GDN and show ads that speak to their specific interests. All you have to do is specify which website visitors to include or exclude from the remarketing list.
Another way that remarketing lists and audience segmentation help you create killer remarketing ads has to do with the AdWords bidding structure. It’s possible to bid more competitively with a remarketing campaign, so you’ll get even more impressions and a higher ad position on the search network. This enables you to funnel retargeted visitors to sections of your website that are high value. If you’ve got reliable data indicating that visitors to pricing or product pages are more worthwhile for your business than blog visitors, you can retarget those visitors, funnel them to high-value pages, and increase your click-through-rates and ROI.
Our final suggestion for how to create killer remarketing ads on Google is for marketers to define their audience categories too. You would set the different audience categories you’re looking to target based on the different blog post categories you’ve got on your company blog. If you’ve classified a lot of content on your blog based on the article’s topic, it’s a good idea to leverage those topic classifications, and use them to create a more nuanced and detailed remarketing audience definition.
Highly targeted, granular data on your audience helps you craft those killer ads. Remember, you don’t want to display remarketing ads to people who wouldn’t be interested in the ad’s subject and content. This won’t help you increase your conversions and could harm your ROI.
Is there a time limit on how long website visitors can stay in an audience?
Yes, there is. With AdWords remarketing, the audience membership duration will last for the number of days you’re going to follow a user around the GDN with your retargeted ads. So, if you were to set your audience membership duration for 30 days, users who visit your site will see your ads for that specified 30-day duration. As always in marketing, it’s important to test and tweak the audience membership duration. You’ll want to experiment with these numbers to see what’s right for your particular targeted audience.
Here at Australian Internet Advertising, we’ve been running optimised and highly granular Google AdWords remarketing campaigns for a wide variety of businesses and verticals. Contact our expert team of digital marketers today and see what we can do to increase your remarketing ROI, sales, and conversions.
