As a user you’ll probably already know, as digital marketers we see it every day in your Google Analytics account: users don’t convert straight away the first time they land on your website. As much as we all wish it was that simple, conversion paths can require different steps. Before getting down to the purchase stage of the marketing funnel, users need time for exploration and consideration and while many digital marketing tactics help you get prospecting customers to visit your website, some of these customers will leave and will convert in a different moment. The question is: how do we take them back to our website without risking to lose them or, worse, get them caught by competitors? Simple, here comes remarketing.
Remarketing (also known as “retargeting”) is the tactic of re-connecting with lapsed users while they browse the web, check their emails, spend time on social media or on their favourite apps.
How does Remarketing work?
When users arrive on your website, their browsers get tagged with a string of code (a cookie) that follows them around the web and allows you to show them targeted ads.
With Google Display Remarketing campaigns, your ads can appear on any of the 2 million websites and apps that are part of the Google Display Network, but also on YouTube and on Gmail. And this is not it, your ads can also follow users while they spend time on social media. How many times you’ve been targeted with an ad on Facebook just minutes after visiting the same brand’s website? If you’ve wondered how Facebook knows your browsing history, here’s the answer. (Top tip: if you’re browsing for engagement rings on your family laptop, clear your cookies or you’ll spoilt the surprise!)
All you need to do to make this magic happen is to install a remarketing tag on your website, depending on the channel you want to use, you’ll need Google Analytics tags, Google Ads and/or Facebook pixel. Once the tag is installed it starts tracking users and you can start to segment them into different audience lists based on their online behaviour.
Not only remarketing tags: Customer lists
We now know how easy it is to keep track of users that visited your website by dropping a cookie on their browsers but this is not the only way advertisers can use remarketing. Another way to target people is to use existing customer lists. If you have your customers’ email addresses, for example, you can retarget them with a dedicated ad providing their email address matches a Google or Facebook profile.
Create your Remarketing strategy
Remarketing can have different objectives depending on your type of business, e-commerce or lead generation.
For e-commerce, for example, the global average cart abandonment rate across different industries is 75%. This makes it very important to create a remarketing strategy that includes basket abandoners. And what about people who visited specific product pages on your website without adding any of them to the cart, how important is it to refuel their interest towards those products before they buy elsewhere? Not to mention that Remarketing allows you to up-sell or cross-sell to past/existing customers. Depending on your customer buying cycle you can estimate when they’d be ready to make another purchase and retarget them with an ad that shows a more premium product (up-selling) or accessories that match what they’ve just bought (cross-selling)
Personalise your ads and don’t forget frequency capping
We’ve seen how important it is to set your remarketing objectives and decide who you want to re-target. Ultimately, this is necessary to be able to create adequate audience lists and personalised, compelling ads.
The average click-through rate for remarketing ads is 10 times higher than standard display campaigns but in order to really see your remarketing ads attract the attention of users (remember ad blindness is a thing) you need to personalise them and talk directly to your audience. For e-commerce businesses, this is even easier with Dynamic Remarketing that allows you to show the users exactly the products or services they viewed on your website.
Also, why not adding discount codes or free shipping offer to your remarketing ads? Think strategically, 55% of shoppers abandon carts due to shipping cost while 23% of them leave because the total order cost was higher than expected. If you really want to win these users, you need to give them a reason to come back.
Last but not least, remember to set a frequency capping on your ads, you want to get visitors back to your website without bombarding them with repetitive, invasive ads.
Elisabetta | Paid Media Specialist 