If you’re interested in getting more bang for your buck when it comes to online advertising, you should definitely consider remarketing. Don’t take our word for it, take the word of companies who have tried it and noticed significant improvement.
1. First, What Is Remarketing?
Remarketing is exactly what it sounds like: a second attempt at marketing. Specifically, it’s a service provided by Google AdWords that initiates an additional marketing effort to people who have already shown an interest in a particular product or service.
For example, suppose you have an e-commerce site that sells various types of footwear. Someone visits your site and browses around looking for work boots. Then, that person leaves the site without purchasing anything.
If you practice remarketing, then when that person performs a search on Google or visits another website that is a member of the Google Display Network, he or she will see one of your advertisements for work boots, click the link, and be directed right back to your site to continue browsing for work boots.
Do you see how it works? You already know that the person has an interest in work boots. For some reason, that person left your site to go browse elsewhere. Your remarketing display ad showed that person something (such as a promotion or brand) that wasn’t noticed before. If the link is clicked, you have a second shot at closing the sale.
2. How It’s Done
As with so many other things offered by Google, remarketing is done fairly simply. You just place a piece of code on your website, preferably in your header or footer so that it shows up on all pages.
Once you have the code in place, you create one or more remarketing lists. The lists are used to specify the types of users who are eligible for remarketing. Continuing with the example above, you might specify a list for people who browse for work boots. Then, when anyone accesses your site looking for work boots, that person immediately becomes eligible for remarketing.
Finally, you create an AdWords campaign that is designed exclusively for remarketing efforts. In this case, the ads in that campaign will only be displayed to people who have visited your site and looked at work boots. Nobody else will see the ads.
3. How Effective Is It?
It seems intuitive that remarketing should be much more effective than advertising without remarketing. This is because the customer has already shown an interest in the product or service being offered. It’s more likely that you’ll have a higher conversion rate with people who are already in the market for what you’re offering.
However, there are companies that have tried remarketing and reported improvements across a variety of metrics. Loews Hotels, as an example, used remarketing as part of its online campaign and saw a 10% increase in revenue, a 9% lift in bookings, and a 5% increase in unique visitors.
Beacon Technologies reports that an American based wholesaler saw new customer orders increase by 10% and visits that came by PPC advertising increase more than 78%.
Further, a study conducted by Hanapin Marketing notes the following: “Remarketing accounted for 16.61% of all conversions over the past six months, at only 12.93% of the total cost. It has only 81.36% of the average click cost, and only 77.82% of the average conversion cost. Of all campaign types in this account, it also had the highest conversion rate.” In short, the company concludes, do remarketing.
Remarketing is easy to overlook because it requires a little additional effort. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not effective. If you’re not running any remarketing campaigns for your website, why not give it a try today?
