Remarketing 101 – Increase the return on your online marketing

So what is remarketing? It’s the high ROI marketing tactic that you might not using, but should be. It’s simply reconnecting with people who have visited your website, by showing your ad on other websites or apps they’re using.

Good vs. Bad remarketing

Bad remarketing is like a childhood crush who keeps asking you out—time and time again—even when you’ve already said no. That annoys you, because you have no intention of accepting their kind, but unnecessary invitation.

Good remarketing is more like ongoing-flirting with your crush, when you know they like you back. It’s making a subtle effort to have a presence in their life, and letting the “action” take place when the time is right.

That’s exactly how you need to think of your remarketing ads. Your visitors are your crush, and you need to persuade them you’re a good fit to do business with. Not by nagging, but by playing it cool, being witty, and having an offer too attractive to resist.

Benefits of remarketing

Remarketing yields great results, because it’s essentially marketing to warm leads, as opposed to cold ones. You already know they have visited your site. You even know what page(s) they have visited. If you’re nifty, you even know what content they have seen, and what actions that have taken, and how they got to your page (e.g. from what site).

In addition to all of the above, you also have other valuable information such as what devices they’re using, (desktop / mobile), what country they’re from, age range, and gender.

This lets you make a few assumptions about your audience, and allows you to narrow down a specific segment to remarket to.

Targeted remarketing example:

If you run an online women’s clothing store, you should create an optimised segment to market to, rather than a general one. This will yield better results.

Keep in mind, the info in the table below is an example. You will need to look at your own analytics data to fill it in accurately.

As you can see, narrowing down the audience you remarket to makes a lot of sense. It allows you to only remarket to high-value people, and not waste money remarketing to low-value people.

In this case, you can see that a lot of younger-women are finding the site from Facebook posts (friends sharing the site, for example). You can also see they’re using Facebook from a mobile-device.

Another key factor is that they have signed up to your site. You can track the date they signed up with the current date to see how long it’s been since they logged in. If it turns out that 50% of people who signed up in the last two weeks have not logged back in, then you might want to run a specific remarketing ad for that segment.

In addition, you would want to display the ad on the site and device they’re using most. In this case, displaying it on the Facebook mobile-app, as opposed to the desktop site.

Bonus: you want to get the numbers on what gender purchases more on your site. A lot of people assume that if it’s a women’s clothing website, that it’s women making the purchases. BUT, in many cases, it’s the boyfriends / husbands doing the purchasing, as they’re buying gifts for their partner.

For further info on remarketing, refer to the links below:

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2453998?hl=en-AU

https://en-gb.facebook.com/business/a/online-sales/custom-audiences-website