A Go-To Remarketing Guide For Beginners

Have you ever browsed the web only to feel like you were being followed by a company? You go from Facebook to CNN to Reality Steve and you continuously see a banner ad for the same company. Immediately you are impressed because you think they must have quite the extensive advertising budget if they can afford to place ads on multiple major sites like these.

If you are not familiar with remarketing, then it does seem impressive. However, it isn’t really all that impressive when you find out what remarketing is and the way it works. Of course, that doesn’t change how effective it is. Instead, it is just a highly effective advertising technique for marketers.

Whether you are completely new to the remarketing concept or need a refresher, read on to learn more.

What Exactly Is Remarketing?

Commonly referred to as retargeting, remarketing are banner advertisements that will target you after you visit the website of a company. So, let’s say that you visit a website like CafePress.com (no affiliation) and then move on to visit CNN, you may see a banner ad for CafePress.com. Sounds simple, right? Well, the process is actually a bit more complicated.

How Exactly Does Remarketing Work?

In order to get remarketing set up on your website, you need to implement a little bit of code into your website. It is JavaScript and will not affect your site’s performance in any way at all. Your website visitors won’t even know the simple piece of code is present.

Each time a new person visits your website, an anonymous browser cookie will be dropped by your site. When those “cookied” visitors go to a different website, your remarketing advertising service provider will know exactly when to deliver one of your website ads. Think about your local coffee shop and the barista there. After you have been there once, he or she will recognize you and know that you want a Chai Latte.

How Do Remarketing and Banner Ads Differ?

The primary difference between the two is the personalization based on a visitor’s web browsing history. Traditional banner advertisements will deliver ads based on a user’s profile, such as interests, age, sex, etc. – which is known to marketers as an interest graph.

So, if you were to visit a site like ESPN.com, you may be delivered advertisements for Stephen Curry’s latest shoes.  You may not necessarily be interested in them, but you fit into the advertisement’s profile. With remarketing, you will only be delivered ads after you have visited a certain site and shown interest in a company.

Why Should Remarketing Be Used?

Just like other types of advertising and marketing investments, the main reason that you want to use remarketing is to make sales – and lots of them. Remarketing is a very effective advertising tactic. While a few users may find the ads a bit creepy, most of them are going to respond to them in a positive way.

One Google case study with Loews Hotel Group saw promising results after shifting 70 percent of their advertising budget from offline to online. Their overall revenue saw an increase of 10 percent, while they booking jumped nine percent. In addition, their website received an increase of five percent in unique site visitors. The best part of it all is that they spent $800 on remarketing and received $60,000 in sales.

Why Does This Technique Work?

There are many reasons why remarketing is effective, including the following benefits:

• It helps to boost brand awareness and recognition thanks to the continuous exposure to brand-related advertisements.
• It helps to drive repeat traffic to your website. As a general rule, sales do not occur when users visit your website the first time. Statistics show that 67 percent of visitors who do not make a purchase the first go-around will make a purchase when they visit the store a second time.
• It helps to improve your return on investment (ROI) based on various user touch points.

As always, persistence will pay off. You need to remain at the forefront of your audience’s minds, especially in today’s day and age when it takes only a second for someone’s attention to be diverted to something new. Remarketing can help you do this.

What Are Some of the Different Forms of Remarketing?

• Site Remarketing – Probably the most popular and simple, site remarketing will display an advertisement once a user leaves your website.
• Search Remarketing – Search remarketing works by targeting individuals who are marketing inquiries based on specific keywords and/or phrases. They are showing an interested in your specific industry and are likely looking for a solution or more information.
• Social Media Remarketing – This type of remarketing tends to focus on displaying advertisements on various social networks, such as Facebook. A user will visit Zulily.com, head to Facebook, and instantly see Zulily advertisements.
• E-mail Remarketing – If you utilize an e-mail client, such as Gmail, then you will notice contextual advertisements that are usually based on the content of your e-mails. However, you also have the ability to remarket to the advertisements within a user’s e-mail client.

What Are a Few Segmentation Options for Remarketing?

Within the above types of remarketing, there are segmentation options that will allow further customization and increased conversion rates.

• General Visitors – This is basically anyone and everyone who visits your site.
• Specific Product Visitors – These are visitors who have come to your site to look at a specific product.
• Abandoned Shopping Cart Visitors – These are visitors who have located a product on your site, put it in their shopping cart, but ended up deciding, for one reason or another, not to go through with the purchase. They obviously had the intent to buy, so you want to target this particular audience because there is a good chance that you can finalize that sale later down the road.
• Previous Customers – These are obviously people who bought from you previously. More than likely, if someone bought from you once, they will buy from you again. So, you want to make sure that you target them. After all, it is always easier to get a previous customer to purchase again than it is to talk a new customer into buying from you.

How Can Success Be Measured?

Just like with digital advertising spend, it is important that you are measuring your results. There are many different key metrics that are critical when it comes to remarketing, including:

• CTR – This is known as the click-through rate, and it is calculated by taking the number of times that your brand ad is clicked on and dividing it by the number of served impressions.
• CPC – This is known as the cost per click, and it is the total spent budget divided by the overall number of clicks.
• eCPM – This is known as the effective cost per thousand impressions, and it is the total earnings divided by the total number of served impressions. You then take that number and multiply it by one thousand.
• eCPA – This known as the effective cost per acquisition, and it is calculated by taking the campaign spend, dividing it by the served impressions, multiplying it by the CTR and again by the conversion rate. This will essentially provide you with what you may have paid for advertisements on a cost per action basis.
• ROI – This is known as the return on investment, and it can be calculated by taking your gain from the investment and subtracting your investment cost and dividing by the investment cost. This provides you with the amount of money that you are generating from the advertising spend.

Where Can a Campaign Be Set Up?

There are numerous companies that have made it so that you can easily create and manage your own remarketing campaign. To help get you started, here are a few of them:

• Google – This is obviously the largest advertiser on the market. They have a large display advertisement network and products. You simply need to log into your Google AdWords account and you can get started creating your very own and first remarketing campaign.
• AdRoll – This is another popular option because they have several advertising partners. You can set up your ads with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook Exchange. So, basically, you have the ability to reach just about every site out there.
• Perfect Audience – For small businesses, this is another solid option because it is very simple and you don’t need a large budget to get started. They are also compatible with most eCommerce solutions, such as WordPress, Shopify, 3dcart and Magento.

Remarketing can be an extremely effective advertising strategy that more marketers need to add into their marketing mix. It has the ability to help with prospective customers at varying levels in the buying cycle. Whether you are trying to grab the attention of a person searching for information, actively shopping or an existing customer, remarketing may be just what you need to get your company that extra attention to land that sale.

To learn more about growing your brand with remarketing, contact us at WebDetail.