Remarketing is a powerful advertising tool that allows you to reach out to customers that have shown an interest in engaging with you but haven’t yet made that final conversion step. Importantly, though, to gain the benefits that remarketing has to offer, you need to approach it with the right strategy.

Remarketing is a nifty feature that allows you to segment a part of your audience who have already been to your website and seen your content. You can then deliver an even more targeted marketing message, aimed at getting them to re-engage with you and hopefully convert.

Google AdWords™ allows you to create remarketing audiences quickly. You define what pages a user must visit or what actions a user must take. Users who meet these criteria will become part of your remarketing audience.

Once you have created your audiences, the people who click your regular ads and proceed to these pages or actions will become part of your audience list. You can then target specific ads at the individuals on the list.

Here is an example of a great remarketing campaign:

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Joes Bike Shop sells bicycles and cycling accessories online and advertises through Google AdWords. Joe creates a remarketing audience of people who have added items to the shopping cart but have not completed their purchase. Joe then creates a remarketing campaign offering a 10% discount coupon that can be used to complete the purchase.

Customers who add items to the cart but leave will see this ad over the next few days. The 10% discount may create the additional motivation needed by some of these customers to proceed with the purchase.

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Remarketing campaigns need a combination of an interested audience, ideally who have made some progress towards completing a conversion and a hook that will encourage them to take that extra step and convert.

All of this sounds simple enough, but it can easily go wrong. Incorrect remarketing strategies can waste advertising budgets and more critically, can negatively impact brands.

Here are the a few things that you can do to strengthen your remarketing strategy:

Understanding your audience’s intent

Many companies make the mistake of remarketing to broad groups without adequately assessing their interests. I have seen remarketing audiences that include everyone who visited the company website.

While some of these people may be good remarketing targets, there are also a lot of others who showed no interest at all. Make sure that your remarketing audiences have performed some actions that would indicate they are interested in your brand, products or services.

Using an appropriate message

Using the same advertising creative and marketing message as your regular campaigns is also likely to turn users off. These users have already seen your advertising and have hopefully expressed some interest in your products and services (remember audience intent!), and need some additional motivation to convert.

Online shoppers also typically do a lot of research, visiting your site and then others while looking for the best deal on an offering. If your remarketing campaigns place your usual ads in front of those who are in research mode, they may ignore you. Or worse, they may click your ad and only then realise that they have seen your website before, and then leave to continue researching, costing you unnecessarily.

It is vital that your remarketing ads and landing pages have a message that will encourage users to re-engage and continue the conversion funnel where they left off.

Pushing a positive message

When planning a remarketing campaign, it is crucial that you consider the experience that your audience will have when you remarket to them. Many companies push their marketing messages too vigorously, causing their audience to feel uncomfortable.

I have heard complaints from many people about how various ads ‘follow them around’ after they visit a website. These people have never heard of remarketing but are well aware that they are being targeted – and they don’t like it.

If you are going to remarket to an audience, make sure that you do it in a way that is helpful and positive. You can push even a great deal, such as a 50% discount on a shopping cart purchase, too hard and discourage someone from purchasing.

Remarketing, for both search and display networks, is a fantastic feature and can help deliver incredible value to a company. However, it will only work with the right strategy, executed with care and attention to detail.

What do you think about remarketing? Tweet your thoughts to me at @nathan5ri
 

If your remarketing campaign isn’t delivering the results you expected, get in touch with Metrixa. We can develop a remarketing strategy that works for you. Try our AdWords Audit.