We share the top remarketing techniques that are helping business owners outshine their competition

When visitors arrive at your website and then leave without completing an action, like making a purchase or filling out a contact form, your business is missing out on an opportunity. So how do you rectify the situation? How do you reconnect with users who have checked out your brand or business online, but have not yet bought from you or gotten in touch? That is a question business owners have been asking themselves for many years, and with the rising popularity of digital marketing, they now have an answer. That answer is remarketing.

What is remarketing?

Remarketing is the process of running online advertisements that specifically target users who have interacted with your brand or business online, but who have yet to convert. It can be done on just about any major online platform, from social media giants like Facebook and Instagram to Google (via Google Ads) or even through email.

The most exciting part is that this has been proven to be an extremely lucrative and worthwhile marketing strategy. In fact, it has been proven to boost ad response by up to 400 percent. But before entrepreneurs take the plunge and begin creating a remarketing campaign, there are some ground rules they should familiarize themselves with. In this blog, we’ll be sharing some key insights into how remarketing works, and providing you with strategic guidelines you should follow to maximize the results of your remarketing efforts.

Here are 6 Tips for Creating a Highly Profitable Remarketing Campaign:

1. Track Your Campaigns: Before you launch a remarketing campaign, it’s always recommended that you set up an analytics account so you can oversee the performance of your remarketing ads and make informed decisions about your campaigns based on solid, irrefutable data. Otherwise, you may end up overspending and blow through your budget too quickly. Google has detailed instructions on how to set up a Google Analytics account here. If you plan to run retargeting ads via Facebook, you can find a complete guide to setting up Facebook analytics here. And remember, the sooner you establish an analytics account, the sooner your chosen platform will begin pulling data from your profiles or website, giving you a clearer picture of your starting point, and a detailed picture of how your remarketing ads are benefitting you as you roll them out.
2. Target Smaller Audiences: This is one of the most beneficial remarketing tips for business owners who want to attract new users who share common characteristics with the people who already support their brand. When targeting similar audiences, Google and Facebook will automatically seek out users who have a lot in common with the people who make up your current clientele. Then, they will display your retargeting ads in their Google search results or in their Facebook news feed (depending on which platform you use). Not convinced that targeting similar audiences is the right way to go? What if we told you that automobile manufacturer Chrysler recently invested in retargeting using similar audiences, and was able to secure 22 percent more conversions, 14 percent lower cost per acquisition (CPA), and an 11 percent increase in click-through rate? With such compelling and proven results, similar audience targeting is a strategy that every business should consider if they want to fully capitalize on the benefits of remarketing.
3. Lock-In Your Binding Strategy: How you spend your remarketing budget will have a major impact on the outcome of your campaign. Distribute your funds intelligently, and you ensure that you get the most amount of quality traffic at the most cost-effective price. Distribute them carelessly, and you could end up with minimal results and a blown budget. One of the most crucial remarketing tips to remember when setting your bids is to focus the majority of your budget on users who have abandoned their shopping cart or who have exited your site from the contact us page. Typically, these users are considered “warmer” than users who only read your homepage or other informational pages on your site. This means, ultimately, that they are more likely to convert if exposed to remarketing ads. By strategically focusing on these users, you increase the likelihood that your campaign will be profitable and yield your desired results.
4. Find Your Timing Sweet Spot: One mistake you don’t want to make when creating a remarketing campaign is exposing users to your ads for too long, or too frequently. Doing so can actually hinder the results of your campaign rather than help them. Instead, you want to find your sweet spot. There are several factors to consider in order to narrow down what time frame will work best for you. For example businesses with shorter sales cycles, like retail and e-commerce, will require a shorter remarketing campaign than industries who typically take longer to close a sale, like automotive dealerships or insurance companies. Additionally, consider setting a frequency cap, so that users don’t feel bombarded by your ads. We recommend allowing each user to see your ads 17-20 times per month (a little less than once per day) to ensure people don’t become irritated by your advertisements. This is important since users do have the ability to block ads on social media, which will ultimately affect the performance of your campaign.
5. Keep Your Content Fresh: When it comes to remarketing ads, keeping your content interesting is vital. If a user sees the same ad from your company for a whole month, it will likely lose its appeal after a little while. A great way to combat this is to use rotating creatives. Both Facebook and Google provide advertisers with the ability to select multiple photos for a given ad, having the photo rotate randomly each time the photo appears in a user's news feed or search results. This keeps your ad content fresh and intriguing for your target audience. This is imperative since click through rates decrease by almost 50 percent after five months of running the same set of ads. Always update your campaigns frequently, and consider running A/B split tests to see which versions of your ads are performing best. That way, you can invest in the ads that are producing the best results, and cut the ones that aren’t.
6. Make Mobile a Priority: It’s no secret that mobile is taking over, with mobile web users accounting for 63 percent of all web traffic in 2017. Yet surprisingly, many businesses aren’t capitalizing on this trend with regards to their remarketing efforts. Mobile remarketing campaigns are actually highly effective. They target users who have downloaded a specific app on their device, or users that have visited a specific website via their mobile web browser. Once they have, your retargeting ads will be displayed when they use the specific mobile app, or when they browse the internet from their mobile device. You can trust us when we say that mobile retargeting is the way of the future. It’s no coincidence that 54 percent of marketers are currently retargeting on mobile, or that 71 percent of mobile sales happen in-app. If mobile isn’t already a part of your remarketing strategy, now is the time to include it!

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