Don’t you just hate that 95% of the visitors to your site leave without interacting with your business? I know I do! They look, they leave, and you think there is nothing you can do about this – but is that really true? You can reach out to that audience and continue the conversation using a process called remarketing which is supported by the Display Network.
Display Network
The Display Network consists of over 1 million websites and it can match to keywords, placement, or remarketing audiences. In remarketing we throw out the keyword matching and replace it with an audience match. The audience is created by tagging visitors who have been to one or more of your pages. The act of loading the page runs a script which gives that visitor a cookie and makes them a part of your targetable audience.
Eligibility & Rank
When the system selects the ads that will be shown it goes through eligibility and ranking. Eligibility is a binary state in that it either is or is not eligible to show. After eligibility is confirmed then the ads are ranked by their bid and quality score. While the complete quality score formula is a deeply held secret inside Google, the concept is simple to understand. The better your ad the more your money is worth. One well known major factor is the Relative CTR and the more it’s above 1.0 the more your bid is worth. Just like CTR is estimated to be 65% of the quality score in search we believe that Relative CTR is also heavily weighted in Display. It is after all a factor that indicates how much money Google is going to make from your ad.
Image versus Text
Remarketing supports both text and image ads but the magic is in image. Text is simply too weak to make a brand impression and we are trying to get them to come back a second time. In all the remarketing campaigns we stress the placement of Image Ads, not text. In most cases we also stress to the designer to clearly communicate the brand and value statement of the client because our goal is to get a brand impression NOT a click. Image ads are powerful and clever ads can get less than qualified clicks and that is not the goal.
Organic Traffic
The goal of remarketing is to build the brand and if this is doing its job we should see an increase in organic traffic. That is not a typo I said organic and here is how that works. The image ad increases the exposure of your brand and your value statement. The idea of the ad is to connect your brand to your value statement and if you do that when the need occurs there is a good chance they will look for your brand or value statement rather than the generic product or service. This does not happen quickly but it is one reason to keep your eye on the branded organic traffic.
About Audiences
Audiences can be positive or negative just like keywords. This allows you to create composite groups such as people that visited your home page minus people that reached the thank you page. This gives you people that have been to your site but have not yet contacted you. In an ecommerce site you might want all visitors, those that added items to the cart, and those that bought product. Each of these audiences could have different image ads with different messaging. One campaign for those that just looked but a different approach for those that checked the price by putting it in the cart. For clients with several categories of products or services we generally recommend different audiences for the different page sets so you can customize the message to their prior exposure to your business.
Frequency
Some people think that remarketing can have too much frequency but I am not in that group. If this concerns you there are several controls over this aspect of your advertising and the most direct is frequency capping. This campaign setting allows you to set the number of impressions a single audience member gets per day, week, or month and per ad group or per campaign. Beyond this you can also vary the budget and time of day schedule so if you deliver a business message you only do that during the business day. We often hear from people that our ads seem to be everywhere and remarketing is the reason for that comment.
In Closing
Remarketing is a powerful tool that allows you to continue the conversation with people that have demonstrated interest in your business. There is no doubt in advertising that frequency works and remarketing is the AdWords tool to serve this part of your marketing strategy.