AdWords Tip: Increase Your Conversions With Remarketing

One of the most innovative and effective tools to have come out of Google’s box of tricks recently is Remarketing.

What remarketing does is allow you to “tag” visitors who come to your website, and then serve specific follow-up ads to them across the entire Google Display Network. What’s more, you can create various remarketing lists within your AdWords account, and then create campaigns to target those specific lists, and even drill down by time elapsed since they visited your site.

I use six different remarketing campaigns to recapture lost opportunities. They are:

1. All Visitors (up to 30 days since last visit)

2. Opt-Ins (up to 60 days since last visit)

3. Abandoned Shopping Cart (up to 90 days since last visit)

4. All Visitors (all time)

5. Opt-ins (all time)

6. Abandoned Shopping Cart (all time)

As you can see, ‘All Visitors’ receives ads for the shortest time. These are people who landed on the home page and bounced off the site without taking any action; therefore they are the lowest-value remarketing prospect. As a result they see ads for the shortest time span and also get the lowest cost-per-click bids.

At the other end of the spectrum, ‘Abandoned Shopping Cart,’ people who got as far as the checkout page before backing out and deciding not to buy, are the most valuable. They were about to click the Order button but chose not to for some reason. Therefore I serve them ads for 90 days, at a much higher CPC bid than the others.

In the middle are those who opted-in to my email list but who have not yet bought. Initially these seemed like high-value prospects for remarketing, but in the end the results weren’t that good, presumably because they are already getting my follow-up emails and don’t need to be targeted through remarketing.

With all remarketing lists and campaigns, the prospect no longer sees the ads once they take the desired conversion action. For example, someone who is on the All Visitors list will be removed from it once they hit the opt-in conversion code, at which time they end up on the Opt-ins list.

Remarketing Tips for Success

Here are some quick tips I’ve learned through considerable experience with using remarketing for both myself and my AdWords management clients:

1. With my ‘All Visitors’ list, i.e. website bounces, sending them to a different landing page had the best result.

Early this year I was referred to a “conversion expert” to redesign my website. I consented then ran a long-term A/B split test between my old site, and the new redesign. Results seemed promising at first – it edged out the old site on opt-in rate but flunked on ultimate sales conversion.

However, there’s a silver lining – all that money wasn’t wasted!

I now use the homepage only from that redesigned site as an alternative landing page for visitors who had originally bounced, but who clicked through via a remarketing ad such as this one:

This page is the original home page. Visitors who originally bounced from that page but later clicked on a remarketing ad land on this alternate page. (You’ll also notice that the new landing page matches the branding in the ad.)

I originally ran the ‘All Visitors’ campaign by sending people back to the original home page, which didn’t work out so well, but sending them to a different page works extremely well and is getting me a considerably low cost-per-action on remarketing opt-ins.

2. Make sure your ad copy specifies the correct call-to-action for that list.

In the ad above, for bounces, the call-to-action is for them to opt-in to get my free download. However, with the other lists, opt-in and abandoned cart, I want them to buy, so this is the ad copy they see instead:

As you can see, the call-to-action is to make a purchase.

3. Limit your frequency cap.

Initially I had no frequency cap on my remarketing campaign. I soon noticed that I was seeing my own ads on nearly every website I went to. This is very annoying for prospective buyers, and also makes it very obvious that you’re stalking them with remarketing, when in reality you want to create the impression that you are a big brand with a large web presence.

As a result I now cap impressions at a maximum of 3 per day per user.

4. Don’t forget text ads.

In working with various AdWords management clients, a common issue I find is that they only add display ads to remarketing campaigns, when in reality text ads are still shown far more frequently across the Google Display Network, so be sure to include text ads in your remarketing campaigns.

So there you have it – some quick & easy tips to make the most of your AdWords remarketing campaigns!