AdWords remarketing: Targeting previous visitors to seal the deal

The worst kind of visitor for your PPC campaigns is one that leaves before converting. They’ve shown enough interest to click your ad – a privilege you have to pay for – but not enough conviction to go the distance and hit your target.
Too many of these visitors will take a serious swipe at your ROI, but you don’t have to sit back and let potential leads slip away. Today we’re going to look at how you can use AdWords remarketing to seal the deal with the ones that almost got away.

Before You Get Started With AdWords Remarketing

Remarketing sure sounds like a nice idea when you have bundles of visitors clicking your ads and leaving before they convert. But, before you delve into remarketing, you need to optimise your ads, landing pages and website to be sure these aren’t causing people to abandon ship. Remarketing won’t do you much good if your landing pages aren’t relevant, you have a lousy user experience or your contact forms make buying your products a chore.
You also need to be sure you have enough visitors in the first place to effectively target those that still have the potential to convert. So, if you’re new to PPC, make sure your campaigns are well optimised, your website is up to scratch and you’re pulling in enough visitors to make remarketing worthwhile.

Moving On To Remarketing

Once you know your site and campaigns are in order you can start to target previous visitors at various stages of the sales process. This works by using cookies to display ads to these users as they browse the web. The best approach is to add the remarketing tag to every page of your site – so you can change your strategy and target different pages without adding any more code. For more information on how to use the remarketing tag you can visit the Google support page.
With your pages tagged up it’s time to draw together your list of audiences to remarket. Visitors can leave at any stage of the conversion process – after viewing your landing page, browsing your products or services; or even adding a couple of products to their basket. You can target these visitors based on the last URL they visited, or even a page they didn’t, and create ads to tempt them back into the sales funnel.

Remarketing Best Practices

There are a few things you need to consider throughout your remarketing efforts, as well as some best practices to follow:

  • First of all you need to update your privacy policy to inform visitors you use cookies.
  • Use Google Analytics and any other sources of data you have to draw up your remarketing lists.
  • Name your lists with the goal you have in mind – eg: “Buy Nike Airs” for users who added the sports shoes to their shopping basket but never make it to the checkout page.
  • Use dynamic remarketing ads, including images, for e-commerce campaigns.
  • Set a custom retargeting member duration to control how long your target users with your ads.
  • Combine this with frequency capping to control how often your ads display while you’re remarketing (people can quickly get sick of seeing your ads everywhere).
  • Bid higher on retargeting users more likely to convert – especially those likely to complete the most valuable conversions.

Sadly, we haven’t got time to go into any more detail today, but hopefully this is enough to show you the potential of AdWords remarketing. And, as always, you can get in touch if you want more info on this or anything else digital marketing.