PubCon Austin 2015 was held during the beautiful Spring in Texas. One of the most informative sessions was the Increasing Your Leads and Sales With Content Remarketing by Damon Gochneaur of Aspiro Agency and Sean Dolan of PushFire.
These guys provided well documented insights into remarketing advertising. Damon kicked off our session with describing what feels like a sucker punch leading to a knock out for him. When he gets great visits, metrics and new leads to a website for a client, he feels like a champion. When none of those leads convert, he feels like he is on the mat for the countdown. Good analogy Damon! You are literally knocked out if not converting. Damon focuses on converting leads and presented on FB Remarketing.
Why Facebook for Remarketing?
Facebook remarketing provides data, lots and lots of data. There are roughly 890 Million Daily Facebook users worldwide and 157 Million daily in US & Canada. Surely your customers and competitors are there.
Remarketing for Damon is the equivalent of what to do when you need more lemonade. Yes you can go buy new lemons or,… you can squeeze the current lemons you have harder. Damon wants to get ALL the juice out of lemons. After all, you already spent money buying those lemons (visitors). Surely you can squeeze harder for less time and $ than buying additional new leads.
Past Customers Are Not Exempt From Remarketing.
Once customers they have purchased, you can still engage with them to help build lists and get reviews. Doesn’t have to be only about purchases. Think about non-transactional events to help build business. A great example included if they do purchase, set your remarketing ads to trigger a week or two for reviews after purchases, or a couple of months later if it is a monthly service based site. Create ads written for the audience.
Many marketers will disregard low intent visitors. For example, if a competitor visits the site, overall blog visitors often visit for information, but without purchasing intent, you are not my market. Damon advises setting exclusions and not selling to these visitors or setting requirements. Didn’t visit the demo page, may not be the target for remarketing. Don’t waste your dollars. Can also really target down into the data with Facebook based on all types of combinations. Use it.
Targeting areas on Facebook included for marketing:
- Demographic – Age, gender, income, language. If a local Doctor office, but probably don’t want visitors from other countries.
- Geographic – state, city, radial
- Interests – likes, interests, pages & business pages liked (most untapped)
- Behavioral – people connect to, places visited, things purchased (if they like Moz, then may or may not be my target)
Sean Dolan Took The Podium To Talk About Remarketing and PPC.
His strong advice? If you do one thing – Place remarketing tag on ALL pages of your client sites. Now.
Besides Google, consider also allocating time and budget to Bing. With the merge of advertising between Yahoo and Bing, they can control nearly a quarter of the combined market now. Start by creating list of behaviors you want to target, and those you want to exclude.
Why Remarketing to PPC? Reduced cost in CPA.
Sean showed a recent example of a 60% drop in CPA for a client. He compared the General Search Network to the remarketing AdGroup. Remarketing starts by adding tracking code to your websites. Currently, Google AdWords will let you bring in this Analytics audience as an automatic group created from All visitors. Display ads are always a great way to start and target audiences. This steps into display space easier and can make the ads profitable for the client.
Examples of audiences can be segmented by Mobile Apps vs. website visits. Visitors to webpages and who didn’t visit other pages, or within specific dates can all be created as audiences. Don’t think just weeks or months. Audiences for annual anniversaries or seasonal targets can be targeted as reminders.
Traditional audiences such as a shopping cart abandonment can be created with a custom combination list. A positive audience from a cookie would be if someone went to the /shopping-cart page, but not the /thank-you page. They didn’t check out, so you can remarket the same or similar products to them.
For longer lead and trials, Sean showed a slide for a audience list targeting just before the end of the trial.
30 day setup for remarketing to Trial or Demo list:
Postive to show ads = /trial expires in 30 days
Negative to show ads = /trial expires in 25 days
Negative to show ads = /thank-you expires in 30 days
Remarketing can easily exclude people with bad behaviors – example – exclude people who visit your jobs page as they are not clients.
Types of audiences that can be developed include:
- Prices / Packages
- Page Views
- Clicked Social Accounts
- Watch Videos
- Surveys (are you M/F, etc. replicate FB audiences)
- Time on Site (>30 seconds)
- Referral Sources
Real-World Applications of how to look at audiences were pretty self-explanatory once they were presented. Think of client sales funnels and types of interactions similar to these.
Sport Clips – reminds guys they need a haircut every 4-6 weeks.
Car wash – collects list, they can turn ads on when it rains in geolocated area.
Sports Bar – collects list of Wed. karaoke patrons, reminds them of upcoming events.
Remarketing by audience includes RLSA or Remarketing Lists for Search Ads.
RLSA let’s you target keywords you couldn’t really afford. If a visitor to your site later searches one of your targeted phrases, you can customize your ad served to them. A budget spend on regular terms might be too expensive, but with a lower CPA of remarketing, these phrases become viable targets. Read about RLSA’s on Google. A few examples of high cost phrases that are examples of valuable RLSA options include:
- Rainmaker platform > [wordpress theme]
- heinzfield.com > “wedding venue”
- Vitamins.com > “symptoms”
New areas and tools in Remarketing to watch for:
As a final wrap-up, we heard about new tools and features anticipated in the remarketing space this year. Right now, Bing is testing a Bing Remarketing Pilot. Place Universal Event Tracking code on all pages now, because you can retroactively create your campaigns. Do it. Right now. UET is compatible with Google Tag Manager. Other anticipated Pilots mentioned were:
- Gmail Sponsored Promotions (GSP) – promtions tab inside Gmail
- Display Select Keywords (pilot) – show ads to ‘more likely to convert’ sessions
- Secret AdWords First-Party Cookie Pilot? Rumored by WSJ.
PushFire and Aspire both provided basic introductions to remarketing and then quickly were able to take the audience down actionable paths for reaching and converting prior site visitors with a lower cost per acquisition. Is it work to implement, yes. Is it worth it? Yes.