Did you know that nearly 75% of people who add something to an online shopping cart abandon the website instead of making the purchase? (It’s true)
Whether it’s a shopping cart, a web form, or some other type of online conversion you are pushing, the fact remains that most people who visit the page will not convert.
So how can we leverage these “abandoners” into more conversions and sales?
The answer is remarketing.
How Remarketing Works
Adwords Remarketing works by tracking when somebody performs a specific action, such as visiting your website. A cookie is placed on their computer that makes note of this activity. When this person goes to other websites, they will then see your image or text ad follow them around the web. This method allows you to heavily target people who have shown some level of interest in your company or product. Once you create the audience in Google Analytics, you can import it to Adwords. Beyond the basic setup and strategy, there are lots of advanced tactics that you can utilize to make your remarketing campaigns work even better.
Audience Segmentation
(Who do you want to target?)
Page Filtering
The first way to define an audience is to filter all your users by the pages they visit on your website. You can make this relatively broad, like in this image below, selecting anyone who has visited one category of pages. Or you can get more specific by selecting users who visit, for example, page X and not page Y. This is how you would create the “abandoners” audience (users who visited the shopping cart page but didn’t visit the order confirmation page).
Demographic Filtering
One option to fine-tune your remarketing list is with demographic filtering. The basic options are age, gender and language. If you want to get more advanced you can target based on affinity categories. One example would be “movie lovers”. These are people towards the top of the funnel who have shown some sort of affinity for a topic related to your business. Another option is in-market segments, which allows you to validate that your users are actually interested in purchasing your products. These users are towards the end of the sales funnel. It’s important to note that these filters are very specific, and if you don’t have a lot of traffic to your site, you will see the audience size shrink quickly while applying them.
Technology Filtering
Another option is to filter by technology. This gives you the option to filter by an operating system, browser, device, screen resolutions, and more. There is also an option to filter all mobile devices, including tablets.
Behavior Filtering
Yet another option is to filter by behavior. What this means is the number of sessions a user has had on your website. You can also look at days since last session, transactions and session duration.
Combinations (Sequence, Conditional)
This is where things start to get advanced. You can get as hyper-specific as you want by building an audience with sequence or conditional logic. For example, you could target people aged 25-34 who visited your contact us page more than once on a mobile device (including tablets). Once you apply the audience, Google will give you an estimate of the number of users over the past 7 days who fit all of your criteria. If the number is really small, you might be getting too specific. You can see our audience over the last 7 days in the image below is 21.
Limit Settings
(When should you stop targeting them?)
Member Duration
Once you’ve decided who you want to remarket you, the next step is to decide on how long someone stays on this list. The default membership is 30 days, however this will vary based on your business. If your customers take a long time to decide whether or not to purchase, you may want to increase it. If you’re worried about people getting annoyed by seeing your ads everywhere, you may want to decrease it.
Frequency Capping
Another configuration setting, frequency capping allows you to set a limit, or cap, to the number of ads one particular person will see over their membership on your list. This can also help you avoid the problem of people seeing your ads too often.
More Advanced Tactics
(How else can we increase conversions with remarketing?)
RLSA
Remarketing Lists for Search Ads allows you to perform the same remarketing tactics, but instead of showing up on the display network, these text ads show up in search results. Here are a few advanced tactics specifically for RLSA:
- Bid on Generic Keywords (Normally not a good idea, but works great with RLSA)
- Bid on Competitor Keywords (Typically hit-or-miss, it works better with RLSA)
- Cross-Selling & Upselling (Remarket to people who already converted to sell more)
The one caveat with RLSA is that you need the audience to reach 1,000 members before remarketing ads will run on the search network. Depending on how much traffic your website gets, this could take anywhere from a few days to a few months to build. Watch a 2-minute video to get a better understanding on RLSA.
Source Remarketing
This advanced tactic allows you to build remarketing audiences based on the traffic source that they initially came to you from. One great example is building a list of traffic that comes from Linkedin. Typically, Linkedin traffic is very high value and normally costly to advertise on. But with source remarketing, we can get ads in front of these people at a much lower cost!
Customer Match
One last strategy is to build customer match audiences and remarket to them. This audience is actually built in Adwords under shared library>audiences. You build the audience by uploading a CSV file of all of your customers’ email addresses. You can then set a membership duration, which should typically be longer since you aren’t as likely to bother people who are your customers.
Feel free to contact us to discuss how remarketing could help increase your online conversions and sales.
