Remarketing: The Smartest Way To Boost Your Ad Revenue
The Internet has truly revolutionized marketing. With artificial intelligence, advanced metric tracking and advanced technology to explode the reach of your advertising, the game has permanently changed. All those who embrace this new paradigm shift will be sure to surf this wave and use it to their advantage, while it looks like the old school of thought is on its way to fading out.
An example of a very modern method for online marketing is Remarketing. In older ages, if a customer walked into your store, and walked out without buying anything, chances were that it was the last you ever saw of them. Remarketing makes it so that advertisements for your business “magically” pop up while they are on their way to work, or on their way home, until they are almost hypnotically compelled to walk back into your store and purchase the thing they were interested in.
Remarketing: Explained
A successfully set up Remarketing campaign typically follows the sequence below:
A potential buyer is surfing the internet, and comes across a banner that catches his eye. He clicks it and is sent to your website, where he proceeds to browse, but decides not to buy, for various reasons (maybe he wants to purchase in the future, maybe needs to do more research, etc). He exits the website.
Now, as he surfs his favorite websites, reads blogs, accesses Facebook, etc, he starts seeing banner ads for your website again and again. The user starts to feel he knows and understands your brand intimately and there is unconscious rapport and familiarity established between you both.
Once he has completed his research and is ready to buy, he clicks over to your website through your ad, and buys what he is looking for. You capture his email address and build a lifelong relationship with him.
The Psychology Behind Remarketing
Now, this all may sound like a vague, mildly interesting “marketing psychology 101” theory – but the numbers make your jaws drop. Companies utilizing active remarketing campaigns that are well put together report 50% boosts in revenue, sales shooting through 200%-500%, and lowering of their overall CPA.
The principles behind Remarketing are surprisingly simple and effective: People buy from businesses they know, like and trust.
Remarketing creates the psychological illusion of knowing the business for a long time, since they become familiar with your ads, and your messages. Once this feeling of comfort and rapport is associated with your brand name, trust inevitably factors into the relationship.
Using a simple campaign, you just clinched 67% of the buying factor.
How To Set Up A Remarketing Campaign
Setting up a remarketing campaign isn’t as technical as you would thing. Most ad serving platforms make it easy for business owners to promote and setup their remarketing campaigns in a matter of clicks. They provide a snippet of Javascript that can be simply copy-pasted into your website. As soon as a visitor opens your website in a browser, a cookie is dropped on their computer.
Using that cookie, the ad service providers “understand” that visitors were interested in your website. They then send targeted ads of yours to your ex-visitor.
If any of this seems confusing – not to worry. All ad service providers who support Remarketing have extensive documentation (including walkthrough and videos) on how to setup your campaign.
Technologies Used In Remarketing
More and more platforms are incorporating remarketing support into their user experience. As of now, the following media has the capability of supporting remarketing campaigns:
- Ad Centres on Search Engines: To show users relevant content while searching for their problems online
- Websites: Visitors are displayed remarketing ads on their favorite websites – this is the most commonly used method currently.
- Social Media: Platforms like Facebook support remarketing your ads (usually on sidebars) to users who have already visited your websites. This is very significant, since users are spending more and more time online on Social Media.
- Email: Services can learn to “read” the content of your emails and inject context sensitive ads directly to an ad section while you check your email.
Types of Customers – To “Remarket” To
As an experienced marketer – you understand customers are divided into different cadres – from the freebie seekers, to the credit-cards-in-hand, and everything in between. From our experience, remarketing to the following types of customers has seen the most positive effects on conversion and ROI:
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Cart Abandoners – visit your website, add things to their cart, and then leave.
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People who actually bought from you in the past.
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People who came through your website through specific search terms, or through clicking an ad (warm traffic)
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Last, and the least – general “browsers” who came to your website with very little intent to buy.
The Best Platforms To Venture Into Remarketing
As of now, you can set up a tester or feeler remarketing campaign to see the kind of ROI you can expect on a huge list of platforms. However, some platforms are definitely superior for setting up remarketing campaign on – these companies have tweaked and tested for a long time to create formulas that convert better. They are:
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Google
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Perfect Audience
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Adroll
They have tons of users, and documentations to setup your first remarketing campaign right now, if you so choose. We thoroughly recommend these.
The Difference Between Standard Banner Ads and Remarketing Ads
Two fundamental differences that have big implications for marketing theory are as follows:
- Remarketing ads know your interests. Since you’ve already been on the website before, you’re only shown ads about what you’re interested in, eliminating irrelevant and annoying ads.
- Opposed to that, banner ads can only “guess” what you are interested in – based on your demographics (age, gender etc.) and need to calculate what ad to display.
Why you should consider starting a Remarketing Campaign Today
Why do we keep seeing the same ads again and again? What drives businesses to invest money in remarketing campaign? And more importantly, what makes them so successful? In our opinion, here are a few factors that we feel contribute the most:
- Repeated exposure to the same ads builds familiarity and rapport.
- It creates the illusion of having a huge advertising budget since the ads keep showing up.
- It is commonly cited in the marketing world that, on an average, a customer needs to see the same information 7-10 times before they making a buying decision.
- Any successful marketer will tell you that persistence is one of the most important keys to selling.
How To Not Be Annoying While Remarketing
We want to add a quick caveat here – if you’re perceptive, you have noticed some companies drop the ball while remarketing – their ads follow you everywhere, and all the time! It can get embarrassing as well, if you head to a underwear store and the ads for delicate nightwear stalk you all over the Internet, even when people are shoulder surfing. That’s why it’s important to limit your Remarketing campaign to reasonable limits.
The best way to analyze this is to measure consistently the following values: Frequency, Reach and Conversion rates. When you see your conversion rates decreasing while above a threshold of frequency, it’s likely that your ad is getting annoying.
When this happens, you might want to consider Frequency Capping – check your provider’s Docs to decrease your FC.
Another important thing to keep in mind is if you’re running 2 or more Remarketing Campaigns that target lists that are NOT mutually exclusive. That means some of your customers are seeing double the amount of your ads – which is most definitely annoying.
Remarketing Case Studies
Study#1
In the beginning of this article, we had stated that Remarketing translates to real, measurable ROI statistics for marketers. We further illustrate this point by citing the most famous remarketing story till date – the Lowes Hotel Group marketing campaign.
Lowes used a remarketing online campaign for promoting their hotel and reported the following astonishing results:
- 7400% profit increases (Income:$60,000;Remarketing investment:$800)
- Revenue: Increase by 10%
- Bookings: Increased by 9%.
Study#2
Yankee Candles, a medium sized business selling designer candles based out of South Deerfield, MA, employed a re-engagement campaign and publicly published their results. They compiled a list of 41,000 visitors over the last 60 days, who had placed items in their carts on their online store, and didn’t buy.
They then used Remarketing to place effective ads on the visitors’ browsers offering them special discounts on their items, and encouraged them to come back to the website and complete their purchase.
Results:
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- 10% of abandoned cart customers returned to website.
- 10% of returning customers converted.
- Conversion rate 600% higher than account average
- 468% increase in ROI
With time, many many companies are replicating these trends and employing remarketing as an indispensable marketing strategy. It’s currently the perfect blend of technology and psychology and we highly recommend adding it to your arsenal of marketing techniques, today.
