You Ask, I Answer: Remarketing Strategy and Tips?

In today's episode, Dominique asks, what type of remarketing are you using, or on which platforms have you been the most successful? So remarketing, the uh fine art of showing ads to people who haven't converted, uh, on the surface seems like a pretty simple uh tactic, right? Show ads to people who haven't converted. The question is, what kinds of conversions, what kinds of people? Remarketing requires, like everything, a bit of strategy to it.

Think about the things that a customer does, B2B or B2C, um, when they're not converting. What caused them to not convert? Was it the offer was wrong? Are they the wrong person? Uh, did the the landing page of the creative not strike them?

Did they get distracted while they were uh at their computer or on their phone and and just forget uh there's any number of reasons that people don't convert. One of the most important things to do is to try and figure that out. So to the extent that you can use exit surveys, um re-engagement campaigns, uh reaching out and calling people to say, hey, not trying to pressure you into buying the thing, I just want to know why you didn't buy the thing, so that we can better tune our uh product development marketing, etc. So that's step one. Figure out to the best extent you can the reason why.

Because if the reason why is something that you can fix with operations, that me that means you don't need to spend money on the advertising uh in order to to r uh recoup those audiences. Now the for remarketing itself, the best overall strategy is to think about remarketing in terms of three vectors, three different dimensions or or or factors uh uh that you can see in your analytics. Uh first is conversion type. So this is especially true in B2B, but it's still true in B2C, particularly complex B2C. Um conversion types.

Is it a lead generation conversion? Is it a purchase conversion, like e-commerce? Is it a booking? Is it informational? Is it uh just transactional?

Is it uh even just awareness generation? What's the conversion type? Because different conversion types obviously are uh easier or harder to win back. The more risk or the bigger the commitment of the conversion, the more likely it is somebody's gonna bail out. Second, uh time.

You need to have in your remarketing system the ability to track and remarket against time. Uh the longer somebody has been away from uh the purchase, uh the probably the less likely they are to uh to buy something, and they may have already purchased something else that fulfilled that need. So you want to have that as a dimension. And the third, of course, is the audience. Who and where?

Who are the people that uh you have uh not converted and where are they? Take a look at your analytics and look at things like organic search, uh, the Google ecosystem, and then the Facebook ecosystem. Uh those are sort of the two big platforms that a lot of digital marketers focus on is Google ads and Facebook ads. Look at your existing traffic, look at your existing converting traffic in your web analytics, and make the determination uh about uh where you get more of your converting traffic from. That's gonna be your best bet for uh where you're gonna run your retargeting ads.

And if it's if it's an even mix, then yeah, I mean you're gonna split your budget. What you want to do is advertise along those three vectors as far as budget allows. And this is important that you get the vector idea in because it's not one of those dimensions, there's a very good chance that it's going to be a combination of those dimensions that determines what causes somebody to come back. So it could be somebody that is relatively low risk and recent to your site. But maybe they're the audience uh type doesn't matter.

Uh or it could be somebody coming from Google and somebody who gets to like ste stage three of your purchase process, whatever the case may be, you're gonna have to do some analysis to figure out along those three vectors what's sort of the sweet spot where you can see the uh these three factors are uh differentially impacting the likelihood of a conversion, then you run your advertising along that. You target people who are at a certain point in the funnel at a certain period of time from a certain place, and run your ads against them. Generally speaking, you're gonna want to uh if you think about your operations funnel from almost purchased to who are you, you want to run your ads with all of your spend uh starting at the bottom until you get hit diminishing returns for your lowest funnel uh audiences, and then moving up the funnel spending until you run out of budget, essentially, uh whatever you've allocated uh upwards of the funnel. But you have to start at the lowest part of the funnel that you can possibly get to because logically, if someone is almost committed and they just need a nudge, you're gonna get a higher return on investment, a higher return on ad spend from that person at the bottom than the person at the top who's like, I still don't I don't even remember who you are, or how I ended up on your website. So think about it along those lines.

Most of this data is in your web analytics, particularly if you're using Google Analytics and you're using Google Ads. Uh, there really is no uh no reason not to have access to all this data. It it is there and it is very, very easy to get a hold of. Facebook is a little bit harder, but not uh a ton harder because again, Facebook wants to make it easier, easy for you to spend money with them. Where Facebook allows you where Facebook gives you some advantage is that it has different properties, and it has um and and their known behaviors.

People do behave differently on Facebook than they do on say Instagram or WhatsApp or Messenger, and so you can uh retarget based on the audience's behaviors, the known propensities of people to behave a certain way on those platforms. With Google, Google has such a massive uh footprint that it can be difficult to know how someone's behaving on the display network, uh, the search network, um, YouTube, uh Gmail, all these different uh systems. That said, when it comes to displa to retargeting, um people have been finding very, very good success with uh RLSA and RLSA YouTube. RLSA means retargeting lists for search ads. Somebody types in a keyword that's related to your campaigns, and you retarget those people with retargeting ads based on their search history.

Um if they've got high intent searches, particularly for competitors, there's a um there's a really good opportunity to steal some market share there, and then there's RLSA for YouTube, which is when you are taking that search history and then showing YouTube ads to those people on YouTube later on. So like uh somebody searches for uh winter snow boots here in in New England where I am and uh and then the next time they're on YouTube, they see ads for your snow boots, uh reminding them, hey it's about to get cold where you are buy a pair of our boots. Those uh retargeting vehicles have traditionally done very, very well for people. So there's a lot to unpack in a retargeting strategy if you do it well, but those fundamentals of conversion type time and audience really help you set your strategy well and in some cases even di uh dictate the platform. Worry less about the platform, worry more about do you have the data to target the right audience that will give you your highest return on ad spend.

Uh leave your comments in the comments box below as always please uh subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems. Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.