Remarketing/Retargeting Done Right… & Wrong #SESLON
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Remarketing/Retargeting Done Right… & Wrong #SESLON

20th February 2013

As many as 90% of the people who visit a website leave without completing any action that online marketers intend them to take. This has led to a rise in re-marketing budgets. It sounds very simple; however, in the early rush to embrace re-marketing, many brands are wasting budget on ineffective or lazy approaches.

In this session, experts shared their experiences with re-marketing and the impact it has had on advertisers’ overall ROI.

Moderator:
Jon Myers, SES Advisory Board; VP, Commercial Director EMEA, Marin Software

Jon started by introducing the speakers highlighting their experience and key skills in the re-marketing sector.

Speakers:

Guy Levine, CEO, Return On Digital

Guy started his session by saying he wanted to cover a few advanced sectors of Google’s re-marketing platform. Google hasn’t developed their platform a great deal over the past year really.

Guy reckons re-marketing is like having a machine gun. It’s a really powerful tool. As an agency they do a great deal of cross digital strategies. His SEOs have been under the pump over the changes Google has made over the past year and conversely the paid search team has delivered consistent growth in ROI for his clients.

Some best practice:

1)      Don’t be an annoying scary stalker – when you’re planning your campaigns think and identify the stalking line. Things like engagement ring re-marketing is also not the best idea. Plan out specific sections that would suit re-marketing and sections that wouldn’t  You can also use re-marketing to upload brand banners without clear click through so you don’t get charged on a CPC basis.

2)      Use re-marketing to improve email marketing. You can show different deals every day and it prevents ad fatigue. You need some forward planning though as it can take two weeks for Google to approve ads. Re-marketing is a great interruption medium use it to be bold.

3)      Product launches and competitions are also great uses for re-marketing.

4)      Use re-marketing for recruitment. It’s great for blog pages if you are a thought leader to tag them up into a re-marketing list. This allows you to target a recruitment campaign based on the post types.

5)      Use re-marketing to leave reviews. If you want to get stars on your SEO and PPC listings you need a review collection mechanism. You can also isolate people with a gmail address which makes it easier to leave feedback

6)      Use re-marketing to increase your social following.

7)      Avoid ad fatigue by changing your creative regularly.

8)      Keep your initial CPC high so you gather data then reduce over time. If you have no data to analyse it becomes pointless.

9)      Add re-marketing from day one so build your lists constantly so it’s there when you need it.

10)   Build lists according to demographics through Facebook marketing. They have started building tighter profiling in their Facebook campaigns. They target specific landing pages and then tag accordingly. They can create custom ads for each group. You can also get cookies dropped after using dynamic forms.

11)   Build lists in analytics. In the new re-marketing lists (beta) you can use google analytics to build your re-marketing lists for you. You use visitor segments to create groups of people. It allows you to segment into people that have come through you site organically that have spent more than 30 seconds on page. This can have a great effect on remarketing. You can also segment people that have items more than £200 in their basket with custom variables.

Dax Hamman, Chief Revenue Officer, Chango

Dax followed him by saying in a lot of areas he agrees with Guy but in others he differs. He does think there is a lot of crap out there about retargeting. People think retargeting is the be all and end all of the marketing cycle but in an ideal world remarketing wouldn’t exist.

He then went through several site retargeting methodologies that Guy covered before with a top tip of improving email remarketing. To do that successfully you will need to have a good open rate of that email to implement retargeting.

He then focused on targeting people that have never come to your site.

1)      Search

You can target people that have never been to your site but have searched using specific keywords. This is all about finding brand new customers.

2)      Social

This has changed now from being platform focused and more to a micro content targeting which targets people who have read specific content.

3)      Engagement

The idea behind engagement retargeting is to include pixels into content which allows you to target people that have read your content from content marketing out on the web.

4)      Contextual

This is principally where connected businesses can work together by swapping retargeting lists and allow them to benefit from each others’ assets. Privacy policies and T&Cs make it slightly more difficult but you can overcome it.

Dax then went on a bit of a rant about Google remarketing. In an ideal world people would come to the site and then interact and purchase. Site retargeting is actually a sunken cost that papers the crack of a poorly converting website. The reality is that site retargeting is only talking to people that have already come through your site. Its dependent on the overall marketing spend to create the pool so moving but from collection to retargeting really doesn’t make sense. Last click attribution funnels obviously favor retargeting as it’s always likely to be the last touch point. If you use last click attribution you should exclude remarketing from your analysis.

Dax then went through the future of retargeting where RFID chips could be embedded in people and then targeted like minority report was. Bit of a scary future in my opinion.

Another new development is the Facebook Exchange. Its early days but people seem to convert through fewer impressions and it’s really cheap. Facebook retargeting is a quick win at the moment but won’t be cheaper long term.

 

 

 

 

 

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Written By
Louis Venter is the founding director and CEO of MediaVision, a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) company specialising in all areas of search. His particular interests are organic search marketing, paid search marketing, conversion strategy and online PR.
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