What Is PPC Remarketing?

A strong remarketing strategy is all about how you entice people who have already visited back to your website to convert. There are many different ways of doing this, but perhaps the most effective method is through PPC remarketing. This blog will be your ultimate guide to PPC remarketing: from the what, to the why, to the how of putting your own remarketing campaigns together to grow your business and drive revenue.

What is Remarketing?

Remarketing is a type of marketing strategy that is designed to bring users back to site, re-energise them, and get them to convert. If you’ve ever received an email asking if you’ve left something in your basket, or been served an ad on Facebook that shows you the products you were just looking at, that’s remarketing. Remarketing strategies can be used across a number of different channels because you’re aiming to bring your customers back to site. Typically, remarketing is done through email or PPC channels like Facebook ads and Google ads.

This is an important part of any overall digital marketing strategy because there is evidence to suggest that around 92% of first time site visitors don’t make a purchase. For marketers, this might seem like an overwhelmingly scary statistic. However, we work within the context of the customer journey, which assumes that a customer has multiple touchpoints with a brand. Understanding how your customers and prospects interact with your site will go a long way to helping you create ads and content that will appeal, engage, and convert.

Remarketing VS Retargeting

Often, the term ‘remarketing’ is used interchangeably with ‘retargeting’, but there are some subtle points to be aware of that differentiate the two. Typically, retargeting specifically refers to paid media advertising; where you’re aiming to guide prospective customers along the path to purchase. Remarketing, on the other hand, is often regarded as an email-specific strategy that focuses on re-engaging your existing customers.

However, not everyone agrees with this distinction, and Google themselves confused matters when they introduced their ad retargeting system as a remarketing tool. For our purposes, we’ll be thinking about remarketing as a strategy for you to re-engage with prospects and move them along the path to purchase. You’re specifically targeting those who have shown enough interest in your business to go to the site, but haven’t converted just yet.

Google Ads Remarketing Campaigns

Turning our attention specifically to Google, retargeting campaigns can be run on both the Google Display and Google Search Network, and so can be made up of both static and animated images, video, and responsive text ads. As well as these different campaign types, there are also a number of different remarketing options available in Google Ads.

• Standard remarketing is a very neutral approach, simply showing your ads to people who have visited the site when they browse sites on the Display Network.
• Dynamic remarketing is very similar except the ads shown are specifically related to the products or services that prospect viewed while on site.
• Video remarketing is similar again; allowing you to target those who have interacted with your YuTube channel or videos with both ads on YouTube and Display ads.
• Remarketing for Mobile Apps will be of interest to those with apps or a mobile website, as it allows you to serve ads to visitors when they use other mobile apps.
• Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs) allow you to target past visitors on the Search Network with tailored ads to help provide relevancy.
• Email list remarketing allows you to upload your known customer emails so you can serve ads to those users if they are signed in.

Key Benefits of Remarketing Ads

Employing remarketing ads into your marketing strategy is a hugely effective way of re-engaging with an interested audience. As we’ve already mentioned, there are very few times when a first time visitor to a site will convert. Typically, it takes a number of interactions, visits and engagements to get them to convert. Remarketing ads can act as one of the steps in the path to purchase. On top of this, by targeting those who have already shown an interest in your business, you’re targeting a group who are much more likely to convert. They’ve demonstrated an interest in your offering and have shown a willingness to engage with your business. The trick is simply keeping your business front of mind.

Additionally, remarketing ads are much more relevant than standard marketing activity because they take into consideration the specific things that a visitor was interested in on site. For example, which is more compelling: a generic marketing message, or an ad that incorporates the products you were last looking at? Creating more relevancy will only benefit your business.

Building a Profitable Remarketing Campaign

Regardless of your industry or sector, remarketing campaigns can be a hugely profitable option if they’re done right. In the next section of our guide to PPC remarketing, we’ll take you through the steps of building a profitable retargeting campaign so you can successfully recapture lost website visits and convert new customers.

Understand your goals

The first thing to outline with any new campaign, but especially a new remarketing campaign, is to understand and outline your goals. In a remarketing campaign, your goals will determine the remarketing tactics that you use, as some will be more appropriate than others. Start by considering whether you’re trying to increase brand awareness and move prospects further down the funnel, or if you want to focus on pushing those who are close to conversion over the line. Alternatively, you might be trying to direct traffic back to your YouTube channel, app or mobile website. Again, there’s retargeting options designed to help you achieve these goals, so understanding what you’re aiming for is perhaps more crucial here than in other campaigns, as they will determine what retargeting options you use.

You can also think about goals in terms of the actions you want your audience to complete. You might want to create a campaign that is dedicated to getting visitors to complete a certain action on a page that they visited, such as downloading a whitepaper. Alternatively, one of the most common remarketing campaigns that you might already be aware of is converting those who abandon carts or didn’t complete their purchase. These are frequently seen as email campaigns, but they can still be very effective when executed through PPC. Lastly, you can have campaigns that help to direct users to a particular page that they might have missed.

On top of this, you’ll need to make sure you’re setting relevant and achievable KPIs. This will allow you to track the progress of your remarketing activity, make sure your campaigns are successful, and show where you might need to optimise in order to achieve your goals. Examples you might use here include Cost per Lead, Site Visits or View Through Conversions. Consider what information is useful to your business and it’s stakeholders and what will help you improve your campaigns.

Define your audience and create a remarketing list

Once you’ve decided on the goals for your campaigns, you’ll need to create remarketing lists to power your targeting efforts. So far, we’ve taken a look at the different types of remarketing campaigns, and the actions you can encourage your audience to take. This will play a key role in helping you define your audience.

To be able to run remarketing campaigns, you need to be able to tell Google the people you want to target. There are two main ways of doing this: either by using data from a remarketing tag placed on your site, or by uploading customer emails from your lead generation activities. Each has their own benefits and times to shine. For example, customer email retargeting can be very effective for “abandoned cart” campaigns, while using website data and page visits can help you to guide users to other areas of the site.

If you’re creating an audience using your remarketing tag data (learn how to set it up with Google if you’re not sure if you already have one), you’ll be creating a new audience list within your Google Ads account. From the audience list set up, we’re most interested in the “List Members” section. This is where you’ll be able to define your audience. Using templates, you can select which users you want to include: those who’ve visited a specific page, or who have visited a certain series of pages. You can also add rules to narrow down users who can be added to the list. For those using emails as part of their remarketing, this is where you’ll be able to upload your lists.

Accelerate business growth!

With your audiences set and your goals defined, the possibilities for accelerating your business growth are endless! Using these specific audiences you’re able to create targeted ads that are much likely to drive action because they take into consideration the actual actions and engagements that users had previously had on your site. Powered by real life user behaviour, your creatives are much more compelling, and hence much more likely to result in a conversion.

Recapturing lost website visitors and presenting them with valuable content that matches their intent in order to move them further down the conversion funnel is a powerful way of achieving your marketing goals. Google remarketing ads are the ultimate tool for unlocking this kind of strategy in order to accelerate your business growth.

Remarketing Campaigns with The Brains

For savvy marketers, remarketing should be a staple part of your overarching marketing strategy. However, getting the right blend of data and messaging to make your remarketing ads relevant but not too “creepy” can be a challenge. Working with a digital marketing agency like The Brains is a great way to bolster your remarketing efforts to help meet your goals and drive success. If you want to find out how we can help you to create remarketing campaigns that work, get in touch with our team today fior a free marketing consultation.