Have you ever got the impression that a product you recently swam for online is stalking you? It’s not just you – that’s the actuality of remarketing, one of the key approaches to digital marketing. This technique maintains the presence of the business when potential customers are surfing the internet since they will be served with advertisements of the business they visited when they were searching for a particular business online. This is a perfect technique of making people remember the products or services they once had interest in and then make a purchase. In this guide, you will learn what remarketing is, how exactly it works, and why it is beneficial to use it in your Internet marketing strategy.
What is Remarketing?
Remarketing is a form of online advertising that involves targeting consumers that have engaged with a website or its contents but did not make a purchase. This is achieved through placement of cookies on the users’ browsing mechanisms and then placing advertisements before the users as they browse other websites and social media accounts. This method assists in maintaining continuity of communication with the target market, thus ensuring the user will come back and finalize the intended action, say in this case, purchasing of a product.
This is the main aspect of remarketing, which works by informing the target audience of certain goods or services they were previously engaged with. For example, trying to buy a new laptop on an internet shop, but exiting the site without purchasing it. At some other time, you are browsing other sites, or scrolling through your social media accounts, you come across an advertisement of that very laptop or of similar items. This is the functionality of remarketing – using the interest that you developed towards a certain product to push you towards its purchase.
The most important strategy that makes remarketing different from other types of ads is its targeting of a already interested audience. While traditional advertisements generate advertisements to a large audience, remarketing narrows down its audience to people who have shown a particular interest hence improving the chance of conversion. It does not only make ad spending more effective, but at the same time, makes the ads more appealing to users.
The difference between remarketing and retargeting lies in their nomenclature but their functional use and applications are one and same.
Remarketing and retargeting are two terms that are often used to mean the same thing although there are slight differences in their usage. It mainly pertains to the difference in the choice of terms across various channels. For instance, Google frequently employs the term ‘Remarketing’ while the social networking site, Facebook, mainly utilizes ‘Retargeting,’ both of which illustrate the advertising method of presenting brands to people who have previously demonstrated an interest in a particular brand. The ultimate aim is to get back these potential customers and get them to carry out the intended action: that can be a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or any other desired action.
Despite the terminological differences, both remarketing and retargeting share a common objective: To reconnect with the users who have engaged in the application or website in one way of the other. It is done likewise; for example, by setting up cookies on users’ devices and utilising these cookies to deliver advertisements that directly relate to their actions. It, therefore, becomes convenient to note that the distinction between the two mostly depends on the platform that will be employed in the promotion of the campaign.
Knowledge of these dynamics can assist marketers in better explaining their initiatives and, in general, improve the planning of their activities on the Internet service. It also has an advantage of setting the perfect tone with the clients or the stakeholders who might be used to one term than the other. In the end, whether you call it remarketing or retargeting, the principle remains the same: fostering a kind of relationship that will invoke previous experiences in order to elicit a desired result in the future.
Why Use Remarketing?
It is important to note that consumers go through a rational buying process from the moment they get aware of a product till the time they actually purchase it. Ideally, it is acknowledged that to make a decision to purchase a product, a customer needs to be contacted about six to eight times. Remarketing is essential in these touchpoints as it ensures that the potential customers always are reminded of the brand and various products it offers. The high frequency also leads to prospects of conversion since the more people are exposed to a brand, the more likely they will be comfortable with that brand.
Think of the example somebody looking for a new smartphone. They may begin like most clients, by browsing a couple of shops and comparing model and features. They may place a phone in a cart and leave the store without buying it, maybe to compare, or to think it over. Remarketing ads can therefore remind them gently of the smartphone they showed interest in or even come with a limited time offer to make them go for the smartphone. These ads are therefore useful to remind the customer of the company and resulting in a chance of the decision making process.
The overall strategy of remarketing, for this reason, hinges on targeting an interested group of consumers. This is people who have for one way or the other had something to do with your company and have not completely turned away. Therefore, warm audiences are likely to be more receptive to your ads than a cold audience would. This preliminary selection of the target audience implies that remarketing campaigns usually yield a higher conversion rate and a lower CPC compared to general online advertising. The efficiency makes the remarketing an attractive option for those companies, which are interested in effective using their money for advertisements.
Additionally, remarketing proves to be very useful in case of products and services which are often considered or evaluated by consumers over a longer time span. For instance, automobiles, houses, or high-end products are usually given much consideration before they are bought. Thus, remarketing assists to maintain the brand in the future purchaser’s conscious awareness during their decision making phase. It enables the business to elaborate on something, to calm its customer’s fears or to offer a discount that might tip the balance.
How Does Remarketing Work?
While the steps in remarketing are few, several mechanics include a tracking pixel/code that needs to be placed on your website. It sets up a cookie in the every visitor’s browser that detects the activity of users on your site. These cookies analyze how people are using the website, which pages are being accessed, which products are being viewed and any other actions taken by the visitors. This information is then used to create a remarketing list; this is a group of users who have engaged your site in certain manners.
For example, it is possible to create a remarketing list for users who have visited the page with a concrete product but did not go further and add the respective item to the cart. Other list may contain individuals who put things in their basket but never proceeded to the payment details entry. These lists can be general or specific according to the need of the campaign as specified above. Once these lists are developed, it becomes possible to post a number of specific ads to these users whenever they are on other sites or when they are logged onto their social media accounts.
Still, the ads can differ depending on the kind of remarketing that is being used in a particular case. For display remarketing, it is possible to use static banners that can present goods or services and can be placed on the websites of the network. Such ads may contain images, messages and links such as call to action placed in a way to force the user to come back to the site. Dynamic remarketing goes a notch higher in allowing for the generation of ads that contain the products that users viewed in your site. It makes the ads more relevant, and therefore, more effective as people are attracted to items of interest to them.
Such Super Bowl ads should be used cautiously so that they do not clutter the audience as this will reduce their effectiveness. Having many ads may also result in ‘ad blindness’ where the users get irritated and begin to ignore your ads. To avoid this, apply the frequency control in order to decide, for example, that a user can see your ad no more than once a week. Also, care should be taken about the timing of the ads; for instance, putting up ads for a specific product or service during the time when this particular service or product is not in high demand could help target early birds who are planning to buy the product during the season but avoiding putting up the same ad at the time when the number of clients searching for the product is at its highest.
Setting Up Remarketing
Before you start with the remarketing, one has to select the right ad platform to work on and integrate all requirements for tracking. Google Ads and Facebook Ads are the most used ones, both provide powerful tools for creating and controlling the remarketing campaign. The first procedure is to place the tracking code for the platform on the web page you want to track. This code analyzes the actions of a user, and it adds a user to a remarketing list depending on the parameters set by you.
For Google Ads, this entails the use of a small JavaScript code referred to as a ‘remarketing tag’ to every page in your website. This tag captures information relative to the visitors and forwards it to Google Ads where you can use it to define remarketing lists. These lists can then be further divided depending on specific actions like, viewing a product page, adding a product to the cart or even the checkout page.
On Facebook, for the same purpose will use the Facebook Pixel which is quite similar to the tracking code that collect data related to an interaction of the customers with your website and the Facebook ads. It enables the building of brand new custom audiences from the type of site visitors from your website or persons who have interacted with your Facebook profile or even Instagram tag. Such custom audiences can be further divided to increase the targeting of the promoted material, thus guaranteeing that your ads are viewed by the right people.
After arriving at this stage, it means that you have set tracking codes for insertion and the remarketing lists have been created too, you can now proceed to developing your ads. These ad copy tips, however, need to be customized according to the specific lists on the ads being made. For instance, if you’re reaching out to users who abandoned their carts, the ads could be on a ‘limited’ offer of a one-time discount or free shipping to push them to make the purchase. The ad creative, copy and the call to action that you use, has to be in continuity with the rest of your brand content.
Types of Remarketing
Basically, there are two categories of re-marketing – Behavioral and Session re-targeting that depends on the purpose of a business. Categorizing such strategies can assist you in selecting the appropriate methods for your profiles.
Display Remarketing: This is perhaps the popular type of remarketing seen in marketing jurisdictions today. It the method, whereby you place an advert that can be still or in motion at the lower part of a users browser as he surfs other sites in a specific display network. These can be personalized to include the kinds of products or services the user displayed interest in; they are more interesting.
Dynamic Remarketing: This type of remarketing is a notch higher than the other forms in that it shows the clients ads that are real-time products that they were engaging on your website. For example, if a specific user visited a few pairs of shoes on your website of online store, then the dynamic remarketing ad displayed will show the visited shoes and more. The degree of personalization in the advertisements is quite high, and therefore the likelihood of conversion is rather high, as they are linked to the individual’s interests.
Search Remarketing (RLSA): Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) – this is an option that enables you to tailor your search ad to the persons who have had a prior visit to your business websites. These are the ads that pop up in the result page of the search engine when people search for terms linked to your business. This type of remarketing is considered as most effective, because it affects users who are interested in the information and who will quickly turn into the purchasers.
Video Remarketing: Services such as YouTube remarketing allows ads and promotions to reach out to users that have engaged the platform and/or your videos/channels in one way or the other. This can range from a viewership of a video content, a subscription to your channel or any other related activities on the video. Video remarketing can often be a highly effective approach to revolving users to the sites with the new visually effective material that will reinforce your branding message.
Email List Remarketing: This entails creating an email list, sending out the advertisement list to the users and having them display the advertisements. This method is very effective when targeted at the existing clients or subscribers who have not yet contacted the company. Thus, using such advertising approaches, one can force the contacts to return to familiarize themselves with the offerings once again.
It is also important to design interesting content for the advertisements. Your ads must be rather graphic and contain concise and easily understood text which speaks about the utility of your goods or services. Utilize Be Specific and Be Direct phrases for Users to click on your ad and come back to your site. It can be here that personalization matters; ads based on the user’s prior journeys though your site are more likely to ‘insist.’
Another important technique is audience segmentation is the method of splitting your audience into parts. It indicates that all the users are not in the same stage of buying process and therefore the strategy can not be generalized. For instance, the users who left products in their shopping carts are likely to require a different message that users who only visited your blog. Since there are separate segments, it will be easier to come up with specific ad campaigns that aim to directly tackle issues and concerns of the said groups boosting the conversion rates.
Campaign and plan revisiting and optimising are also recommended for the process: Conduct some form of analysis on the advertisement by employing some form of analytical tools so as to determine the efficiency of the content being placed across the boards. They could inform you on the need to make modifications on the individual ads, further changes to the targeting criteria or on the general approach. Another sure way of identifying which aspects to alter is through actually varying various respects of your promotions in a manner that is similar to how A/B methods are used.
Challenges and Considerations
However, it is necessary to recognize the existence of main challenges in remarketing as a powerful tool. The main threat is ad fatigue, when the audience gets bored with the advertisements with which it is exposed daily. This can be solved by changing the creatives of the ads and implementing the frequency capping technique. Also, the visibility of adverts chasing users might be regarded as rather invasive for some individuals. These are valid worries as the government and big companies continue to gather individual’s details while surfing the Internet. It is recommended to declare the existence of data collection and the possibility of refusal.
Another problem is reaching out to users who have ad blocker or privacy feature that hinders tracking of such ads. This, however, hinders the possible remarketing areas though adhering to the rules regarding user privacy such as the GDPR. For this reason, by offering value through ads and acknowledging users’ choices, one can increase the reliability of campaigns.
Remarketing should also not be operated independently but as a part of a global marketing technique. However, remarketing should not be the single strategy you utilize since the concept can be very effective. When used alongside other techniques like SEO, content marketing and social media, then can make up a more holistic and efficient marketing strategy. This way you are sure that you are touching on the potential consumers at different stages of the buying cycle and via various channels.
Remarketing Platforms
As it has already been mentioned, there are several platforms that allow for remarketing and they all differ in certain aspects. Among the most renowned tools, it is possible to underline Google Ads that provides extensive coverage through the Display Network. It also contains options for the creation of remarketing lists as well as ads and it gives an ability to track the performance. Facebook Ads available targeting is very pronounced, including the option to upload a custom audience based on the actions taken by visitors on the Facebook page or Instagram profile. LinkedIn is another alternative more so if the company selling its products is of the B2B nature intending its advertisements to a professional audience.
When it comes to selecting a media site, the type of audience that you are reaching out to should be taken into consideration on the area they spend most of their time thus seeing the ads. All of them have some special facilities and advantages so you should select the right one for your marketing business. Also, it may be helpful to use several instruments to address as many Internet space users as possible and increase the efficiency of the campaign.
Conclusion
It can also be noted that remarketing is essential to nearly any integrated approach comprised of digital marketing tools. Since it is forms of reaching out to individuals who have shown interest before, it is cheaper when it comes to closing the deal thus increasing conversions. It has been pointed out that through the awareness of the working of remarketing, the creation of specialized campaigns, and the application of the guidelines of the strategy, businesses can actually harness the potential of remarketing in the sale of their products and services as well brand building.
Thus, I concluded that to be the most effective, it is necessary to monitor the campaigns’ performance and make the necessary adjustments orderly. But it encompasses monitoring various aspects such as leading indicators, exploring along with various ad creatives, as well as the choices of targets and making adjustments according to the results. Thus, you can guarantee that your remarketing is going to stay effective and important, which means that it will pay off.
In the world of digital business promotion, when competition is intense, and people’s concentration is shortly interrupted, there is a possibility to use remarketing as one of the ways to interact with clients and lead them to further purchasing processes. Through the application of the Google AdWords and Facebook AdWords, entrepreneurs are able to make very appealing advertisements that will be of interest to the customers.
