You've already got a lot of visitors coming to your site through your SEO efforts, but how many of those visitors convert on their first visit? If your site is like most sites, less than 5%. Those visitors that don't convert the first time around might come back to your site, but why not make the decision easier for them? Use retargeting! There are a lot of great reasons to implement a retargeting campaign and, in that vein, there are a lot of steps involved in doing so. On this week's Whiteboard Friday, our very own Justin Vanning explains some of the tips and strategies he's used to create successful retargeting campaigns. Are you a retargeting wizard yourself? Tell us about your own tricks in the comments below!
Video Transcription
Hey Mozzers, my name is Justin and I am pretty new here on the SEOmoz team. I work on the marketing team, and I'm responsible for all of our pay channels, so paid search, retargeting, pretty much anything that has a budget where we're trying to go and acquire new customers, that's what I work on.So I'm going to take a little bit of a breather from SEO. I know most of our Whiteboard Fridays have to do with SEO. I have a paid search background, a paid marketing background, so I'm going to stick to retargeting since that's what I know and hopefully can show all of you who are doing SEO why it's valuable to use retargeting and give you some tips.
So for those of you who don't know what retargeting is, it's basically you serve a cookie, you serve a pixel on your site that's going to capture users who have visited it so that in the future when they're visiting different web properties, other websites, you can show your ads to those users because you know that they've actually been to a specific page on your site. So I'm not going to go too deep into what retargeting is or give some specifics on that because I think most people probably are aware of it. We've done a bunch of blog posts on it. I know Joanna wrote a bunch that if you're interested you can check out and you can kind of see the basics of retargeting. But what I want to focus on are just some five quick tips for running a successful retargeting campaign.
The first one is to create highly relevant audiences. In retargeting, your audience is basically the group of people that you are capturing through the use of serving them a cookie. You're capturing those users, and you're putting them in a segment or an audience. So here at SEOmoz we use AdRoll as our retargeting platform, and they're great if any of you guys want to check them out. But the first thing that AdRoll offers, and I know some other retargeting platforms offer, is segmenting and filtering. So what this means is that you have the retargeting pixel on your entire site. So if a user visits your product page or your features page, they're going to be served that cookie, but what segmenting and filtering does is it lets you take a group of people and say, "I want to only create an audience from people who have been to our features page. I only want to create an audience of people who have checked out . . ." Let's say you're a snowboard retailer, and you only want to grab people who have looked at winter coats. Well, you can use segmenting to grab those users and put them in a highly relevant bucket so that when you're serving them retargeting ads when they're out on different websites, you know exactly who that audience is and what the best ad is going to be that they're going to respond to.
So utilizing the segments and also utilizing filters to filter out people, like here at SEOmoz, we have Pro subscribers, so if I wanted to create an audience, I probably don't want to include our Pro subscribers in our retargeting campaign since they're already signed up. So I can use filtering to make sure that I'm filtering out anybody who's basically come to their login page or has gone to their Pro dashboard.
The second point is utilizing all of your web properties. So what this is talking about is if you have a company blog, you have multiple sites that basically maybe you have two sites that are offering two different product sets, make sure that you're using your retargeting pixel and you're creating audiences in segments on all of your web properties. So if you have a blog that gets 20,000 visitors a month, even though they might not all necessarily be prospective customers, it's a great idea to use that blog, throw the retargeting pixel up there, and start capturing that audience that in future if you decide that you want to give that audience a particular message through banner ads, you can serve that to them.
Then the third point under this is just to know your goals. Make sure that you know exactly what you're trying to do with your retargeting campaign. If you're trying to drive conversions, you want to make sure that your - what I'm going to speak about next in the conversion funnel - and make sure that you're keeping in mind what your conversion funnel is. If you're trying just to drive lead gen, to drive people signing up a form with information, make sure you know what that goal is of what you're doing. Maybe it's just brand awareness and staying in front of potential customers. So you can use retargeting to really do any of these different goals. It's just making sure you know what the goal is and structuring your campaign to meet that goal.
The second tip is to utilize your conversion funnel. Every site's going to have probably a slightly different conversion funnel, but the basic one is you have these different steps that the prospective customer's going to go though as they are going from first being exposed to your brand or to your site to finally making a purchase, whether that's signing up for software that they're going to pay a monthly fee for, or if it's purchasing a T- shirt. There are going to be different levels in that funnel, but for this scenario, we're just going to say the first one is the awareness stage. That's when a customer is just kind of being exposed to your brand. The way that you can utilize this in retargeting is to, say that somebody just landed on our homepage and they never went anywhere else on our site, well if I have a segment or an audience that's set up just for the homepage and it's filtering out everything else, I can say, "Let's serve these people ads with just our logo and our company name because that's going to reinforce that brand." It's going to reinforce the fact that they know they've been to your site. They might not yet know exactly what you do. They might not know your full product set, so you can keep these ads more simple and just focus them on brand awareness.
The second part of the conversion funnel is interest. This is somebody who's maybe looked around a little bit on your site. They've started looking at your product offerings. They've gotten a little bit more in depth into the conversion funnel. This is where if you're retargeting this specific audience, you would want to have ads with a specific product. So if somebody went to your - I keep bringing up snowboarding, but that's because I like to snowboarding - but if they were looking at actual snowboards, well then you could say, "In retargeting I want to serve them maybe ads that are going to talk about other snowboards that we offer." Or maybe we got a new line of snowboards in and you want to try to get that person to come back to your site, so you use that interest that you know that person has based on their behavior.
The next step would be evaluation. These are potential customers that are in the evaluation phase and they're looking. They've been to your site. They've done a lot of looking around at different products or your different services, and they are currently evaluating whether or not they're going to become a customer. So at this point you want to have retargeting ads that answer any of their lingering questions. So, good things here would be maybe to reinforce if you had won an award for your product and to reinforce that in your retargeting ads that are going after this audience. Maybe it's to talk about if you have a lifetime warrantee and none of your competitors do, at this point you would maybe want to bring that up in your retargeting ads.
The next step is the decision phase. That's when the customer is literally about to buy whatever the product or the service is that you're offering. Maybe they've made it to your cart page and they haven't actually converted into a purchase or a paying subscriber. So at this point you would want to serve these types of customers ads that show particular promos and discounts. Let's say your product normally is $99 a month, but you're going to run it for $79 a month. So it's a great way to go after that audience of people who have made it really far in the conversion funnel, but haven't converted, by creating ads that are speaking specifically to kind of that last step to get them over the hurdle of, "Should I become a customer or not?"
Then the final step is after somebody has purchased the product you want to . . . you can use targeting in some creative ways after the purchase to basically say, "Okay, this person purchased a snowboard. They didn't buy bindings or boots from our company. Let's serve them retargeting ads that have products that we know are similar to what they already bought and that we think they're going to have interest in, and try to use that purchase behavior to create the ads and create the retargeting campaign that's going to go after that specific segment.
The third tip is to avoid banner fatigue. In retargeting, if you set up a retargeting campaign and you're not careful, it's definitely easy to have it where your ads are literally just following people who have been to your site and they're following them from site to site to site. It can get a little creepy. People get weirded out by that. I know experts usually say that 7 to 12 ads per month is the ideal range that you want your banner ads to be showing up to people who are in your retargeting audiences. So whether you have to turn down the frequency of how often your ads are showing, if you want to cap your impressions to one per user per day, you can use some different things in most retargeting tools to make sure that you're not just bombarding people with banners ads. You don't want to create just the negative feeling that you're constantly following them or that you're desperate for a sale.
The other tip under here is to just rotate your creative constantly. I think having a portfolio of creative that is kind of a living, breathing portfolio of multiple creatives, between static, between animating. Like I said earlier is that people are going to be seeing these ads frequently, and you don't want them to keep seeing the exact same ad, or the exact same call to action, or the exact same offer. So I think rotating these ads constantly, whether you're doing different campaigns to hit customers at different points in the conversion funnel, making sure that you have multiple ads that can speak to exactly where that customer's at and where you want them to be in the conversion funnel.
The fourth tip would be optimizing your landing pages. As most of you know, from whether you're doing paid search, you're doing other channels that landing page optimization is crucial to making sure that if you show your ad to a potential customer and they click on it, that's the first step. You want to make sure that you have compelling creative to get them to click, but once they actually perform that click and they get to your site, you want to make sure that you're not losing them for a second time. Keeping in mind, all of these people who are in your retargeting audiences are usually going to be people who haven't made a purchase, unless you've going after this segment of people who did make a purchase and you're trying to get them to come back. For the most part you're going to be going after people who probably haven't purchased on their first visit to the site. So you want to make sure that your landing page is optimized to speak to them. If somebody's in the decision phase of the process, you know they've already been to your product or your features page. They have a lot of information. You don't want to drop them on your homepage. You don't want to drop them back on your "About Us" page when they're at that phase in the process. You want to make sure you're getting them to as few clicks as possible to the actual conversion point.
The other thing that I like to do is just to constantly test and make sure that you're using creative copy. There are things you can do where you can create your custom landing pages for your retargeting campaigns that thank the user for coming back. You know that they've already been to your site. So having the first thing they see, copy that says, "Thank you for taking for taking another look at our site. Thank you for taking a look at our products." Those types of things can be effective to give you that extra bump in conversions.
Then the fifth and final tip is to have patience and continually test. Retargeting is definitely more of a marathon than a race. If you set it up, you're really excited, you get your campaign up and running, you're probably going to be a little bit disheartened as soon as it gets up and running because it's slow to really build. Retargeting, it needs time. As your campaign is running, you're serving more impressions to the same users over and over. So you're reinforcing your brand, you're reinforcing your promotion, your offers, your products. The longer that your retargeting campaigns run, the more successful they're going to be. It doesn't mean you can set it up and just forget about it. You definitely have to test. Testing creative, testing offers, testing landing pages, all of those things are really important, and they're really simple to do if you're using a good retargeting platform where you can just do A/B testing. You can have a creative with your mascot versus a creative without your mascot. You can have creative that is strongly pushing a call to action to sign up for a free trial or to buy a product, or you can try to tone that language back and see which one performs better.
So I think at the end of the day if you're testing your ad copy, you're testing your creative, you're testing your landing pages and constantly building that data set of metrics to create what decisions you're going to make in the future, and you are constantly learning from the retargeting campaign, I think that's the most effective way to run retargeting.
So these are some of the tips that I've learned in previous jobs and here at SEOmoz, and will continue to learn moving forward. Retargeting is something that I think the more you do it, the more you can learn from it. So I don't think you'll ever get to a point where you feel like you're 100%, you know everything there is to know about retargeting, but it's a great channel to use. It really is the best way, I feel like, to get the customers that have been to your site, whether they've come there organically through SEO. You're spending all your time in SEO and you're driving traffic to your site. Why not use retargeting to try and go after that 95%, 97%, 98% of the people who get to your site and never actually convert on that first visit. Retargeting is a great way to let you go and stay in front of those people. When they're out surfing on the Web, doing things on the Web, you can stay in front of them and remind them of your brand, remind them of your products, and hopefully get them to come back.
That's all I have for you. I hope that was helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me through email. My email is listed on the SEOmoz site. Thanks a lot, guys.
Hey Justin,
Congrats on your first Whiteboard Friday!
Found this really interesting as I had no idea of the depth behind the basic concept.
I think maybe you might need to check on those filters for registered Pro members. Roger still follows me around a lot and although it gives me a little buzz every time I see him, I guess those are wasted impressions!
Sha
Thanks for the info Sha! I know we still have some issues with filtering out all of our Pro members due to how many ways our Pro members can "log-in". We can filter out people who clicked on the actual "log-in" page on the top right and also filter out people who hit the Pro Dashboard but Pro members can also sign in using the pop-up when they try to reply in the Community blogs and we have no way of filtering those out. I'm working on making a standard log-in process that we can roll out with in the future which will hopefully let us filter out all Pro members from retargeting.
Glad you enjoy seeing Roger from time to time though. :)
You kidding?
I'm secretly in love with that little cutie! ummm...but that's just between us right? ;)
I don't know how US citizens react on retargetting and remarketing campaigns but the most important lesson we've learned with remarketing for our clients in Europe is:
Know when to stop the remarketting campaign:
If you "follow" the prospect to long he or she might get annoied by it. In that case it will backfire on you instead ;-)
The funny thing is that we also have different reactions from different countries. For example, people from south of Europe will not get annoied by remarketting easily while people from Germany or the Netherlands react the opposite. They notice the remarketing quit simple and within days even and they react on the remarketting complete differently. So remarketting still running after a purchase or longer then two weeks is not done in those countries.
How is that in the variety of US states??
Kind regards,
Hans van Schip
Mmm... surely Spanish people get quite bored by retargeting if it is not well planned and it becomes somehow a persecution.
I think it is all a matter of how much persistent should be the retargeting and also how good it is targeted the where to show the retargeting message. What can make someone chin is to have a retargeting banner about - I don't know - SEO in a website about sport.
A quote from Brad Gaddes:"Advertising is not advertising, when it is information"
In my opinion that's what we should keep in mind when using retargeting. Know who the viisitor is, what content she usually consumes and make her an offer she cannot refuse (Free trials? Free downloads?). Then you're not smacking a visitor in the face with ads but actually helping the visitor.
When I was first playing around with remarketing in the US, I decided to open the hatches and set no impression cap, which seemed very scary to me.
Much to my suprise we saw a significant increase in conversion rate once we made this change (by serveral % points). I don't know if this is going to be the same for every industry/product, but it sure worked for them!
Great info....I have used Fetchback for some of my clients and like them....I do have a question. Some of my clients want to use retargeting but get turned down because their site doesn't have enough monthly volume for the retargeting company to take them on. Do you know of any retargeting companies that are more flexible in this area? Again, Ty for the great WBF!
Tony
You can use Adwords retargeting. they dont require you to have a minimum budget or amount of visitors, although I find their product showcases very very limited compred to other retargeting companies, its a good way to trial
https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173945
Adwords remarketing requires that your user bucket has at least 100 users minimum for it to eligible (based on a 30day cookie). I believed they have recently changed this because it used to be 500 users from what I remember...
https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=171246
Hey Tony...I believe with Google Remarketing you don't have to have a minimum. I also believe with AdRoll you don't have to have a minimum number of impressions either. You can set up your audience/segment and just let it run for a decent length of time to build up your cookie pool. It would be worth checking with some of the Retargeting providers like Adroll and Retargeter to see if they have minimums. I'll try to look in to this for you and let you know what I find out.
Hey Tony...quick update here. AdRoll does not have any budget minimums, contracts or set up fees so probably would be worth checking out for your smaller clients.
Second update (sorry to interject) --
ReTargeter (I work there!) has a monthly minimum at $500/mo, and provides full customer support and account management to everyone that they work with. We try to maintain ourselves as a premium service - not just with our ad technology - but also with the insight and support that we can provide to everyone we work with.
thx Justin......and everybody..I have a scheduled phone call next week with Adroll .....:)
tony
Here's a creative example of #3 https://www.bluefountainmedia.com/blog/owl-retargeting-ctr/
Thanks for sharing. Great to see online marketing can be used for each and every step in the buying funnel.
Just like Justin said it is important to have the segmentation setup correctly. The more you know about your visitors the more you can serve them usefull ads.
Something we did on an e-commerce website was serving banners ads to people who visited a certain category. The banner ad offered them a discount for products of that category. When they clicked the banner, the landing page was setup in a way that the visitors received the coupon code by submitting their email address. In that way even if they didn't buy something, we did get their e-mail address.
Great strategy! Offering visitors a riskless offer is a perfect way to get value out of a "micro-conversion"! What was the quality of the email addresses?
That's a fantastic use of retargeting. I honestly can't think of a scenario when collecting email addresses is a bad thing :)
Great tips!
Great thinking! Criteo is known for their remarketing for e-commerce where they actually have dynamic remarketing ads depending on the specific product the user expressed interest in. Anybody have experience with Criteo?
The conversion funnel is a great lens to view all your marketing through, not just online.
Sidenote - I get chased all over the net by tigerdirect's remarketing. Very creepy.
Great contribution to WBF Justin. It answered questions I've been meaning to dig into with retargeting.
Here's something I'm still wondering: What are the most important qualities you look for in a retargeting platform? (very interested in hearing what helps you since this is your sandbox).
Wouldn't the most important quality for a retargeting platform be segmentation features? At least in my opinion this is the most important feature...
Segmentation is definitely important. I think user experience in the platform is important as well as data and tracking. It's still difficult to track conversions to the site level in retargeting since most of the media is bought as remnant media and is difficult for the retargeting platforms to report on.
Very good to know Justin - especially when I dip my toe into the remarketing pool. I'll anticipate the tools in the sphere are still evolving.
Great WB-Friday, very informative!
Just one thing: As a Pro Subscriber, why do i get ads by seomoz all over the web? There might be something wrong with your filters ;)
Hey Frank, can you tell me how you log-in to your account? Do you click on the main log-in button on the top right? Do you visit the pro dashboard frequently as well?
I know some of our pro users do get thrown in to our retargeting segments due to us not having a consistent log-in method for all users. I'm working on implementing this in the future so we can filter out anyone who hits our main "log-in" page. If you can provide any info on how you log-in to your account that would be great and help me see if there's any temporary fixes for this. Thanks!
Justin you totally rocked your first Whiteboard Friday! I won't even show you my first one as it was downright tragic. We get lots of questions about retargeting so this will be a great resource to point people to. Thanks for tackling this subject!
Thanks Jen! Now I want to search the archives to find your first one. :)
Hey Justin! Congrats on your 1st Whiteboard Friday!
I found this as a very actionable session and I like the last tip which is important and business owners should understand that search (especially retargeting) always takes time and there is no magic going on…
The moment you said it’s more of a marathon then a race… I think of Joanna Lord as her previous posts on retargeting actually help me understanding a lot about this topic…
Great Post!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Not necessarilly related to what I do with my site. But a great video here, Justin, with great content. Thanks for sharing! Might consider this in the future.
Thanks Bryan! Glad you found some good tips. If you can work Retargeting in to your online marketing strategy, it can definitley be a good counterpart to your SEO and PPC work. :)
Funny you mention 'fatigue.' I'm an SEOmoz Pro Member, but I constantly see your retargeting ads following me. It is a bit annoying - but not enough to make me cancel my subscription :)
Thanks for letting me know. We are aware that some users are falling through our Filters due to many log-in areas on our site. We are rolling out a fix that will hopefully capture all of the PRO members in our filter moving forward so you don't have to see Roger following you around anymore.
Justin, your 5 tips are spot on! Thank you for helping to dissolve the fear and increase the credibility of the retargeting space. Here at Simpli.fi we definitely emphasize taking advantage of the conversion funnel, and as others discussed above, it's also important to watch your frequency capping and test sequential messages to avoid banner fatigue. If anyone above is interested, we create weekly feature videos to help media plannners get the most out of their campaigns. Feel free to visit us on YouTube.
Thanks again, Justin! Keep up the great work.
Thanks Mandy! Glad you enjoyed the WBF!
Great WBF Justin. Thinking on your feet is the sign of a great speaker.
I used to work for a display ad network which ran a lot of retargeting campaigns for large advertisers. These campaigns usually had conversion rates with a minimum of 10x lift over non-retargeted display ads. Retargeting is just one form of behavoiral targeting that worked really well, but generally to be effective, you need to have a fairly substantial cookie pool otherwise delivery will be low to non-existant.We used a "clear cookie" to capture conversions, but this will only filter ads for users on the device for which they or someone else converted on. If someone clears cookies often (few do), all bets are off. Regarding search vs. display, they both have a place in a multi-channel marketing strategy, at least for larger clients, especially when you have keyword overbidding on driving down ROI on paid search.
Great retargeting tips!
Thanks for the comments. Glad you enjoyed the WBF!
Nice post Aaron. If you have a chance check out this alternative/itneresting approach to retargeting CTRs.
https://www.bluefountainmedia.com/blog/owl-retargeting-ctr/
Ive tried using retargeting several times with different sites. I always ensure the ad url is tagged so it tracks properly in Google Analytics. The clickthoughs and clickthrough conversions that the Remarketing UI reporting shows is never anything like what Analytics shows (ive used 3 of the big retargeter firms) making it really hard to trust/judge ROI figures. Any ideas why they never match or how to improve accuracy?
Hey, great question. So in my experience, it is important to make sure you are tracking analytics on your own along with using the Retargeting platform metrics. I do the same for PPC campaigns. You can do this with custom UTM tracking appended to your destination URLs to make sure you are carrying the important metrics through to your CRM system. Or if you have GA fully integrated in to your in-house analytics, you can rely on them. It's always good to have another way to track conversions besides relying on the platform provider.
Hey Justin,
Great whiteboard. I've had some success with retargeting and some competitors are using it swimmingly. Is there a post, walkthru or video somewhere that touches on what are the best settings for an Adwords Retargeting campaign? It seems that there a hundred and one different settings you can use in the backend for these campaigns or a combination of them and a simple checkmark being turned off can be the difference between success and failure.
Good question. I don't know of any off the top of my head but if I come across any I'll pass them along. Otherwise, might be a good WBF topic for me to cover in the future. :)
Great video Justin, I've been looking online for awhile noe trying to find some solid information on retargeting. Would you recommend a retargeting campiagn for a website that doesn't sell products directly on the site? They sell products, but through retail stores. Just curious if this would be a good fir for retargeting...what do you recommend? Thanks!
Hey Gary! I think Retargeting could still work well for this scenario. The hardest part will be tracking conversions from people who saw or clicked on an ad. You could use the retargeting to message promotions and sales to potential customers who have visited your site and then have custom coupon codes in the ads that they user brings in to the store with them when they come in to shop. That way you'd be able to track the people who saw the ads and unique code through to the sale in store.
If you'd like to email me, we can chat a bit more to get more information from your exact scenario so I can better understand it. My email is justin (at) seomoz.org.
-Justin
I came lately here, but, found this really great. I have been trying retargeting for bannerweaver, let see how this can help me.
This video was GREAT! We've recently started using retargeting and both yours and Johannas advise has been brilliant!
Thanks guys!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Thank you for the article and ideas to funnel my traffic more effectively on my website.
While I'm fascinated with retargeting in general, just definitely pointing out that it's not an exact science. For eg, I'm a pro subscriber but don't seem to get filtered out as you mentioned above Justin... I see Roger plastered all over the web constantly!
Similarly, the capping frequency doesn't seem to kick in for me. I'm talking 10+ impressions a day sometimes.
Not huge drawbacks, obviously... but for some I can see how it would be a fine line to walk :)
Thanks for letting me know Burgo. We are aware that some of our PRO users are not getting caught in our filters. Can you let me know how you log-in to your account? Thanks!
Very good and practical 4 use ! Thanks!
Heh, I get non-stop ads from SEOmoz on FB and the net despite being a pro member. Retargeting isn't working so well I guess.
Thanks for letting me know. I know we have some issues with how our PRO users log-in since we have so many different ways for them to log-in to their accounts so our filtering can't catch them all. Can you tell me how you are logging in to your account? Thanks!
Being an Organic search man this field of retargeting and paid search is totally new to me. Thanks Justin for a very useful and educational lesson.
Glad you enjoyed it Chris! It's great that we have more Paid marketers in SEOmoz now since any great online marketing strategy really should use all of the available channels. If you ever have questions about Paid Search or Retargeting, feel free to hit me up.
Nice presentation! I can tell that you know what you are talkin' about.
I learned a lot. Thanks!
With AdWords remarketing, I think it's possible to combine different lists of remarketing lists to check after how many days your visitors get bored of your ad.
For example:
Remarketing list 1: 7 daysRemarketing list 2: 14 daysRemarketing list 3: 21 days
Et cetera
Then create three ad groups:
Ad group 1: Remarketing list 1Ad group 2: Remarketing list 2 - Remarketing list 1Ad group 3: Remarketing list 3 - Remarketing list 2 - Remarketing list 1
Et cetera
I haven't tested this yet but I reckon this will give great insights in the ultimate # of membership days.
Hi Justin,
thanks for this very didactic WBF and compliments for your first WBF.
Personally I still have not experimented with Remarketing, as it is not actually one of the consulting services I offer... but I find very true what you say at the end, that this tactic can be a real support to what SEO succeed to obtain (traffic to a site) and give to that work a second (or third) opportunity to obtain a ROI.
Just a question, that I ask in order also to have a portfolio of excellent example to show to clients in the case I may propose retargeting:
apart the SEOmoz case, that we all know quite well, what sites in your opinion are doing a great job with retargeting? Are actually existing studies that says with data what is the % of conversions generated by retargeting vs. (for instance) PPC?
Thanks
pd: message for Joanna Lord... when will we see you in a WBF?
I'll let Joanna answer that question for you herself. :)
Nice video some good tips for all =)
Yet I want to say that one specific company I went to the homepage by chance, looking at something on Linkedin. It was a cloud computing company and wow for the last 3 weeks I have been bombarded with messaging from this company!!! I am not even looking for cloud computing, but I have to give them credit the longer I do not click these special offer banners keep getting lower and lower, they ads they have a very annoying too they have this bar going up and down saying I will miss out, when I do not even care.
There's definitely a fine line between a good retargeting campaign and a spammy one. If done right, retargeting ads should be giving the user information or offers that you know they are interested in. As we get more and more sophisticated with retargeting and retargeting platforms evolve to allow even further segmentation and control, these issues should get smaller and smaller.
A tactic that I've been playing around with is paying extremely relevant websites to place the code on their website. Seeing that most people don't understand the technology yet, most webmasters are willing to do this for relatively cheap.
We've also went so far as to do segmentation based on the pages a user visits on that website. Have been playing around with it for a few months, and it seems to be yielding far better results than just the display network.
Do you mean this?
If it is so, IMO that is not retargeting but spamming my search experience.
Hey Justin great WBF it awesome to get the perspective from someone who works on the paid side. Also, found your
advice about funnel segmenting to be very valuable.
Justin,
Awesome 1st WBF!! i love having a paid advertising subject on the white board. I using adwords but typically steer clear of Display Network advertising which kinda sounds like this retargeting campaign. I feel search traffic is a better quality of customer as they are searching for a specific product/ service. What are your thoughts?
You mentioned that LANDING PAGE SEO is important and I completely agree with you 100%. The page has to be able to convert site visitors into clients!
Some great tips mentioned today... will be sure to share on my FB & Twitter!
Hey Justin -
You did a great job on your first WBF and I really enjoyed the subject matter you covered. I am even more involved in paid search than SEO, so I hope SEOMoz keeps cranking out new resources for the paid stuff. Also timely enough, I've been fleshing out my first retargetting program to launch in a couple of weeks so as a newb, this info really helped a lot. I plan on starting with Google and seeing how that goes before I consider trying an alternate service.
Again, great work on this one, and thanks!
^^CHRIS^^
Thanks Chris! Good luck with your first retargeting campaign. I plan on providing more insights and resources for the "paid" side of things in the future so hopefully those will be helpful to you as well.
Very informative video, thanks for making a WBF another good one. AdRoll eh? Have to check that out after reading in the comments that there isn't a minimum.
Do it Guy! The AdRoll team are a great group of people. I should start charging them for referrals from this WBF. :)
Quite usefull info here. I took notes from this one :)
Buut - Justin, you've said you're a new recriut in the amazing moz team... and I can see you look scared from the camera. Well, don't be :) Smile, point us the interesting parts with your intonation and don't worry moving around the board even if you hide some usefull drawing with your head/body - It took Rand months to learn how to move in front of the whiteboard :D
Thanks for the tips Debilz! I was a little nervous mainly because I didn't have a lot of time to prepare. Rand usually does our WBFs but was traveling so we need to scramble a bit to tape one in time for today. I will make sure to make my next one much more entertaining!
This has really got me interested about retargeting. What would be an acceptable effect on the overall conversion rate for a retargeting campaign? Just curious.
Your overal conversion rate shoots way up because people who are remarketed to are much more likely to convert than your average user. You need to be careful how you track conversions though... I've noticed that remarketing pushes a lot of view-through conversions as opposed to last click conversions. In other words, remarketing does tend to push a lot of conversions, just not directly through the ad itself. You will find a lot of people will see the ads and find another way to the conversion through a different channel (like organic), making proper attribution difficult.
Superb video