Using Remarketing To 3x Conversion Rates

In today’s rapidly changing, fast-paced marketing world, success in most businesses, and especially online, is often limited by how well you can market yourself.

Approximately 96% of users fail to take action on your website. Similarly, an estimated 69% of online shoppers never make it to the checkout page.

Remarketing campaigns present you with the perfect opportunity to re-connect with your target audience even after they’ve visited your website. This all-in-one guide covers everything you need to know about remarketing — what it is, how it can help your business generate more sales, and the two most common remarketing platforms to invest in.

First Things First: What Is Remarketing?

Have you ever been reading an article online and suddenly noticed an ad there for the very pair of shoes you were looking at a few days previously?

That’s remarketing in action.

In a nutshell, remarketing refers to serving targeted ads to people who have already visited your website.

Remarketing follows the ever-so-popular “rule of 7,” which assumes that your prospects need to come across your offer at least 7 times before they will take action.

Why use remarketing?

How? There are two main types of remarketing: pixel-based and list-based — and while the first is a lot more common, they both have different advantages based on your campaign goals.

Pixel-based Remarketing

Remarketing serves ads to users who have already visited your website.

When someone visits your website, an unobtrusive piece of JavaScript code (often referred to as a “pixel”) places a “cookie” in their browser. When they leave your website to surf the web, that “cookie” notifies retargeting platforms to serve highly targeted ads based on the pages and/or products they visited on your website.

Pros

• Very timely — With pixel-based remarketing, you can retarget potential customers pretty much immediately after they’ve left your website.

• Behaviour-based — The ads they’re served often relate to the specific pages and/or products they’ve visited on your website.

• Completely automatic — Once you’ve implemented the piece of JavaScript code on your website, everything else is carried out by the remarketing platform.

Cons

• There is likely a lower volume of people in the campaign at any given moment. It all comes down to how often users are visiting your website and viewing certain pages.

• Not straightforward. If you choose to get into remarketing independently, you might find it difficult or time-intensive to implement the pixel on your website.

List-based Remarketing

List-based remarketing refers to serving certain types of retargeting ads to existing contacts. You essentially upload a list of email addresses to a retargeting platform (usually a social media network such as Facebook or Twitter), and the platform will identify users on that network with those email addresses and serve retargeting ads to them only.

Pros

• Highly customisable — List-based remarketing campaigns are based on more than behaviour, and can help serve ads to a highly targeted group of people.

Cons

• There’s always the possibility that a person in your list uses a completely different email address on the social network, in which case they won’t see your ads. This also means you’ll need a fairly large list of contacts to maximise the efficiency of this type of remarketing.

• Less automatic and timely — You are in charge of uploading and maintaining the list of contacts, and therefore managing the campaign becomes less automatic and a lot more time-extensive.

AdWords Remarketing

AdWords remarketing. Image via Megalytic.

One of the most popular remarketing platforms is AdWords.

With AdWords remarketing, you can position targeted ads in front of a defined audience that had previously visited your website. These ads show up on any website that accepts advertising from the Google Display Network, meaning your prospects will be able to view them even when they’re browsing elsewhere around the Internet.

How Does AdWords Remarketing Work?

AdWords remarketing is a pixel-based type of remarketing — it works by placing cookies on your website visitors’ devices when certain criteria is met. Once the cookie is placed, a unique cookie ID is generated, which is then added to your remarketing audience list.

AdWords provides a fairly extensive list of advertising controls that can help improve and refine your remarketing campaign. For example, the period of time that a cookie ID stays on your remarketing list is customisable. You can also set specific criteria to control the targeting of your ads, such as age, gender, location, and interests based on browsing behaviour.

Be Aware

As of 2018, Google has rolled out two major changes to their AdWord remarketing tool.

First, they’ve introduced a feature whereby people can mute remarketing ads for 90 days if they’re too repetitive or irrelevant. Remember that the main purpose of remarketing is to serve ads that are of interest to your audience so they’re more compelled to take action and convert into paying customers.

Second, Apple’s recent operating system release, the macOS 11, introduced a feature called Intelligent Tracking Prevention, which disables tracking cookies after just 24 hours on Safari browsers. The only way for a cookie to be re-enabled is if the user revisits your website.

As a result, drops in activity from Safari users are very prevalent. And considering that nearly half of mobile users own an iPhone (and, therefore, use Safari as their main browser), this can take a toll on your remarketing efforts.

Facebook Remarketing

Facebook remarketing

Facebook remarketing works similarly to Google Adwords remarketing, but rather than displaying your ads on other websites within the Google Display Network, the ads are displayed on Facebook.

While Facebook remarketing is mainly pixel-based, you have a few different options to retarget your audience.

Customer Lists

A list-based remarketing approach, Customer Lists enables you to serve personalised ads to a list of contacts you have already acquired. From email addresses to phone numbers and even Facebook user IDs, you can pull a list of contacts from your CRM (or wherever your customer data is stored), upload it directly to Facebook, and target those contacts with ads that are relevant to where they are in your sales funnel.

Website Traffic

Much like Google AdWords remarketing, this type of Facebook remarketing is pixel-based, which means you need to place a Facebook “pixel” on all pages of your website and set up specific audiences with filters.

For example, let’s say your company sells women’s clothes, but you want your Facebook ads to target only people searching for heeled shoes. You can set up an audience that shows your ads to people who have visited pages with the keywords “heels,” “high heels,” “heeled shoes,” and other relevant keyword variations.

App Activity

Finally, you can serve ads to users based on app activity in a few different ways. You can reach people who have recently opened your app, achieved a certain level in a game, recently completed a purchase, or even have abandoned a shopping cart within your app.

Are you ready to start remarketing? Primal offers the best AdWords and Facebook remarketing services in Bangkok. Contact our team for a detailed strategy call today.