The average website only converts at a little more than 2%, and that’s a shame considering just how much effort, resources, time, and investments are made just to get relevant people to visit your website.
Most visitors who reach your website, your landing pages, or your funnels don’t take any action. They come in and then they leave.
That hurts.
You might get 2% conversions (on average), but you need more. You’ll want a part of the other 98% and retargeting is the way to get there. It’s a remarkable way for you to reach out to all those visitors who’ve left your site without doing anything.
But wait… Does retargeting really work or is it a fantasy?
The average click through rate of a regular display banner ad is a little shy of 0.07%. Meanwhile, the average click through rate of a retargeting banner ad is 0.7%.
According to Invespcro.com, retargeted customers are three times more likely to click on your ad (and take action) compared to brand new visitors to your website.
Compared to all other digital marketing strategies available, it’s retargeting that gives an average brand lift of over 1046%, according to ComScore.
Convinced?
But wait… Here are a few basic steps you should take before you launch your retargeting campaigns:
Sweeten your original offer
Chances are that you have a regular funnel built to convert fresh, incoming traffic into customers. Your regular funnel is usually your first attempt to get new prospects to sign up as leads or to make sales. It’s likely that you already have an offer to get people to sign up.
But that’s not the offer you’ll make when you do retargeting. You’ll have to consider sweetening the deal a bit.
For instance, let’s say your original offer was X, you’d have to give X + Y away this time around.
Here are a few examples:
Original offer: Get 20% Discount
Retargeting Offer: Get Exclusive 30% Discount
Original Offer: Download eBook
Retargeting Offer: Get the eBook + One-to-one Coaching Call
Original Offer: Get a Free Trial
Retargeting Offer: Get Free Trial + Exclusive White Glove Migration
See what we are doing here? We are enticing visitors who already saw your original offer with an even better deal.
Build dedicated landing pages for retargeting
Most businesses and marketers point their retargeting ads to their original, main campaign funnels.
Big mistake.
You don’t want to send your retargeted traffic to the same funnels and landing pages since there’s no point in doing so. They’ve already seen your offer.
Build dedicated landing pages and funnels specifically designed for your retargeting campaigns in line with the retargeting special offers you are making (as above).
Use countdown timers
One of the reasons why most offers don’t convert (whether they are main campaigns or retargeting campaigns) is because there’s no pressure for your visitors to act. They normally think that the offer you are making is going to be around for awhile so they can come back to it later.
An easy way to apply slight pressure on them to take immediate action is to use a countdown timer for your offer, stating that the offer will end soon (with a countdown timer showing just how much time there’s left before the offer ends).
Countdown timers are known to boost your conversion rates by at least 3 times, as this experiment by ConversionXL proves, thanks to Graham Charlton of SalesCycle.
Duplicate email sequences and tweak
You would already have an email sequence (or a set of autoresponders) that triggers for every lead signing up for your original offer.
Take that autoresponder sequence, and tweak it a little (at least the first few messages to acknowledge the new offers you make with your retargeting campaigns).
Since you have a new offer that you’d be making on your retargeting campaigns, allow the first few email messages (like the welcome email) to reflect the exact offer you made for an overall consistent experience for your prospects or leads.
Test your retargeting funnels
You never know what works and what doesn’t until you start testing your funnel elements. Without A/B testing, you don’t have a way of know winghat works and what doesn’t. Just like you’d normally test your main campaign funnels, you’d have to deploy separate A/B testing workflows for your retargeting funnels too.
You can test out the offers you are making, the ads, the landing pages, the email subject lines, and more.
Yes, it’s another line of testing for an entire funnel (and your work only multiplies) but it’s worth it.
That’s how you launch retargeting campaigns, and yes, they mean more work.
Nothing worth pursuing comes easy, now, does it?
GSDdaily Episode 87
Today, we’re going to continue on the retargeting front. What we’re going to do is we’re going to walk through setting up campaigns from scratch. We’re going to start with a piece of an ad platform called AdRoll. Also, we’re going to walk through the building and creating banner ads, and we’re going to start talking about pixel data.
Now, yesterday, we introduced the following ideas
- audiences
- pixels
- stepping somebody through a marketing or retargeting funnel, based on the action they took or based on the action that they were about to take
Today, we’re going to build on that and dig into AdRoll. We’re going to log into the platform and we’re also going to create some banner ads in Canva, and I’m going to show you a couple of just little tweaks, little things that I do to create the banner ads quickly, because a lot of design sucks and banner ads are expensive too, if you were to go to a designer and have them build a bunch of different banners. There’s a tool that I like to use. It spits them out really quickly. To get started today, though, we’re going to visit this article, Basics of Retargeting You Can’t Afford to Ignore.
The reason retargeting is so powerful is because, by and large, you’re never going to get a better return on ad spend.
Somebody has been to your website, they’ve watched some of your videos, they know you’re around, they’re aware of your brand, they’re aware of your products and your offers and all that other stuff, so retargeting is the quickest path to cash in terms of advertising.
The awareness is already built. They already know what you do. They’ve already investigated you to a small degree, perhaps, or maybe to a large degree, but your brand and your message are consistently being reinforced in their head every time they log in, they get online. Whether they are browsing the internet, they’re seeing little banner ads, if they’re on Facebook, they’re seeing banner ads and they’re seeing videos and stuff.
Your brand is consistently being re-reinforced. They’re being reminded of you if they did business with you and maybe they didn’t do anything or they haven’t done anything with you in a while. You’re always top of mind. You can think of it like if you’ve ever thought about buying a new car. Let’s say you want to buy a Tesla, let’s say. Every time you see a Tesla, it just jumps right out at you because you’re mentally aware of Teslas. You want a Tesla, it’s at the forefront of your brain. Do you know what I mean? You’re constantly looking for Teslas, you’re constantly picking up and spotting Teslas.
Now, retargeting works under the same modality, really. I mean, every time they start browsing online, they see your logo or they see your image or they see your banner, so it is always at the forefront of their mind with retargeting. Whether they do business with you tomorrow or a week from now or a month from now or six months from now, you’re building that awareness. You’re building that brand recognition in their head. The difference is you’re only doing it with 2,000 people or 3,000 people or 5,000 or 10,000 people. You’re doing it with a very small group of people, so you’re able to build that and channel that to a very small group of people.
Here’s just a fun little hack. In Christmas time, when ad costs go apeshit crazy when CPMs are three, four, five times what they are right now because Amazon and Best Buy and all the big box retailers, they’re all buying ads, and then, of course, ads are being purchased on a bidding model. What we do with a lot of clients is we shut off their cold traffic ads like halfway through November or so and we then ramp up their retargeting budget. We’re not attracting new people into the ecosystem of our clients, but we’re able to optimize the ad spend through the holidays.
The prospects of our clients, continue seeing the ads because we’re just doing retargeting. We’re just not welcoming new people into the silo if you know what I mean. We’re not engaging in awareness and branding campaigns through the holidays because that’s like murder, it’s just crazy, wicked expensive, but we are showing up for retargeting. Then in January, when ad prices just go through the floor because all of these big advertisers pulled out, we ramp up hard in January to the cold traffic and then we start expanding on the retargeting campaigns again. That’s just kind of a thing.
Advantages of Retargeting
Retargeting, what we’re going to do, on average, less than 2% of visitors are going to buy. Retargeting is going to let us engage with people who visit the homepage, who look at categories, who look at products, who add to cart, all of that stuff. One of the cool things you can do with retargeting is you can actually sweeten your original offer. If you want to give a 20% discount code or 30% or 50% or whatever, a flash sale, you can do all that with retargeting without having to engage them in any other way.
You can build dedicated landing pages for retargeting too, so the last chance offers a landing page that is only seen for retargeting. We’ve done this quite a bit where somebody will come into our world and then from our retargeting ad we’ll say, “Hey, this is the last chance offer,” or, “We saw you went to such and such page, but you didn’t opt-in. Why was that? What can we do differently?” that kind of thing.
You can use countdown timers, hugely effective, no matter what. I mean, just having a countdown timer on a page increases conversion. You can duplicate email sequences and then tweak those sequences. You can split-test different email sequences for retargeted audiences. It’ll be just a small variation of a cold promo sequence, but it will address the fact that this is the second or third time that somebody has been to a website. Then, you want to test your retargeting funnels.
AdRoll
What we’re going to do is we’re going to kick over first of all into AdRoll. What I want to do is I want to log into AdRoll, and I want to walk you through audiences and how to set up an audience so that you can install your pixel, set up an audience, and then go from there. Let’s go here. Inside, we have our pixel active, which basically means that the pixel is active, it was last received 15 minutes ago. Yesterday, when I told you to set up an AdRoll account and install your pixel if you did that, then you should have a pixel active right now. That way you’re collecting new people.
Audiences
If we go down here to Audiences, the audience is the most important thing that you’re going to set up first. Inside your Audiences, what we want to do is we want to … I have a number of different audiences set up. We have high-intent groups, we have website visitors, like all website visitors, we have a Facebook audience, an Amazon audience, a funnel audience, an email audience, a promoter product audience.
Just to see what this is, what the funnel audience is if somebody has been to the website and the URL that they’ve visited has the word funnel in it, then they get dropped in this audience. Well, what that lets us do is have a very specific silo of people, a very specific group of people who are only seeing funnel creative. The same goes for Facebook, the same goes for email or high-intent audiences or whatever. But how we do that is we would set up a new audience and the new audience that we want to set up, there’s a couple of different ways to do it.
We can do URL Visited, that’s probably the easiest way to do it, is the URL that they’ve visited matches Done For You. If the URL matches doneforyou.com, which is basically anywhere on the website, then it’s going to put them in this one specific audience. But let’s say I wanted to only have an audience for the number of pages viewed.
If somebody viewed five pages, then we put them in a different audience. Now obviously, if somebody went to maybe five pages of your website, they’re pretty engaged. They’re pretty interested in what it is you’re offering. Maybe they go to a sales page, maybe they go to a homepage and then a blog post, then a sales page and then a blog post, then a support page. Whatever that looks like, if they visited five pages, they’re pretty interested. It would make sense to show them a different offer, a different ad, right? Because they’re pretty high-intent.
Now, let’s say we’re looking at URL visited, and then we’re just going to go to Done For You, see what kind of page we got here. We are going to go to Solution, we’re going to go to Automated Profits, it’s just a webinar that we got running right now. Automated Profits, if you would like to register for it, I’m going to drop the link here.
Setting Up Audience
For everybody who hit this webpage, if we wanted to capture them in an AdRoll audience,
- New Audience
- URL Visited
You can see right now, we just started this webinar, so you can see that there have been four people. It averages four visitors a day which is nothing, but right now, that’s the number of people that are on this page.
Now, check this out. Let’s say we were to pull this out, so we’re just going to pull this out. On the Resources page, on average we get seven visitors. That’s pretty cool, right? Check this out. If we do doneforyou.com and then we just do a little hotkey, actually, we might need to fix that. We’re going to look at that page, then my audience name is going to be Webinar Registration Visitors. Then this is not a conversion audience. What a conversion audience is, is if the audience is the actual thank you page then the confirmation page, it signals a conversion, then it is a conversion audience. We’re going to keep this pixel for 90 days, we’re just going to go ahead and create this audience. That way it’s done, it’s good.
Conversion Audience
Now what we’re going to do is just to finish, to actually make that conversion audience, we’re going to opt-in here. When we opt-in, then we’re going to see the conversion page, which is right here. This URL is my conversion audience, this is the page that we’re going to be … We’re going to set up a new audience, a second audience. The URL visit is going to be this. Please remove HTTPS, okay. All right. This one is going to be Webinar Conversions, or I’m going to say Webinar Leads just so I know. Then this is a conversion audience. The conversion value is just a free opt-in, so we’re going to do zero, but if they were to convert, we can do 0.01. How long to keep a person in the audience, 90 days. Then we’re going to create this audience.
Including and Excluding Audiences For Your Campaigns
Now we have two audiences. We basically have our webinar registration page visitors and then we have our leads. Yesterday, we talked about including and excluding. When we wanted to create an ad, we would include everybody who landed on that webinar registration page, and then we would exclude all the leads for our campaign. That way, when somebody opts in for the webinar, we aren’t asking them to opt-in for the webinar again, we’re not wasting ad dollars in doing that. Then once the audiences are set up, what we need is we need a banner ad.
Creating Banner Ads
What we’re going to do is we are going to go create banner ads for this automated webinar. For banner ads, my best … Photoshop is one way to build banner ads. It’s an easy way to build banner ads, but the better way, the way that I very much rather building banner ads, is Canva. Especially for retargeted ads, and here is why.
1. Canva
We’re going to go into Canva and we’re going to create a Facebook ad. There are lots and lots of Facebook ads that we can … I’m going to go to Home. There are lots of Facebook ads, lots of different ad sizes and images and graphics, and all kinds of stuff that we can do, but if we start from a Facebook ad then what we’re doing is we’re basically creating a Facebook ad that we can use. Then, we can resize it. If we resize it, then we can create the six different AdRoll banner ad sizes that they recommend. There’s 970 x 250, 468 x 60, 728 x 90. There are different banner ad sizes that they recommend and we can create them on demand.
What we’re going to do, we’re just going to do this. We’ve got some nice images and whatnot around here. That one’s actually a little bit more complicated than what I was thinking. How about we just use this one, just for example’s sake. The ad that we’re going to create, Find Your Footing. All right, it’s running a little bit slow today.
We are going to do Automated Profits and pull the size down a little bit. We’re going to do 42, then Click Here to Register. From there, we’re going to drop in a new image. We’re just going to look at photos and see what they’ve got. Oftentimes, I use Envato Elements for a lot of photos, but sometimes they have decent photos here inside Canva too. If you have a pro account for Canva, then you can just drop in whatever. Let’s just see what this looks like. We’re just going to drop in this laptop. That doesn’t look very good, does it? Let’s see, how about this guy? There we go. Oh, that looks cool. We’re going to remove this one.
We can export this as a Facebook ad right now, it is in the Facebook ad size that we need, but what we want to do is we want to use it for AdRoll. AdRoll, if you Google AdRoll recommended sizes, then we have our recommended sizes right here, Digital Marketing Ad Sizes You Need to Know. For our image ads, there are six, like I said. There’s 300 x 250, 160 x 600, 728 x 90, 300 x 600, 970 x 250, and 320 x 50.
What we’re going to do is I’m going to pull this off over here. This is why I love Canva for these things. We have our base image here and what we can do is we can resize this thing. Our base image is 1,200 x 628. We are going to add a custom size, and this custom size is going to be 300 x 250. We’re going to add another size, I’m just going off of that AdRoll recommended images, 160 x 600. Then we have another one, which is 728 x 90, 90. We can do the same with all six, we’re going to hit copy and resize.
Now it is creating our additional image sizes. Basically, it’s creating those. Now we have a super, super, super short one. All we have to do now is we just click this and then we’re going to want to reposition the font and stuff, make sure the phones work and all that other stuff, but basically, we can drag this over, and then we can make this look a lot better just by dragging stuff around.
If we go to the previous one, here we have a tall one, this is called the skyscraper. This, we can just change the size and then we can put it wherever we want. We’re going to want to mess around with the fonts a little bit. Make sure they’re centered, they have a button or something on the image size. All in all, you can just download these out of Canva and upload them right into AdRoll. Apply the audiences that we just created, and then now you have a retargeted banner ad campaign that is going live, after their approval. Of course, they have to approve it.
All you do is you go into Ad Campaigns, you create a new ad campaign for your audience, and then you are live within a day. You already have your audience. It’s super, super cheap. You can start with like five bucks a day for retargeted pixels. You have your banner set up, you can start split testing banners and creative against each other.
For Questions and Guide
If you would like for us to put together a retargeting campaign like this for you, in Facebook, in AdRoll, where your banners are following people around, your prospects around online, they go to doneforyou.com/start, fill out a little application, schedule a call with my team and I. We’ll walk you through putting together an action plan, putting together something like this. I’ll talk to you soon, all right? Thanks, bye.
