You create content and publish it on your blog continuously. Amplify your content distribution using social media and you also strive to grow your email list, and maybe you run paid advertising campaigns with targeted and complete sales funnels.
Over 80% of everyone who arrives at your website or your landing pages will leave without taking action. This, in turn, means that you are losing over 80% of your potential prospects.
That hurts; you don’t want to lose your potential customers, do you?
On average, less than 2% of your web visitors will ever buy. You want to do much better than that. Retargeting is a great way to refuel your funnel, boost conversions, and bring back all those potential customers you could have otherwise lost.
What is retargeting
Retargeting helps you reach out to those exact people who visited your landing pages or website by targeting those audiences exclusively in your paid campaigns. It works on advertising platforms such as Facebook and Google. Furthermore, retargeting will show ads to web visitors regardless of their initial source.
For instance, you could launch retargeting campaigns to traffic from any of the paid traffic sources. Or you could retarget to all the visitors of your website or landing pages (including organic traffic).
Retargeting is often overlooked and not many businesses actually make the best use of it. The fact is that your inbound marketing funnel is never optimized without retargeting.
You have regular funnels that you use for advertising campaigns with the goal to reach out to new audiences and expose them to your brand and offers. You then have retargeting funnels which are slightly tweaked versions of your main funnels with the goal to bring back visitors who left your site and convert them into leads.
How to make retargeting work
To make retargeting work you should follow these tips today:
Start with well-defined audiences
To begin with, build only one general audience on your advertising platform. This should consist of everyone who visits any of your web properties.
A general audience could be all visitors to your website and/or all visitors to your landing pages or both combined — regardless of the platform on which you are building an audience (Facebook or Google).
Every other audience you’ll build is going to as specific as it can get.
Here’s an example of a high-intent audience for a service business.
- People who read your blog.
- Then, those who checked out your products or services.
- Those who visited your pricing page.
Or an audience of an e-commerce store, which has the following behavioral attributes:
- Visited store.
- Browsed products.
- Added items to cart & did not make a purchase.
You can get as specific as you can. The more specific you get with an audience, the better results you’ll be able to get with laser-focused retargeting campaigns.
Don’t wait too long or launch too early
Whether you are building audiences on Facebook (using the Pixel) or on Google (using Google’s Audiences feature set), don’t make the mistake and launch too late or too early.
If you launch too early, your audiences won’t be populated yet. In plain English, this means that your potential audience doesn’t know you well enough to make a purchase yet.
If you are too late, your retargeting campaigns might not be able to catch your potential customers hot on the button and ready to buy.
The appropriate time to launch your retargeting campaigns is to launch when you hit the sweet spot with your audience size. An exception to this is the default generic audience, as this is an audience you can target anytime you want.
For all other audiences, aim to gain at least a couple of hundreds of unique visitors before launching a retargeting campaign.
Don’t ask for the sale
With Amazon, people don’t have a problem clicking on the “buy button”; they trust Amazon and believe that their purchase is secure (among other things).
For other businesses, an instant purchase is a little too much to ask from a new web visitor. No matter what kind of a campaign you run — regular paid ads or retargeting ads — newly acquired traffic won’t convert that fast.
Taking that credit card out and purchasing from you is not going to come naturally to most people who aren’t familiar with your brand yet. You’ll probably make a few sales but it’s not something that’s sustainable or would work in the long-term.
Instead, try launching retargeting campaigns with much less friction and a high-conversion offer, like a free trial, a free download, a free sample, or a sneak peak.
Follow up with automated email campaigns to make those sales happen, over a period of time.
Don’t push too hard
Retargeting is meant to be an assertive way to follow up, follow through, and to just keep showing up around people almost furtively, as they browse online. It is not meant to be aggressive, “I’ll follow you no matter where you go, till the end of the world” kind of a campaign.
For that reason, keep an eye on “frequency caps” that every retargeting platform or channel allows you to control. Don’t set it frequency cap as “infinite” and then throw your lifetime earnings on campaigns.
The best way to let ads show to a particular visitor is much like how you’d follow up with a potential client on a phone call or an in-person meet — soon after the first contact? Once a week? Once a month? Not all of the time though because pushing too hard will irritate the prospect.
Retargeting demystified
By now, we hope you can see that following these advanced retargeting tips you’ll be able to optimize your campaign and see better results.
Remember, maximizing the potential of your advertising efforts is an ongoing process. Test. Review. Optimize. Repeat.
How are your retargeting campaigns managed? If you’d like to discuss your existing campaigns, sales funnels, or your marketing strategy, get on a scheduled call with us. If you’d like to build out a paid traffic strategy, including retargeting, from scratch… We’ve got a number of ad management packages that you can pick from!
GSDdaily Episode 90
Today, we’re going to summarize, put a capstone on the retargeting week. Basically, we covered everything retargeted related. I mean we talked about how it’s usually the quickest way to generate sales from the traffic that has already been to your list. We talked about how to set up banner ads and creating audiences. Also, we talked about pixels and all that other stuff. So today we’re just going to recap it and talk about what your next steps are if you want to implement retargeting or you would like somebody to do it for you.
First of all, for those of you who don’t know who I am, we’re always getting new people, there are always new folks who are watching these videos and stuff and learning about internet marketing and whether it makes sense for their business and everything, which of course it does because we are living through a pandemic at the moment. My name is Jason Drohn, creator of doneforyou.com. We specialize in creating offers, building sales funnels, and also doing the marketing automation and the traffic to drive sales for your business. Today we’re finishing up the retargeted piece.
Here’s a post that is going to walk you through the basics of retargeting campaigns, stuff that we’ve covered in the last couple of weeks. This top video here is us right now, so this is the Livestream.
First of all, what is retargeting?
We covered this on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, but retargeting is when somebody comes to your website or they watch some of your video or they are on a customer list or a prospect list and you upload them into a system. Retargeting is where you show that person a banner ad or an ad of some kind to bring them back into your website, to bring them back into a sales process, to bring them back to an order form. That’s what retargeting is.
Retargeting goes by the phrase remarketing too in Google language. Remarketing, retargeting, same thing. If you have ever gone and looked at a hotel in Las Vegas and then you’ve found that they’re following you around. You go to the hotel and then you start seeing their ads everywhere, which is retargeting at its finest. I know that the explanation might be belaboring the point because retargeting is something that’s four or five years old, but at the same time, it’s the most powerful form of advertising, especially if you’re not doing paid traffic.
It is the way to do paid traffic, it is the way to get started with paid traffic. Even us, we drive a lot of traffic. The sole purpose of the code traffic we drive is to grow the retargeted audiences. The retargeted audiences are actually the things that generate a tremendous amount of return on ad spend.
How retargeting works?
We set up a pixel, the pixel gets added to a website and basically every time somebody comes to that website then a cookie gets added to the web browser. Basically, that cookie travels around with them everywhere else they go. So if that cookie is present in the web browser then your ads show up to them, so it’s a way for a company like AdRoll, which is an ad platform. It’s a way for AdRoll to basically match your visitors with your banner ads and then it serves up those banner ads.
It’s very, very nice, very easy, and the audiences can be as generally wide as you want them to be. An audience could be all visitors who have come to your website in the last 180 days. They can be an audience who could be everybody who reads your blog. The audience could be only the people who visit your products or only the people who visit your services. They can be only the people who add that item to a shopping cart are actually going to see my ads.
There is a lot of different customization when it comes to audiences, and then you also want to exclude all of your buyers, all of the people who took action with your business, all of the customers. You don’t want them seeing ads for things that they just bought. That’s where the audiences come into play. You have a big audience of people who’ve been to your website and a small audience of people who have bought, so you want to make sure that they don’t see your ads.
Now, when it comes to retargeting you don’t want to wait too long to actually show them ads. If somebody hits your website and then they don’t see ads for 30 days that’s too long. If they hit your website and they’re seeing your ads 60 or 90 days later but they haven’t been back to your website then you’re wasting money. The sweet spot is understanding that there’s a warm area. If they’ve been to your website or they’ve watched a video in the last seven days, they are hot. They know that there’s a problem that they need to solve and they know you are a potential solution for it. Showing them ads is a great idea.
Now if they’ve been to your website for seven to 30 days, so in that other… little bit farther out but they haven’t engaged with your website your brand in any other way between seven and 30 days they’re warm. Those people you should still retarget, but maybe you retarget with a lower ad budget, so those people aren’t nearly as hot as the newer folks.
Then you have your 30 plus day crew. Your 30 plus day crew is they haven’t been to your website, they haven’t watched a video in 30 or more days so those folks can actually come back and buy, so you can have the least retargeting budget for those people or you can just cut them out entirely, it’s up to you how much you want to stretch your budget. The other nice thing about retargeting campaigns is they let you do a lot of cool things on the code traffic side.
You can give a lot of value, you can drive clicks to blog posts, you can have a video that people are watching 10 seconds, 15 seconds, whatever. So you throw this video up and then you can retarget only the people who watch that video. It lets you be really cool upfront and give a lot of content. It will give a lot of value and engage with people and grow your audience where they are. Then if they are interested in taking that next step with you, then you can retarget them into a product offer or a service.
One of the nice things about retargeting is because you’re building your warm audience by bonding and engaging with them.
Retargeting Frequency
Now you also do not want to push too hard on the retargeting campaigns. When retargeting first started, AdRoll had a really bad problem. All of the platforms, but AdRoll who is the retargeting platform that we like, had difficult frequency issues. Basically, inside AdRoll there are six recommended banner ad sizes that they have. What AdRoll would just literally just litter the whole page with your banner ads. You had a header bar and a sidebar and a footer bar. Some would have banners all over the whole page, so it looked absolutely terrible. Well I mean if you’re a prospect it looks really, really, really spammy.
They have since dropped the frequency, so it’s kind of like who is it? CW, have you ever watched the CW app? It’s funny, my wife and I joke about it but I forget what we were watching, The Flash or something. You see the same commercial five times in a row. That is a remnant ad buy that somebody basically just said, “We’ll take all your remnant space”. They just had to fill holes in the commercial slots. Was it State Farm? I don’t know, one of the insurance agencies or the insurance companies it was four and five in a row. Domino’s pizza four and five in a row. So, bad retargeting is when you have four or five banners all on the same page.
The platform needs to allow for the room so it doesn’t feel spammy even though you’re still following them around. When I say don’t push too hard, be mindful of that. There are some platforms you can even cut down the retargeting frequency. Also, there are some platforms that control the retargeting frequency, so just know that.
When your frequency goes up in retargeting campaigns then it’s not always a good thing. Other than that, from a retargeting standpoint, we talked a lot about AdRoll. We logged in to AdRoll and we created a campaign and our audiences. Talked about Canva for creating banner ads. Canva can create rapidly prototyping different size banner ads and designing them. Another tool that in your retargeting tool belt you’re not going to want to miss.
The other option is Photoshop. You can do Photoshop and create a royalty-free image creative company like Envato Elements has a nice subscription. It’s a subscription service that you get access to a bunch of royalty-free downloads, video stock images, all that kind of stuff, icons, some 3D stuff. You can download this, use it in Canva, use it in Photoshop, but it’s going to give you some nice images that you can use that aren’t necessarily something that you have to create. I mean with retargeting sometimes we’ll end up uploading a lot of different variations of the same creative to see what tests better and then we’ll go through, look at the CPMs, look at the click-throughs, look at the conversions, all that stuff of the creative and disable the stuff that doesn’t work. The same optimization rules hold true for retargeting as any other app platform.
Facebook ads, Google Ads, retargeted ads, whatever, you still want to optimize it, you can’t forget about it, you want to make sure that you’re always optimizing and bettering the creative and always driving people to the next thing that they need to see and making sure that you’re excluding the audiences of the people who already took action. You don’t want them seeing the same ad for the thing that you already did. That’s definitely bad.
Applications For Creating Banners
All right, so now if you would like to… This whole time I’m sitting here talking I’m not sharing my screen.
- Envato Elements – where we end up grabbing some stock photography.
- Canva– where we design a bunch of banner ads
- Photoshop
- Adobe Creative Suite – which is just a monthly subscription
- Illustrator
If you’re not a hugely adept graphic designer, Canva’s going to get 98% of the way there. Very, very nice piece of software. AdRoll is the retargeting platform that we use for banner creative. You can also use Facebook retargeting in there, and then you can use Google, of course, Google remarketing. They have their own campaigns that you can use for remarketing. AdRoll is going to give you retargeting on both platforms.
It also gives you a way to back up all your retargeted data. If your Google Ad account gets banned, Facebook ad account gets banned all of your stuff is still safe because it’s inside AdRoll. And this is the article that we were using.
For Questions and Guide
If you have any questions or would like to set up retargeting campaigns or would like to at least chat about it, go to doneforyou.com/start. Fill out the little form and we will get on like an action plan call and walk you through what a retargeting campaign is going to look like, what it’s going to do for your business. Obviously the important parts there are how big is your audience? Do we need to build the audience? Do we need to add some video ads and stuff so that we can build that audience for you and then move people into retargeted traffic? But the quickest path to cash for retargeting is if you have a website that is getting some traffic and then you install the pixel and then you set up the retargeting.
Back on Monday I said, I told you, “Set up the AdRoll account, install the pixel. We’ll be creating audiences in the next couple days,” and that’s exactly what we did. If you want to get into retargeting, you have a website, or you’re getting some traffic and you want to start capturing that traffic into retargeting banner ads, set up an AdRoll account, install the pixel. Give us a call and we will work through the banner ad stuff for you. Have a fantastic weekend. It’s Friday, so it’s the last episode of the week. Monday we will be back with something new. Monday, 10:00 am Eastern and I’ll talk to you soon, all right? Thanks. Bye.
