Consider this: If you have an e-commerce website, only 2% of all your visitors will shop on their visit. The other 98% are just gone, according to Adroll.
Or maybe you wanted them to sign up for an offer you made on your landing pages or funnels or have your visitors contact you using your contact form.Perhaps you just wanted your visitors to create a free account for the SaaS product you just built.
Only 2% of your entire visitors will ever take action.
All the rest are gone, if you don’t do something about it, that is.
Retargeting helps you get those 98% of visitors back. It helps improve your overall conversion rates while simultaneously bringing your costs down. If you just threw money at a retargeting campaign and expect your users to come back to your site to finish what they started, it’s not going to happen.
Your retargeting campaigns will need the same diligence, attention to detail, creativity, and hustle for them to work for you. Here are some smart ways to make your retargeting work for you.
Build your audiences
Retargeting has everything to do with the kind of audiences you build on platforms. Facebook audiences, Google Ads Audiences, Adroll Audiences, or Retargeter audiences. Each platform allows you to build your audiences as you deem fit.
While we all know that there’s going to be at least one audience that’s a default audience (everyone who visits your website and/or landing pages). For the most part, the onus is on you to build specific audiences based on their browsing patterns, the URL paths you want them to take, or specific pages they visit on your site.
Depending on your website, you might want to develop audiences such as:
- People who visit all pages of your website (this is default)
- People who signed up as leads, downloaded a free document (PDF, eBooks), people who’ve contacted you, or people who signed up for an appointment.
- The complete list of your customers (always updated)
- List of customers who’ve added items to their cart but did not complete a transaction
- Potential customers who’ve initiated checkout but did not complete
Stay relevant
Relevance is big with retargeting and staying relevant (by showing the exact kind of content that your visitors would be interested in) goes a long way to make retargeting more effective.
By working with your audiences and with attention to detail, you could serve more relevant content with your retargeting campaigns.
If you had an e-commerce store, for instance, you could use Adroll’s Dynamic Ads to show your visitors the exact products that they were considering or those that they initially had an intent to purchase.
Here’s an example of an Adroll Liquid Ad:
Rework your creatives for retargeting
If you use specific ads and landing pages for your main paid campaigns, you shouldn’t use the same creatives for your retargeting campaigns.
Change your creatives (ads and landing pages) or tweak your main creatives to make it more relevant for your retargeting campaigns. In fact, if you could, create completely new creative assets for your retargeting campaigns.
Businesses that are serious about their retargeting campaigns generally create a dedicated set of ads and matching landing pages to launch specific retargeting campaigns.
Try retargeting email
The average shopping cart abandonment rate is at a whopping 67%, according to Baymard research.
That just hurts. A personal, engaging, and highly-effective way to try to counter the huge abandonment rate — and also boost revenue and profits — is to use retargeting email.
Email customers are at least 11% more valuable than your regular Twitter followers other social networks (with Facebook being the only exception)
According to Moz, email retargeting can give you 4X the revenue and 18X profits.
Leading retargeting platforms such as Adroll and Retargeter already provide you with features to send retargeting emails.
Include & exclude audiences
Don’t waste your budget by choosing “everyone” as an audience.
As you launch your retargeting campaigns, not everyone who visits your website and leaves is the apt audience. By including and excluding audiences, you get more control on who sees your ads and who doesn’t.
How you manage your audiences determines how effective your retargeting campaigns are going to be. For example, Shioban McGinty of HubSpot advocates that you should ideally exclude anyone who spends less than 10 seconds on your website (testing the time frame helps you identify your unique time frame, however).
By using “include and exclude” features available on every platform that you’d use for retargeting, you can:
- Identify and include high-intent audiences who are most interested in your business, products, or services.
- Include only those people who might have followed a specific path or pattern while on your website (such as people who read your blog, and then checked out your services page, and also landed on your contact page).
- Exclude people who might have already purchased your products or those that don’t need to see your campaign at the moment.
- Exclude people who “bounced”, “didn’t spend enough time on your website”, or those who might have accidentally landed on your website.
How do you manage your retargeting campaigns?
If you’d like help to strategize, launch, and manage your retargeting campaigns, or if you’d like to discuss your paid marketing strategy, our team is on standby and we’d love to talk. Hop on a call now.
GSDdaily Episode 86
This entire week we’re going to talk about retargeting. It has been such an important part of our business and our clients‘ business because the people who see a retargeted ad, this isn’t the first time that they have seen you, or they’ve seen your videos, or they’ve seen your brand, or they’ve taken part in your message.
The people who see your retargeted ad have already been to your website. They’ve already seen a Facebook video or a live stream. They may have already interacted with you and your business at least once, and that is the power of retargeting. That’s why retargeting turns into such a fantastic marketing medium, especially when you’re just starting up or when you’re trying to scale because your retargeted budget is going to flip into cash a lot faster.
Somebody who has been on your website, they’re going to come back to your website, they’re going to go to your sales page, your offer page, whatever, and they’re going to convert that much more quickly. Because let’s face it, only about half a percent, 1%, 2% of people who are going to buy something from you the first time they see it or the first time they land on a website. Most of your sales though are going to come from your retargeted traffic, people who come back to your website and they purchase after they’ve had some time to think about your offer.
Today, we are going to go through a guide. Retargeting Campaigns: Smart Tips To Get More From Less. This is the article, I’m going to add it here to the chatbox. Here’s the post, and you should see that on Facebook and YouTube and wherever else you’re watching. For those of you who don’t know who I am, my name is Jason Drohn, creator of DoneForYou.com. We specialize in creating offers, building sales funnels, and setting up marketing automation and traffic campaigns, basically everything that you need to have in order to scale a digital business.
Retargeting Campaign
Today, and this week, we’re talking about retargeting. Mostly because it’s super easy to set up. It’s super easy to set up, it’s super easy to build retargeting campaigns from, and the software is really pretty prevalent. It doesn’t take too much to get going and you’re going to be able to get some success from it pretty quickly. We’re over here on the tutorial page here, Smart Tips To Get More For Less, this is the video that you’re watching right now, go ahead and hit that subscribe button right there and subscribe to future videos so that way, even if you miss the email or whatever, you still know the link for our daily live streams.
Now, retargeting helps you get all of the visitors back who come to your website. They don’t do anything or watch a video. They don’t convert. There’s a couple of steps. As you can see here, there’s a couple of scenarios. First of all, you have your prospect. Your prospect doesn’t know who you are just yet. Your prospect hits your website, and then they browse around, they click around. They’re tracked once they get there. There’s a little tiny, what’s called a cookie. That cookie that is installed in their browser, pixel fires is what it is, and now we have the ability to follow them around the rest of the internet.
We use a piece of software called AdRoll to do this, and I’m going to show you how to set it up. In a video this week, we’re going to talk about banners, and then we’re going to talk about setting up AdRoll, and then we’re going to talk about setting up the pixels. We’re going to go through and set all of that stuff up in the rest of the episodes this week. Today, I wanted to lay a good foundation for what retargeting is though.
Pixel Fires
When somebody hits your website, pixel fires and installs a cookie on their browser. Now, what that does is it lets your banner ads override all of the other ads that are on the websites that they’re visiting. If somebody comes to your website and then they go to Woot.com, let’s say. They go to Woot, and they will see your banner override whatever banner is supposed to be there. There are always banners that are circling, but basically what happens is that the retargeting overrides the banner placement, and you pay a little bit more because all of the banner ads are built on a bidding mechanism.
It overrides the banner that is there. You pay a little bit more, but this person is super, super hyperactive because they’ve already been to your website. They already know about you. This is their second, third, fourth, sixth, seventh, twelfth impression. At the end of the day, they’re more likely to convert, and they do. Your return on ad spend from retargeted ads is the highest it is going to be in all paid advertising. When a prospect is tracked, then they leave, and then they see your ad on other sites.
Now what happens is when they come back, then it resets that ad. It resets that pixel. One of the things we do on Facebook a lot is we do, if they’ve been to the website in the last five days, show them this ad, if they’ve been to the website in the last 10 days, show them this ad and then exclude the previous five. You can use banner ads almost like an autoresponder, which is kind of cool.
Audiences
Retargeting has everything to do with the kind of audiences you build on platforms – Facebook audiences, Google audiences, AdRoll audiences.
Your audience is the people who visit a specific website or a specific landing page or a specific confirmation page or whatever. That is your audience. And your audience can be just the people who buy X products, or it can be just the people who signed up for Y lead magnet. It can be super, super specific, or it can be everybody who has been to the website in the last 30 days or the last 180 days. It can be very, very broad. You can have audiences of different sizes, and your use of audiences is how the banner network knows what to show and when to show it.
For example, you can have people who visit all the webpages on your website, people who signed up as leads, a complete list of customers, all your buyers. On Facebook, you can upload your buyer’s list and create custom audiences and build lookalike audiences from those. The list of potential customers who have initiated checkout, but did not complete, so will be added to cart or cart abandonment buyers, or cart abandonment prospects. What retargeting does really is let you stay relevant. People will be reminded of your brand whether they buy from you and do business with you or not. They’re reminded of your business and your offers.
There’s a lot of companies that we work with where sometimes their customers forget about them. Even big contract manufacturers and stuff, every once in a while, if the email list isn’t really engaged or the prospects don’t have a reason to come back to the website, they don’t. Then it’s out of sight, out of mind. What banner retargeting lets you do is for a very, very minimal budget, you can continue to show ads to your website visitors for up to six months. Seven if they’ve been to the website, they’re going to think you’re still everywhere. In the next six months, your audiences will continue seeing your ads as long as that cookie is still installed in their browser, which is awesome.
Banner Ad Sizes
What you want to do though, is you want to make sure that your creativity is on point. When you get into banner ads, which is what retargeting mostly is, or AdRoll retargeting, which is what I’m going to show you how to set up, it’s all banner ads. There are six sizes, six specific ad sizes that are the most popular on AdRoll, but they also have video ads, they have some odd sizes for websites that have odd placements. There’s a lot of different ways, but you need to have good creativity.
Designing Banners
We use Canva for a lot of our own projects for the stuff that we do because we test a lot of stuff. We use Canva, we use a lot of Photoshop. Canva and Photoshop are really kind of the big ones. Photoshop tends to be the place where we do a lot of very specific creativity. I have some Done For You ads running right now that are just simple ones done in Canva. It’s really just meant to test a bunch of different creative quickly and see what flies, then we can perfect the images and all the text and all that other stuff.
I try to put new creative up about once every 45 days to 60 days for us. That tends to be when it starts to play out a little bit from a retargeted banner standpoint. But anything less than that, you don’t necessarily reinforce the message. I was actually just kicking through AdRoll this morning, and that’s our project. That’s what we’re going to do is we’re going to create some new creative this week, and then I’m going to show you how to post it and show you how to set AdRoll up. That way you see actual retargeting campaigns going live, and then you’re going to see campaigns while you’re out and about because you’re on the website too. That’s going to be a lot of fun.
Include and Exclude Audiences
Now, one of the important things about AdRoll, is you want to include and exclude audiences. How that works, the exclusion tool is really pretty interesting, because the idea is you have your big whole. Your big whole is all of your website traffic. And then you want to not show your ad to certain buyers, and the buyer’s list is going to be just a smaller segment of the overall whole. You have your big pool, all your website traffic, and then a smaller group of people who bought. We want to exclude this group from our AdRoll, from our banner campaigns.
What ends up happening is, because you include the whole, you have all of your website traffic. You exclude your buyers, none of those people are going to see your ad. Now, all that’s left is everybody who hasn’t purchased. It’s just a math problem, basically. If you have 15,000 people who have been to your website and 2,000 buyers, then you’re going to be marketing to 13,000 people, 13,000 non-buyers. Your main audience, and then your buyers.
Then those 13,000 people are going to be seeing your ad until they buy. Once they buy, they’ve obviously put it into the exclusion list, then they don’t see you. That is how you start building complex kinds of retargeting automated sequences. You start doing things like abandoned cart sequences, and very specific segments where only certain buyers see certain offers. You can really go down a rabbit hole on it. Two segments that you need,
- prospects
- buyers
People who paid you money and people who haven’t paid you money yet.
The people who haven’t paid you money yet, you send to an offer. The people who have paid you money, then you can put them in the next offer, you can put them in some sort of onboarding or a webinar, or a customer appreciation, or discount code or whatever. There are lots of things you can do there. But that is really probably the simplest way to start setting up the audiences and the exclusions. That is kind of just a very broad-brush, as I hit my microphone, a very broad-brush explanation of retargeting.
AdRoll – Banner Retargeting Platform
Now, some of the things that we’re going to talk about this week, just to kind of set up the rest of the week is, there are a couple of things we need to do. The first is AdRoll is a fantastic banner retargeting platform. They actually do quite a bit more now, they do email retargeting, they have some cold traffic, they have some email matching stuff, but we’re going to be walking through setting up AdRoll for your business and your website. You can actually just grab an account first, and that way you already have it all set up for when we’re ready to dig into AdRoll throughout the rest of the week.
The setup is free. You can create an account for free. They will give you a pixel, and then you put the pixel on your website. As soon as the pixel is installed on your website, then it’s going to start tracking all of your audience, the people who are coming to your website. And with that, it’s going to track. Everybody who comes to your website, it’s going to pixel them, cookie them, and then it’s going to put them in an audience. It doesn’t charge. I don’t believe it charges any money for just putting together those audiences. It doesn’t start costing something until you start running ads to those audiences.
I am very much a believer in more data is a hell of a lot better than no data. Set up an AdRoll account, install the pixel, and start tracking the people who are coming to your website. We can always work with those audiences. We can always say, “If somebody landed on this webpage, then they are a buyer. If they landed on this webpage, they are a prospect because they signed up for something,” like a confirmation page. Or if they signed up for none of this stuff, then they are still just a prospect. We can always set up those audiences later, I will walk you through the audience set up this week. But you need to have audience data in order to set up those audiences.
Designing Banner Ads on Canva
The banner ads, we’re going to design in Canva. I believe it is also free to set up banner ads. There are paid plans where you can do animated gifs and stuff, which we do a lot of. In Canva, you can set up a banner ad, and we’re going to talk about sizes. There is some very specific kind of sizes. I believe 468 by 60 is the size. We’ll give you the sizes. Basically, how I ended up setting Canva up is I kind of start with one. I clone it and resize it to a bunch of different sizes. Then I drag the text and stuff around that it fulfills the needs I have for AdRoll. That’s how I do the banner ads.
And then we’re going to upload those banner ads into AdRoll. AdRoll also does Facebook, but we set up Facebook retargeting inside Facebook. That is the plan for the week. We’re going to use AdRoll for banner retargeting, we’re going to install the pixel. Well actually, you’re going to install the pixel today. And then tomorrow, we’re going to do some banner ad designs. We’re going to talk about some retargeting more in-depth on a banner creative level. For the rest of the week, we’re going to set up banner retargeting on your website. We’re going to do that by walking you through audiences, exclusions, inclusions, and then, of course, optimizing the ad campaigns.
For Questions and Guide
I hope you liked today’s presentation. If you have any questions at all and you want to go through a little action plan call where we actually book a time in the calendar, talk about your business, talk about your sales follows, your traffic strategies, your offers, your marketing automation, all of that stuff, go to DoneForYou.com/start, fill out the little form, and book a call on our calendar. If there’s anything we can do in the meantime, just go to DoneForYou.com. There’s a little chat box in the lower right-hand corner. Just click the little chat box and then just pick an option here. Fill in what we can help you with, and we’ll be happy to lend a hand.
That’s about it. I will talk to you soon, have a fantastic Monday. I’m looking forward to the rest of this week where we kind of uncovers retargeting.
