Remarketing: The PPC Tool You Aren’t Using

When most people think of PPC management, they only think of bidding on a set of keywords.  Many don’t know that you’re able to send a custom-crafted message to specific segments of visitors to your site — for example, those that have visited your website and left before contacting you.

In a perfect world, visitors would end up on your site and immediately become paying customers.  In the real world, some visitors leave and compare your products/services with those on competitor’s sites.  Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could send a highly-specific message to the customer that left?  Well, you’re in luck! As of March 2010, Google released a feature called “remarketing” that does just that. PPC management companies are using this exciting feature for the clients, and if you don’t take advantage of it, your competitors will leave you in the dust as they snatch up indecisive customers and clients that are on the fence.

The concept is quite straightforward: someone visits your site, a cookie is placed on their computer, and when they visit sites within the Google Content Network (not to be confused with Google Search Network ads) at a later time, your text or display ads will appear.  Many of our clients in the Maryland, DC, and VA are already using B2B remarketing on their sites to capture new leads and customers.  The process involves javascript, cookies, changing settings within your existing Adwords account, making budget changes, and more.

First, you’ll need to create/log into your Adwords account and perform the following steps:

1. Click the “Campaigns” tab.
2. Click into “Audiences.”
3. Click “Add audiences.”
4. Select the campaign or ad group that will be the target of your remarketing.
5. In the section labeled “Add audiences,” click remarketing lists.
6. There will be a “Create and manage lists” link towards the bottom.  After clicking it, the audience setting tab will open.
7. Click into the new audience drop down and click remarketing list.  This will open a new panel.
8. Fill in the required fields. It’s best practice to clearly label what audience you’re targeting in the “Remarketing list name” field for future reference and modifications.  NOTE: Membership duration is the length of time visitors will stay in your remarketing list(s).  It automatically sets itself to 30 days, but you can change it depending on the length of your sales cycle.
9. In tags, select the radio button for create new remarketing tag.
10. Click save and “continue,” then “save.”

You’ll be given javascript to place onto your site that your targeted visitors will be viewing. Upon viewing these pages with the code installed, the process will begin and they’ll start seeing your remarketing ads.

How to Enhance My Remarketing Campaigns

You can improve your remarketing efforts by creating custom combinations.  More simply put, you can combine marketing lists to manage users within your remarketing campaign. It’ll be less confusing when we break it down; for example…

• Users that have been on the list for more than 7 days, but less than 14 days.
• Users that are on a remarketing list that have not “opted-in.”
  • Opted-in users: people that have landed on a page with specific code that you’ve installed, such as a thank you page.  These would be users who, after performing the call-to-action on your site, you don’t want to remarket to in the future.

I figured it out; I’m all setup — what now?

• Look at where your ads are being displayed within the Content Network.
• Check out your number of impressions to see the reach of your ads.
• Keep track of the number of users in your lists.
• You can also modify how “bombarded” visitors are with your remarketing ads.  For instance, if you want to target your remarketing members hardest between the 7th and 14th days of being on your list, you can do that.  On the flip side, if you want to have a steady flow of remarketing impressions for 100 days, you can do that too.

Do You Need Help?

Need a professional PPC management company?  The paid search team at WebMechanix in Baltimore, MD can help you out.  Contact us today — you won’t regret it.