A Simple Yet Effective Guide to Generating Sales From Remarketing Let’s begin. Point #1: Have you carefully defined your audience and precisely targeted your campaign to reach the right people? ● You’ll launch your first remarketing campaign on the Google Display Network (containing 2 ​ ​ million websites) or on Facebook (having close to 1.5 billion users). ● Let’s look at how you’ll target your audience on both of them. How to define your audience in Google AdWords? ● Say a visitor jumped off your consultation offer page. And, another visitor jumped off your blog. ● The mindset of these two visitors is different and so might be their interests and their level of buying intent. ● That’s where creating a remarketing list inside Google comes enters the picture. ● You just need to place the remarketing tag on your website and Google will take care of installing the cookie on your website visitor. ● Next comes the most important step – defining which website visitors should be included and excluded from your audience. ● Don’t treat all of your website visitors the same way by only creating one remarketing list targeting everyone who visits. ● Instead, you can bid aggressively for the section of your website visitors having higher value based on your analytics data. ● Once you’ve created a list with your website pages, here are 3 specific targeting examples you can use … ● The key landing pages on your website (like your product page, ebooks/lead magnet page) should be tagged differently. ● You can serve bounced visitors from these pages with aggressive messages and persuade them to complete the transaction. ● Such a remarketing list deserves a higher bid, because the group targeted on it consists of warmer traffic that is more likely to convert. So, you should use higher ad placements to close more sales. ● You can even serve discounts to these visitors and entice them to get back to your product page and complete the sale. ● You can also tag your post conversion landing page and target your previous customers for repeat business. ● It’s a great strategy to increase your brand loyalty and awareness. ● Define your audience categories in AdWords, based on these existing blog post classifications. ● Here are two common mistakes that plague remarketing campaigns. 1. Thinking that remarketing ads creep your customers out just like generic display ads – Nope, they don’t. Ad fatigue isn’t as quick in remarketing. Actually, a remarketing ad fatigues at less than half the rate than a generic display ad does. 2. Not excluding the audience that has already made a purchase from you – This is a classic ​ one. You’ve got to exclude an acquired customer from your new acquisition remarketing and lead nurturing funnel. ● The campaign exclusions tab can be found by clicking on + Targeting under the Display Network tab. ● Then, choose Campaign exclusions >> Add campaign exclusions >> Interests & remarketing. ● Select the converted customer remarketing list you’ve created from the site category. ● You should also exclude your ads from appearing alongside inappropriate content, because it’ll hamper your brand image. Category-based exclusions will help you prevent negative associations with your brand. ● Also try to exclude your ad from websites unrelated to your product and services. ● Note: You don’t need to run your ads 24 x 7. For better profitability and effectiveness, run ​ them following the 5 simple steps in this article. How to unleash the hidden power of Facebook Ads by creating a custom audience? ● Similar to Google, Facebook also offers you remarketing options to create your own audience list. ● You simply install a pixel (1×1 pixel image) on your website from Facebook’s tools section in Ads manager. ● The code for tracking your website visitors and conversions is a bit different. Jon Loomer discusses the technicalities of the new, upgraded Facebook pixel in this article. ​ ​ ● Let’s jump on how to create your own audience now. ● From your ads manager, select Tools >> Audiences >> Create Audience >> Custom Audience (from the drop-down menu). ● You’ll get a pop-up with three options. Let’s explore the targeting options. ● You can upload your own email list or phone list. Then, Facebook will create an audience for you, based on it. ● Or you can target your website traffic down to the people who haven’t visited your website in a certain amount of time. ● You can even target people who visited your landing page, but didn’t convert i.e. visiting your thankyou page. ● You can also create remarketing ads for your products. For higher relevance, target people who have read your blog’s content on subjects related to your product. ● The demographic targeting you can achieve in Facebook Ads ecosystem is mind-blowing. There are 1500 data points available on an average user. ● You can layer your custom audience with these targeting options. But, don’t get so specific that your ads reach gets thrown out. Strike a balance between your budget and audience size. ● You can further expand the reach of your custom audience by creating a lookalike audience. ● It’s a great strategy that allows you to mirror your current Facebook fans or website visitors. ● You get the option to display your ads to the top 1 percent of users with similar traits in your target country, or to 10 percent of the users in your target country who are most like your target audience. ● You can read some more powerful targeting options in this article by Jon Loomer. ​ ​ ● Rather than running your Ads 24 x 7, you can also schedule them on specific days of the week, at your peak engagement levels. ● Pro Tip: You shouldn’t stop at creating an ad for your various segmented remarketing lists. ​ Expand your efforts to create a customized landing page that incorporates your retargeting message for every segment of your list. ● For maintaining scent, keep the headline, photo and the color of your landing page the same as your ad. ● Also, pay special attention to the copy on your ad and the specific keywords that you use. ● If you create a smooth experience for the user, you can improve your conversions tremendously. Point #2: Have you experimented with various ad formats? And, are you actually creating compelling ads that grab the attention of your prospects? ● Do you know what can make a user click on a link? It’s when you appeal to them emotionally. ● The plain informational advertisements sans any personality. Try to incorporate the emotions and benefits for your customers in your ad. ● On the Google Display Network, image ads get a higher CTR. Which means the CPC on them is notably different. ● We would suggest that you hire a good designer to create those fancy image ads. And no, plain text ads reformatted into images don’t count. ● This brings us to the next point on testing your ad format to find the best message and ad placement that appeals to your target audience. ● There are 14 different types of display ad formats available on the Google Display Network. ● By diversifying your ad formats, you can increase your chances of ad placements in positions with more impressions. ● It’ll also help you in lowering your competition in ad auctions and in fighting ad fatigue by giving advertising networks options to rotate your ads. ● On Facebook, you also need to keep changing your ads to maintain your ad performance. Monitor the response graph and keep an eye out for your peaks and troughs. ● If you have different products, then you need to create different ads for them and start rotating them. ● But, even for the same product, you need to create multiple variations of the same ad, by playing around with your title, ad copy, CTA and, most importantly, your image. ● You can even rotate your target audiences on Facebook to keep your ad campaigns fresh. ● By writing more ads, you get the opportunity to dive deeper into what’s working. ● She confesses that she does not just write one ad and sit back. Rather, she puts in the hard work to write 30+ ads in different ad formations for a single landing page. ● By watching the click-through-rate (CTR) she keeps fine tuning her ads and weeds out the non-performing ones. Point #3: Fiddle with the unlimited impressions cap on AdWords. And, send your first follow-up email immediately, but without a discount ● This validation point on impressions is for AdWords. But, the following up immediately part is valid for all email remarketing campaigns. ● Let’s look at them one-by-one, starting with Adwords first. ● You might feel that repetitively showing your ads will intrude on and annoy a user. ● You might prefer to set a frequency cap under 3 or 2 (which controls the maximum number of times a user will see your ad). ● But, you shouldn’t start with low impression caps for your campaigns. ● A typical remarketing campaign does not deliver more than two ads per day to your users. ● So, the best way to ensure that your ads get an ample number of impressions is by starting with unlimited impressions. ● Now as you know, drawing generalizations is far from a good marketing strategy, especially when your money is at stake. You need to make data-oriented decisions. ● So, while it’s okay to start with unlimited impressions, you should tweak your frequency, based on your own data. ● You can find the data in your Reach and Frequency report, located inside the Campaigns tab. ● Click on the “Reach Metrics” option from the customized column drop down menu. ● Put simply, reach is the number of unique users who saw your ad and frequency is the number of times they saw it.