Remarketing (or, retargeting) is a tactic that many marketers have leveraged for some time now, and by this point all of us have probably at one point or another been “stalked” by ads from the likes of Zappos, Amazon and many others. Remarketing can be a very cost-effective, targeted way to reach people who you know have visited your site in the past, but any time people equate marketing tactics with stalking there’s cause for concern. In his talk at this year’s GACP Summit Dan Stone shared some thoughts on improved ways for advertisers to leverage retargeting.
Remarketing is turning into an always-on tactic. Multiple touchpoints across multiple devices means that consumer behavior is becoming much more complex, and this in turn means that marketers have to start thinking more strategically about how and when to leverage remarketing as part of their online marketing activities. Stone says there’s three steps to doing this right:
– Target the right user
– Show the most relevant content
– Deliver the right message at the right time, with the right context
Who Should You Target with Remarketing?
The key to a successful remarketing campaign comes down to segmentation. The more specifically you can define your segments, the better chances you have of tailoring a message that is relevant to that segment. So if you’re thinking about remarketing, make sure that you know what customers segments exist in your business.
What Creative Messaging Should You Use When Remarketing?
Now that you’ve identified your customer segments, your next task is to make sure that you’re serving them messaging that is relevant and targeted to their last interaction with your site. That’s where dynamic remarketing comes in.
Dynamic remarketing lets retailers with a Google Merchant Center account create and deliver personalized display ads with the creative and messaging that is most likely to drive results based on visitors’ past behavior on your site. If a visitor browsed the dresses category of your site, for instance, dynamic remarketing would allow you to create and serve an ad displaying the exact products they viewed while on your site, like in the example below:
When Is The Best Time to Serve Remarketing Ads
Back in April Google announced a new type of remarketing list called Smart Lists. This new feature leverages your site data – and those of the millions of Google Analytics-enabled sites that opted-in to share their data with the company – to create and optimize remarketing lists for your site. The smart list data is then ported into an advertisers AdWords interface, and then uses site usage and conversion data as signals for determining the best time and message to serve to specific users based on the list’s prediction of which users are most likely to convert when they come back to the site.