Remarketing is perhaps the hottest online marketing topic of 2010, especially since it is now “available to the masses” as a feature of Google AdWords.
The concept isn’t too difficult to understand — with remarketing you can tag anyone who visits a page on your site and then show them your ads when they are browsing the Internet. Since they have already been to your site, these ads usually have some extra pull.
While you can set up and launch a remarketing campaign within Google AdWords with relative ease, there are definitely some strategies you’ll want to employ.
Here are a couple to get you started:
Don’t treat all web visitors the same.
Someone who reaches your order form is much more valuable than someone who bounces
from your landing page. You’ll want to segment your remarketing into
different lists so you can bid according to the potential value of the
visitor and target the messaging of your remarketing ads.
Recognize that the value of remarketing to individual users decreases over time.
When setting up your remarketing lists, you can choose the “list duration.” A list duration of 30 days means that if a user gets onto the list on the 1st of the month, you’ll only be able to market to them until the 30th of the month.
Since a recent visitor is worth more to you, you’ll want a list of recent visitors so you can pay more to remarket to them. Yet you don’t want users to fall off your remarketing radar completely just because they aren’t new anymore. The solution is to use combination lists to include and exclude people from different date ranges. This will allow you to segment your list durations according to value and unique messaging opportunity.
For more high-level strategy about remarketing, check out the article “Re-Marketing Display Advertising: Ready for Take-Off” written by our CEO, Timothy Seward, published in Electronic Retailing Association’s Online Strategies magazine.
