On Monday 16th May, I attended day 1 of SMX Advanced London at the beautiful Millennium Gloucester Hotel & Conference Centre. The day was really enjoyable, with great content, great speakers and great munchies!!
In this series of blog posts I will go through the key sessions that I attended, and give a brief summary of the points made.
Remarketing For Fun And Profit With Guy Levine CEO of Return On Digital, Stuart Meyler President of Beeby Clark+Meyler and Josh Shatkin-Margolis CEO of Magnetic
For those of you not familiar with “remarketing”, it is a tool that allows you to show ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse the Web. For example, a user may have visited your site, looked at the duck feather pillow page, but not completed an online purchase. Remarketing gives advertisers a second chance to market their products, and usually works in conjunction with an incentive message. An advertiser would likely show the following ad to the user in the example above:
“10% off duck feather pillows, today only”
Google AdWords offers remarketing functionality on their Display Network. Google’s Display network reaches approximately 82% of the UK online population, with around 400 ad exposures per user, per month. Working on either a CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per impression) basis, remarketing through Google AdWords is quick and easy to setup, and very effective.
As well as going through best practices for Remarketing on Google AdWords, the session covered some interesting creative strategies that the speakers had used:
1. Combine Facebook & Remarketing
Create a Facebook campaign targeting a specific demographic, and then drive these visitors to a dedicated PPC landing page which contains remarketing code. This will enable you to create ultra-targeted remarketing campaigns based on gender, interests, age, education, location etc. This would be especially useful for high end retailers that have a very specific target audience, who are looking to find new customers.
2. Use Remarketing/Retargeting to build Twitter & Facebook fans
It is a far softer sell to ask a visitor to become a fan, rather than carry out a transaction. Use remarketing to generate followers or fans, and then market to them at a later date with offers/new collection information. Retailers such as Asos have seen huge success stories driving sales from their Facebook & Twitter fans & followers
3. Advanced Forms
Use dynamic script on signup/registration forms to build targeted remarketing lists. Depending on the answers on certain fields (sex, address, age etc), visitors can be grouped into more specific remarketing lists, and then more effectively re-marketed to at a later date. The more specific the demographic/audience in a remarketing list, the more relevant you can make your advertising messaging. Using a dynamic script you would be able to segment men & women, and thereby show very different ads to each.
Finally, it was stressed that the performance of remarketing campaigns should be analysed on an incremental basis i.e. how much more traffic/transactions has this campaign driven in addition to what you would have got already? It is likely that some visitors who click & convert through a remarketing advert would have done so regardless of seeing a remarketing ad. It is therefore imperative that you calculate the projected volume of conversions you would have expected to receive in total without remarketing, and then calculate the difference.
In the next blog post I will discuss key points from the Best Practises With adCenter For Bing & Yahoo session.