Remarketing

Remarketing is something people think about doing. Well, they think about implementing it but simply don’t know what to do about implementing it. Let’s start off with the most important question:

What is Remarketing?

It’s very simple. You sign up for a service someplace (we’ll talk about those services in a little bit), and then when a person visits your website, they are cookied. After that person leaves your site, you can have ads for your products and services follow them around the internet.

This person is going to see text ads or banner ads for your business on different sites they visit on the internet. And what this does is activates the visitor’s reticular activating nerve. Which means it brings something to the forefront of the visitor’s consciousness.

A new car is a great example. You have just purchased a car; you spent time choosing the color and the features and you feel like you have purchased a truly unique car. And then you drive off the lot, and it seems like everywhere you go you see another car exactly like yours. Well, that’s your reticular activating nerve.

That’s what they’re doing with this remarketing idea. You went to this site, abc.com and now you leave it. All of a sudden you start seeing banners and ads everywhere for abc.com inviting you to come back to it.

What is the Process of Setting Up Remarketing?

First, you need to sign up for a remarketing service, then you need to implement the code they give you on your website. It sounds simple, and a lot of people would stop there. They throw up the same old ads they have been using to get people to their site originally and don’t think strategically about why they are remarketing.

I value the return of the visitor to my site more than the first visit.

The likelihood of the person taking action on your website, whether it is simply just giving you their email address and name or if it is purchasing, is higher on the second visit—quite dramatically higher. It’s very important that you treat that person a little bit differently than a first-time visitor. Don’t utilize a generic type of ad in order to try to get them back. You want to use different ads than originally used to get them there on their first visit.

When most people hear about the subject of remarketing, they only think of Google, and that’s it, but there’s more than that. There’s Google remarketing. There is Facebook remarketing. There is Twitter remarketing. Then there are companies like AdRoll.com or SharpSpring.com (formerly PerfectAudience. com). Each one of them has some unique features, and I personally believe that you should be utilizing them.

When you first set up a website, or if you already have a website and want to start remarketing, sign up for all these services and get your remarketing codes from each service. There are plenty of great videos that people make all the time that teach you exactly how to do that.

Now, you’ll need to create ads for these services. But what kind of ads? Well, some of them utilize banners. Some of them utilize text ads. For example, Facebook utilizes a text ad along with an image, but Google typically utilizes banners. Twitter utilizes a combination of an image and a text, with AdRoll and SharpSpring typically utilize banners.

As I mentioned earlier, you need to treat your remarketing audience differently. They have come to our website already, so you don’t want to show them a generic ad. You want to create a specific set of ads that say or do a few things:

1. Let them know you know they have already come to your So, you can say something like, “Hey, we are saving a spot for you at (insert your website/product/ service name).” Or “Please come back and we will give you ‘X’ if you purchase our product or service.”
2. Let them know how much you want them back on your You need to not only entice them to come back, but you need to let them know what they need to have—and that is your product/service.
3. Give them a call to This could be an arrow or a button. I typically want a button on a banner. I have discovered that people are 300% more likely to click on a button than anything else. And people know what to do with a button; they know you click on it. It makes it very simple.
4. Display your branding clearly. They have seen your website, your logo—the look and feel. Ads should emulate what they have already seen because you are trying to activate their memories, so they recognize you at a glance.Now that the ads are created, it’s time to run the campaigns. I mentioned that there is more than one way to create a remarketing ad. The most basic way is to put the default code on your website, so you are at least targeting everybody. Creating what I like to call a Plan B.

   Plan B is what you do if a visitor doesn’t buy or doesn’t give you their contact information. In most cases, people don’t have a Plan B in place. But by using the remarketing code, you are building a list of people you can run ads to, who have at least been interested enough in you to have visited your site.

Now, here is where most people who say they utilize remarketing stop. But I like to go even deeper than that by segmenting this list and running different ads to different types of visitors. How am I defining the groups? Let me give you an example. Let’s say I have a website that has a lead generation page where they give me their name and email address before they visit my main page where I make an offer for a product or service. I am going to have three groups of visitors.

1. Those who get to the landing page and give me their contact information, visit the site, and do purchase.
2. Those who get to the landing page, give me their contact information, visit my site but don’t buy.
3. Those who get to the landing page but don’t give me their contact information.

In this scenario, I’d want one remarketing campaign tailored to those who visited but did not provide their contact details and another remarketing campaign tailored to those who provided their contact details but didn’t buy.

In doing this, I have one campaign where I’m just collecting everybody. But then I’m going to create another campaign where I’m targeting people who came and didn’t opt in, and then I’m targeting another campaign to people who opted in but didn’t purchase so I can run different ads. It’s like I’m reading their minds. I know they came to my website, and I know what actions that they did or didn’t take there.

You could even go deeper if you wanted to. Some people utilize a process where they track the length of time a visitor spends on their site and treat a certain group of people in a specific way based on that amount of time. For me, that’s not an indicator. I typically like actions because actions, in my opinion are trackable. There’s a lot of different reasons why a person could stay on a website. For example, they could have got a phone call. That doesn’t mean that they’re more interested in the product or service that I have. I look at what kind of actions a person takes:

• Did they come to my website?
• Did they click on anything?
• Did they give me their name and email address?
• Did I generate a lead?
• Did I generate a sale?

And those are things I can track, and those are things that we can remarket to slightly different.

Those are the basics of remarketing and how to utilize it to your benefit. Remember, the people who have already visited your site are more valuable than new visitors because we can get them to come back for a second look. The fact is, if we can get more of those people back to give us their information or to purchase where we can follow up with them, then we have a winning combination!