Life would be so much easier if everyone who visited your website did exactly what you wanted. But of course they don’t. And if you own an e-commerce store then the proportions can look quite scary. For instance think 3% do what you are aiming to achieve leaving the remaining 97% to slip through your pages, leaving only a trace of session history in your Google Analytics accounts before they are off.

Nevertheless the positive part in all of this is that those 97% did at least arrive. Just by completing this action they are naturally one step closer to buying when compared to those that stayed away.

Remarketing helps you market to those who took that single step as they trawl around the Internet looking at other “stuff”. For instance you can remarket to these visitors while they are browsing videos on YouTube, reading a message within their Gmail account or just visiting one of the millions of websites that allows Google’s advertising to display.

Sound all a bit “Big Brothery” to you?

Well it is.

That’s why Google ensures you follow their simple guidelines to ensure you don’t step over the mark and push your potential customers away rather than enticing them back.

Once you have updated the Google Analytics tracking code on your site, Google also tells you to that you need to update your Privacy Statement (you do already have one don’t you?). This change is to include easy to understand commentary on what you have done, how people can opt out and a link to the browser supported add- on Google has to make the opt out process a breeze.

And there’s more. Google also stops you from using re-marketing when you may use sensitive information about your visitors to build your remarketing audience. For instance say you run a medical supplies website then you couldn’t re-market to those who visit certain product pages based on the assumptions that they have the ailments solved by the products they have seen.

Once the web “paperwork” is done and the strategy fits within Google’s guidelines then you are off. First up you need to design the audience that you want to remarket to. Perhaps it’s everyone with a pulse who visited your site. For them remarketing could include creative links to special promotions that run through the year.

Or how about those that came and purchased. Here you could have special customer offers that are too good to open up to a wider audience. Perhaps those that came to you via Facebook so you can present your remarketing in a way that fits with their use of social media. As you can see there’s a number of ways to go about creating an audience and then picking the right strategy and design to match (contact us for more details on which options may best suit your needs).

Once all the design and strategy work is done then the Google magic can begin. You add the single line of code to your Google Analytics tracking code, build the audiences you want to market to and then “push” the data through to your linked Google AdWords account. Currently we are told that you need more than 100 unique cookies (visitors) for the audience to be marketed to.

Next up you need to produce your ad content. Google gives you a range of banner image sizes you can apply as well as the vanilla search text ads. Some of the image ads are more effective than others. So it pays to take time to figure out which ones have the greatest likelihood of converting and to design around them.

So you have your audience and your ads – all you need to do now is to get the two to meet by presenting your advertising on the right websites. This can be the greatest challenge of re-marketing. Up to this point it’s been relatively straight forward. Consumer product / service people may find this easier than their business to business cousins. For example YouTube could be an option, remembering your ads will only be shown to previous web site visitors means you can pick some high volume sites just like this with safety.

Nevertheless, stalking your visitor for ever as they move around the Internet is not a good option. Google helps you to avoid this by limiting the amount of time your ads can run for – say 60 days after the visitor became part of your remarketing audience. Plus they also allow you to cap the frequency the remarketing ads are shown so your ads are only shown 10 times per week. “Ad fatigue” is a problem here so ad creative is best re-worked on a frequent basis to ensure this doesn’t occur.

And the results?

We’ve seen clients achieve a cost per click that is a fraction of their search campaign alternatives and to then produce a significantly reduced cost per conversion. Of course your results may vary but the logic makes sense to try to bring back those that came before in conjunction with plans of creating that first visit. Contact us today to learn how this strategy could work for your business.