Although remarketing already has been around for awhile now on the display side of marketing, it seems that it has been picking up not only steam, but more people are adopting it on the paid search side. Regardless of remarketing’s recent popularity, as with everything else, there are those who know how to take advantage of it and do it correctly, there are those who are quite the opposite. We’ll include some things that experienced marketers have learned from their B2B remarketing campaigns.
For anybody new to the concept of remarketing, it’s pretty easy to understand. Remarketing is when a user has already been to your website, and thus creating a cookie on their computer. With this information stored, a person who is remarketing can later deliver ads to that person to draw them back to the website. You’re not marketing to somebody new, you’re marketing to those who has already come to your site and you want them to coming back for more business. In a way, remarketing is great, because from a search perspective, you know that the searcher is already interested in your brand since they’ve already visited your site at least once before.
Remarketing allows marketers to encourage potential customers down the conversion funnel, since the marketer knows what sort of content the users have been engaged with and can message them based on what they’re interested in.
So, on to some of the things we’ve learned with remarketing.
Tight Audiences, Granular Remarketing Lists and Targeted Messaging
If you know some of the ins and outs of traditional paid search and product listing ads, you should feel right at home with remarketing. The more specific and granular you are, the better results will come out of your campaign. As usual, best practices will tell you, make sure that the keywords that you use are tightly themed within each ad group. Remarketing follows the same idea, except you will replace keywords with lists and audiences.
Marketers will want to create custom combinations of their audience and lists by either adding or excluding lists together. This will create nice, neat niche customer pools. This way, you will then know what sort of actions the customer has taken while at your site, as well as what sort of pages they’ve been to.
Many of those who are in e-commerce remarketing have complained that the customers they remarket to successfully convert, they are remarketed to later about the same product they just bought. To fix this, all that needs to be done is add an exclusion of customers who are on the list of “completed sales.” By adding them to the exclusion list, they won’t be remarketed again for the same product.
You may think that once the customer is done once they’ve bought the product, but there’s more that you can do with the customer. You can utilize the fact that they’ve completed the sale by remarketing them with complementary products and services.
Also, if you find that a customer has visited a checkout, but never completed the sale, another strategy you can take is to remarket in your copy a coupon code or some other incentive, which can land them on a page further down the funnel. This can help promote that sale completion.
The same strategy will apply for lead-gen remarketing. The first step will be to tag as much of your site as possible, including all content on your site, parent site, and even microsites. When you tag your content, as customers are added to these lists, custom combinations will be created. This can help to keep track of where customers are in the conversion funnel, and their potential interest in your brand.
If your data shows that customers landed on a content page, but left before completing the conversion and making a sale, remarket to them. But, instead of landing them back on the content page, land them on the conversion page instead. If you find that the customer has completed the form, there’s the fact that they are now a lead. In this way, you’ll want to remarket to them by sending them information about breaking research. When the customer replies, they will be landed on the press releases of the research. This will help keep your brand fresh in their mind. If a customer lands on a parent site, remarketing can be used to lead the customer to a child site, or even a microsite. They can also be sent to a niche solution or other product that they could be interested in.
Since remarketing runs on the Google Display Network, don’t worry about excluding content that isn’t converting at the CPO goal required. Since remarketing utilizes the entire GDN, if you have a customer that is included in one of your lists, the message could possibly serve next to content that has no relevance to your brand.
It makes sense that success is seen mostly when ads are served by content that is relevant to your brand. Adding exclusions, just like negatives that are added to broad match keywords when the match isn’t at all relevant, is something that should be performed on a regular basis when you are working on your B2B remarketing campaigns.
Remarketing Opportunities And Other Stuff
If you begin using remarketing more and more as an affordable and effective way to drive customers to buy your products and create leads and sales, you’ll find that there will be more remarketing opportunities that will pop up. As an example, YouTube is an effective way to scale and grow remarketing lists for your brand. When the customers who are interested in your YouTube video are watching, the B2B advertiser has the opportunity to remarket and message them back to the parent site for yet another opportunity for conversion. If not that, it can mean getting put onto another landing page on another YouTube video to consume additional video time.
Another opportunity to think about is remarketing lists for search ads (RSLA). This feature came out of beta only a few months ago, and can be implemented along with enhanced campaigns. With this feature, an advertiser can change the message and bid higher on specific keywords during a search on Google, assuming that the customer is already in a remarketing list.
There was an article that spoke of testing using geo-bid multipliers to scale search volume when and where opportunity existed. Naturally, it is not an original idea or new concept to pay a higher, premium to target a more profitable audience, there are quite a few opportunities to grow our accounts and reach potential customers. If you can scale search volume using geo-bid multipliers, why not use the RSLA option to scale? This should be do within reason though. As a marketer, you’ll want to use analytics so you don’t inflate CPC or CPL past profitability.
In The End
It is key to be granular when setting up a B2B remarketing campaign from paid search. This will allow you to get tightly grouped lists that will give the B2B advertiser the ability to remarket more effectively through messaging and a great landing page. There are other opportunities that you take advantage of for scaling B2B remarketing, such as YouTube and RSLA, but you need to be careful when considering them to make sure that the profitability doesn’t go out the window.