Roughly 97% of website visitors DO NOT convert. Do something about that: Leverage these nine remarketing techniques to bring one-and-done visitors back to your site and encourage conversion.
1. Define Your Audiences
First, segment your audiences.
Break your remarketing audiences into cohorts of at least 1,000 unique users. The more visitors you have on your website, the more granular you can be with your remarketing audiences. If you only have a one to two thousand visitors per month, it may only make sense to have only one remarketing audience set.
Segment audiences based on factors that make the most sense for your business. As you determine the boundaries for each segment, ask yourself: Will the message in my ad be any different for this audience? How do I tailor my messaging to address each audience?
To get started, consider segmenting your website visitors according to their visits to pages in specific product categories, pages of specific services, and specific location pages. Segment also by users who started but did not complete a contact form, by video viewers, and by those who converted in the past.
Next, define the length of time the user segment will remain on your remarketing list. Base this on your customers’ buying cycles. Is it one week, two weeks, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days?
For step-by-step instructions on creating remarketing audiences, see Google’s About Remarketing Audiences in Analytics guide or watch a step-by-step YouTube tutorial.
2. Facebook & Instagram as a Channel
After you’ve defined your remarketing audiences, determine the best channels and techniques for delivering your message and re-engaging prior website visitors.
Facebook and Instagram are two of the best for catching your audience’s attention. These channels offer you nearly full-screen ads for precisely targeted users as they’re engaged with their feeds and stories – that is, while they are receptive.
Facebook and Instagram are extremely cost effective. Facebook’s average cost per click is $0.38. Instagram averaged $1.09 as of Q3 2018. The low cost comes with a bonus of low effort; it’s simple to run your remarketing ads on both channels through the single Facebook advertising platform.
3. Facebook & Instagram – Video
We all know that both video and remarketing are hot. Put them together, and they’re HOT.
Video remarketing, far more than static images, gives you a chance to tell your story and elevate your users from passive audience to active prospect. Video allows you to demo a product, push out a heartfelt client testimonial, showcase a case study, and tell your brand story.
Beyond conversions and awareness, video is also extremely effective for generating additional brand searches on Google. Users very often watch remarketing videos and then Google the brand. On average, brand searches increase by 420% when remarketers combine a Google paid search campaign with a Facebook video ad campaign.
The key to video remarketing: Hook your audience within the first TWO seconds. And keep your video short, 15 to 30 seconds. Picture the user – or just think of yourself -- scrolling through Facebook. You know how users behave. Online, less is almost always more.
4. Facebook & Instagram – Static Images
On Facebook, a static image complements video beautifully.
Your video asset might capture the attention of most of your audience, but not all of it. The static image can scoop up some of the rest, and it has long dwell time before the eyes of your users. Your static image is a second opportunity to catch your user’s attention.
5. Facebook & Instagram Lead Forms
The most successful remarketing campaigns set the user on a path of little resistance. Facebook Lead Forms do exactly that, when lead generation is your goal.
Lead Forms eliminate the step of sending your remarketing audience to your website with the hope of converting them there. Instead, the forms capture your prospect’s information inside Facebook. Facebook will auto-fill most of the form with the user’s info, further reducing friction on the path to conversion.
6. YouTube Video
When you think remarketing techniques, think about the entire map of your audience’s digital journey throughout a day. You have defined audiences who have visited your website. You want to reach those audiences in as many cost-effective places as possible. You want to stay in front of them and encourage them to come back and convert.
Facebook video works toward those ends.
YouTube should also be in your remarketing mix. Your video will show up before your audience as they watch videos on YouTube, which is great. It will also extend its reach beyond YouTube when, for example, a news station embeds a news video from YouTube on its news article page.
Although YouTube remarketing is effective, it reaches a much smaller audience than other social channels. However, it extends your remarketing reach and should be among your tactics.
7. Google Display Network
The Google Display Network delivers a massive number of impressions to your target audience across a vast network of websites and mobile apps at extremely low cost.
8. Remarketing Lists for Search Ads
If you run paid search ads (Google Ads, for example) for keywords that do not include your brand name, this remarketing technique can prove very effective.
What is a remarketing list for search ads (RLSA)?
It is a bid adjustment for a specific audience -- your website visitors – that raises your keyword bid. In turn, the RLSA places your search ad higher on the search results page for members of this audience. This is extremely useful!
Picture this scenario:
- A user searches for your most important keyword (excluding your brand name).
- The user lands on your website, looks around, doesn’t convert.
- The user returns to Google, either right away or later, and searches that same keyword. At this point, you know this user is shopping around across multiple brands and is a HOT target.
- Since you have a bid adjustment on your remarketing list for search ads, your bid is boosted for this user and your ad continues to stay in front of the user on the search results page as the shopping around continues.
9. Monitor Frequency
It’s important to continue to monitor the frequency with which your ads appear to your audiences on each remarketing technique you employ.
The size of your audience and budget allocation per audience will directly affect how frequently your remarketing audience sees your ad.
Whether your audience is large or small, it is finite. An increased budget to that specific audience will not enlarge that audience, but it will engage the audience more frequently.
A frequency of 10-20 or so per channel, per ad is reasonable for a remarketing audience. If you’re showing an ad to a specific user 50 times, you’re spending much more than you need to on that channel and leaving your audience fatigued.
Summary
Remarketing can be a highly effective tactic as part of your overall digital marketing strategy. Leverage the techniques in this post to bring back and convert the here-and-gone 97% of visitors you missed the first time around.