An Introduction to Remarketing

It's just a fact of internet marketing: even the most engaging, effective websites only convert about 1% of their visitors into buying customers -- if they're lucky.

High-quality content, responsive web design and effective SEO practices can all help, but the truth is that the majority of your website visitors are likely to move on from your site after a look around. In most cases, they move on without buying your product, without completing your newsletter/enquiry form and without engaging with your brand in any meaningful way.

Going Beyond Just One Percent

Enter remarketing. Remarketing is a dynamic way of helping businesses to re-target visitors. With remarketing, as they go on to browse other websites, ads for your business will appear on these sites and remind them about their contact with you. In effect, for an affordable monthly budget, you can remind recent website visitors about your company and products. In doing so, you'll reinforce your company brand and subtly invite them back to your website while their interest is high.

Remarketing is a powerful development in advertising that's now an integral part of the Google Adwords program. It is also available as part of Facebook campaigns and other web marketing platforms (eg AdRoll, Perfect Audience). Done well, remarketing can be a highly effective way of maximising traffic back to your website while creating the perception that your business has a vibrant advertising campaign on a network of websites.

You've probably experienced remarketing in your own web adventures after visiting specific types of websites and noticing that in subsequent browsing, adverts for these sites have "followed" you to other sites. No, it's not just a cosmic coincidence; it's remarketing! In effect, remarketing can help keep a topic in a visitor's awareness for weeks or months after the initial search.

Remarketing for Your Business

Assuming you already have a website that's current and contains top-quality content about your business and brand, there are two basic steps for setting up a remarketing campaign. You don't have to complete them both at once, but both will be required to reap the full benefits of remarketing:

1. Traffic. Remarketing only works if you have a stream of visitors already interested in your site and finding their way to it.

2. Your ads. From here, you'll create effective advertising banners and configure a campaign. There are a number of options at this stage, and we can work with you to maximise the benefits.

Remarketing Costs

The costs for a remarketing campaign are in three basic areas:

• The initial account setup / website tracking
• The creation of the campaign with specific ads and banners
• Your ongoing monthly ad campaign costs

1. Account Setup

Your initial account setup can be completed quickly and will require access to your website CMS or source code. Initially, there are no ongoing ad costs since your ads are not yet being displayed. In this stage, all your website visitors are collected and added to an "audience" who will be shown your ads once step #2 is completed. Visitors added to your audience will remain there for up to 540 days, giving you about a year and a half to benefit from this data.

2. Ad Creation

Your ads and banners will have the capacity to be displayed over a large, far-reaching network of websites on the internet that include some of the largest, most well-known brands in the world. These businesses may use different size and shaped banners on their sites, therefore it's advisable that our team create a number of versions of your banners so that your ads will be shown in the maximum number of places and effectively appeal to your target audience. It's also possible to create sets of banners with that offer different messages to further customize the experience; we'll be happy to talk to you about these options and guide you through how it can work optimally. We can also provide you with the information and guidelines necessary to have your own creative team make these banners, then we'll assist you in using them for your remarketing campaign. Due to the unique and customizable nature of this step in the process, costs will vary depending upon your specific business needs.

3. Ongoing Monthly Campaign Costs

As mentioned earlier, remarketing is extremely cost-effective and can re-target your website visitors very efficiently. Campaigns are usually structured to focus on optimal “impressions," which refers to the number of times that the banners are displayed. Traditional Google AdWords pay-per-click advertising is focused primarily on getting users to click your ads; however, in most cases, remarketing is more focused on building a brand than on just click-throughs. A website with moderate traffic and a relatively small audience of a couple thousand visitors will cost a manageable fee each month. As a business audience grows, the cost to reach them through display of banners will grow as well, and other options will become available that we can discuss with you when that time comes. You can choose to increase your budget to remain in-line with your growing audience, or you can set a limit and allow your budget to determine how many times your ads are displayed.

Now that you’ve visited this website, you're part of our audience. You may start to notice our banners and adverts as you go on to visit other websites. We're hoping these will act as a friendly reminder about the effectiveness of remarketing for keeping brand awareness alive even after a potential customer has visited a website. Think of remarketing as a valuable service you can offer to your website visitors. If they end up becoming your customer, then it's a win-win for both of you.

Remarketing can be a vital part of your company's online marketing campaign. Contact us today to get started.