Planning out a Remarketing Strategy

As we discussed in our introductory post, remarketing is a comparatively new function within Google Analytics which allows users to produce adverts and show them on Google’s Display Network, directed towards people who have visited your site and either not bought anything, or clicked back off again. It’s a fantastic (and cheaper) way of driving traffic and increasing the number of conversion rates.

With the average CPC (cost per click) amount rising all the time due to how saturated and popular paid searches are becoming, it’s not a moment too soon to have such a feature. And it’s fully customisable too. You can set your own rules and agenda and it can therefore be as easy or as mind-bogglingly difficult as you desire.

In order to plan a successful remarketing strategy, it's relatively simple, as long as you keep a close eye on it at all times. Not monitoring a campaign, especially a remarketing one, will obviously badly affect everything. In times of global financial instability, you’re going to need as many potential sources of revenue as possible and this can be one of the simplest to implement.

Think intensively what you want to achieve

Hopefully you would do this before doing anything anyway, but if you’re going to try and secure people whose attention has previously strayed, you have to be 100% sure of everything before you start. After all, you don't want them straying the second time you've managed to gain their attention.

Think about:

1. What is it you want to improve on from before?
2. Conversion rates?
3. New orders from new customers?
4. Repeat orders from current customers?

You must also consider how you’re going to grab visitors' attention. Think about how you can use strong calls-to-action on your landing pages – use Skype buttons to encourage calls, or offer a discount for those that take actions such as entering their email address.

Of course, it will be necessary to pinpoint your target audience too; is the campaign targeting all of your customers/visitors or certain demographics? You can use the data that Analytics has already generated to help you to decide which visitors are attracted to your site but just don't stay.

Analytics will show you which pages are performing badly on your site with the highest bounce rate and it's these you really want to optimise for remarketing. Ensure that the checkout process is painless too, to make sure that those people that are adding to their shopping cart are not abandoning the process due to irritating bugs in the site that interrupt the process.

Don’t head into a campaign too quickly

Particularly if you are a little unsure of what you’re doing. Spend time on every decision, but equally don’t feel that you have to create an ad for everything on your website. Not only will this get cluttered, messy and confusing for customers, but you will find it awfully difficult to be able to monitor it all.

Allow customers the chance to browse for themselves – if your website is easy enough to navigate and interesting, they’ll stay. Don't appear desperate to your visitors, showering them with far too much choice, take it a product or batch at a time. Don’t be afraid to spend lots of time on a select few. Quality should always come before quantity.

Plan your method

Like most business practices remarketing takes planning and this means that you should carry out an analysis of why visitors are abandoning your site or the checkout process. In analytics, you can set up remarketing lists based on a number of metrics.

These include:

• Visitors that have never converted
• Visitors that spent under or over a certain amount
• Visitors that arrive through an ad and then following a search
• Visitors that complete a specific goal
• Those completing a goal within a specific time period
• Visitors that have visited at least once within a few days

You can also set up lists that are based on goals you've set in the past or ad performance. Be careful not to make your target audience too broad or it's likely that you won't be successful.

In Analytics:

You can choose:

• All site visitors
• Visitors to a specific page
• Using visitor segments

Again, it’s entirely up to you which one you go for, but you should pick whichever one returns the best results. Give each one a go and see what works best, don't be afraid to experiment to some degree. Regardless of which one you go for, you should ideally limit the amount of ads which appear to people. The limit depends on how impressionable your target audience is, so once again you should experiment and see what’s most successful. Whatever the case, too many ads regarding the same product will only make people feel as though they’re being hassled.

Remarketing is a great way for you to connect with those customers that you haven't quite managed to win over before. If you're still not sure what it is, then think Amazon and those suggestions that the site gives when you buy something. The principle is the same and using Google Analytics, you can effectively target your potential customers with the Google Display Network (GDN).

If you're not sure where to start, then Google has predefined remarketing lists that you can use, choosing from demographics such as location and previous customers to make setting it all up a doddle. When used in conjunction with Adwords and the GDN, you have the potential to reach customers in a different way, that hopefully should reap profitable results.

In coming posts we'll be looking a little further in depth into how to set up lists and work with them in Analytics and Adwords.