Remarketing campaigns offer the ability to “follow up” with consumers most likely to purchase from your business based on their recent interactions with your brand. In this post, we’ll review types of remarketing campaigns, their benefits and popular parameters to consider in reaching the right audience at the right time.
What is Remarketing?
Remarketing is also known by other names and has slightly varying definitions though at its core, remarketing is a marketing effort focused on consumers already familiar with your brand to some extent. Remarketing audiences for digital campaigns primarily focus on recent website visitors and past purchasers though could be expanded to include email recipients, recent visitors to your social media profiles and the list goes on.
Remarketing is heavily utilized by e-commerce sites. If you’ve ever visited the e-commerce website of a boot manufacturer but not purchased anything, you may notice seeing advertising for that brand as you browse other websites and social media apps. This is remarketing. Many savvy brands take this a step further and display ads featuring the exact product(s) you were browsing; this is known as dynamic remarketing.
Benefits of Remarketing
Remarketing offers the ability to “follow up” with specific audience segments you’ve identified. You can display ads exclusively to people who have visited your website recently and feature a special offer or discount to encourage them to visit a physical location or book an appointment.
Remarketing ads can also provide upsell opportunities to those who have already purchased from you. Businesses can target ads to previous customers to promote a new product or service being released or to previous customers of certain products to promote popular accessories for those purchases.
Remarketing campaigns are typically available on most online advertising platforms such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads. Ads to these audiences can be included as an additional segment within existing campaigns at no additional cost overall though it’s typically best practice to separate these efforts into a separate campaign for more tailored messaging to these users and more accurate campaign performance analysis later on.
Lastly, development of first-party data and remarketing audiences are becoming increasingly important as many tech platforms are transitioning to a “cookieless” future. Though applauded for consumer privacy purposes, this trend related to third-party data will likely have an impact on ad targeting in days ahead.
Remarketing Considerations
When considering remarketing campaigns, businesses should ensure their desired audience segments are large enough to be targeted by their preferred ad platform(s.) At the time of this writing, “data segments targeting the Google Display Network must have a minimum of 100 active visitors or users within the last 30 days for your ads to show; segments targeting Google search must have a minimum of 1,000 active visitors or users.”
Remarketing can include many audience types, which could potentially require separate campaigns or ad groups, depending on the messaging and attention each group will receive. Common remarketing audiences are recent website visitors, uploaded .csv files of previous customers or contacts and people who have recently visited or engaged with your business’s social media profiles.
Lastly, consider filtering your remarketing segments to exclude users who completed a desired action. Especially for e-commerce businesses, consider setting up a remarketing campaign of recent site visitors and potentially narrow this list to users who progressed as far as a cart or checkout type page; though you may consider excluding those users who completed a purchase in order to focus ad spend on consumers still in their shopping journey.
Summary
Remarketing campaigns offer an excellent method to maintain presence in front of consumers who are familiar with your brand and likely to purchase. With proper segmentation and tailored messaging, remarketing campaigns provide an extremely cost-efficient opportunity to close additional conversions for your business.
