It’s hard to believe that it has been nearly two whole weeks since I took the stage with Mark Irvine (Wordstream), Joe Kerschbaum (3Q Digital) and Pamela Parker (Third Door Media) to talk about advanced Audiences. It was a blast to say the least! Partially because remarketing is one of my very favorite things to talk about but mostly because my fellow panelists – and moderator – were awesome and there was a ton of information shared all around.
In case you missed it, here’s a quick summary of my slides.
Effective Remarketing Starts with Goal Setting
Sometimes it seems like we take remarketing for granted. It generally performs well, so I often see campaigns that are set up with a pretty basic structure instead of taking the time to identify specific goals and aligning the appropriate audiences.
A few examples of remarketing goals could be:
- Keeping Consumers Engaged Throughout a Long Buying Cycle
- Closing the Sale
- Bringing Back Previous Buyers
- Prospecting (using lookalikes)
- Announcing New Products
- Re-Engaging Consumers with Accessories or Add-Ons
Choosing a Channel
There are so many campaign types with which to leverage remarketing audiences. It’s a good idea to make sure your channel selection aligns with what you are trying to accomplish (as with any other campaign). You may want to leverage multiple campaign types. For more information on your channel options and the pros and cons of each, check out my slides above.
Audience Segmentation
This is where remarketing really becomes exciting. I encourage people to view their audience as a pool of individuals – remembering that different individuals have different needs, preferences and priorities. It’s out with the old way of remarketing: building an audience for all site visitors, excluding those who have converted and showing them all the same landing page and ad.
Start building informed lists based upon actions that users have taken. Consider the pages they’ve visited, the source/medium/campaign information that drove them to the site, the actions that they took on site, their location and their demographics. All of these things will help you build segmented audiences so that you can better understand what they are looking for and where they are in the purchase funnel. (Check out the slides for some example lists!)
It’s no surprise that segmented lists outperform sitewide lists (more than 50% lower CPA in an example that I shared) but sitewide lists often have more volume. I’d never suggest leaving potential on the table. Instead, I suggest building campaigns with segmented lists first and then building a catch-all campaign that excludes all of the segmented lists.
If you find that your catch-all campaign is significantly bigger than your segmented audiences, consider making on-site optimizations to help you understand more about your visitors. Sure, your primary conversion is the first and foremost goal – but if you can’t get that, try to get something that will help you to build a specific audience.
Building tightly segmented audiences allow you to do several other things including: building funnels, aligning creative and landing pages most effectively, and creating audiences specifically for exclusions (beyond users who have converted). Check out the slides for more information regarding each of these opportunities.
Of course, you can’t get the full effect of the panel without seeing both Mark and Joe’s slides, too, of course, so I’ve included them below!
