In a world where your prospects aren’t following as much of a linear path as they used to, it’s important to stay in front of them as much as possible. The old stand-by is the rule of 7, meaning it takes on average 7 exposures to your brand before someone takes an action. That was developed in the 1930s, so you may need more impressions or touch-points nowadays, especially with all the advertising noise everywhere you go. To help address this need, Microsoft Advertising just launched impression-based remarketing to those who view your ads.
Before we go any further, let’s disclaim that this is a very new feature that is rolling out. I checked over 20 of our Microsoft Advertising accounts and it wasn’t available in any of them yet. Don’t despair if you don’t see it either — know that you aren’t alone. It will rollout in time! Until then, let’s dig into what we do know.
Impression-Based Remarketing Benefits
There are quite a few ways that this amazing feature can benefit your efforts:
- Increase brand recognition
- Improve ad recall
- Harness the power of sequential messaging
- Fuel your lead or sales funnels
- Reach users outside of the channel where they first saw you for greater exposure
- Utilize a variety of ad formats to reach your audience wherever they are
- Have an advantage over your competitors that might be utilizing this advanced technique
How Impression-Based Remarketing Will Work
I love that this is super easy to set up. You can find the instructions here. You don’t need any special UET tags and nothing needs to happen on your website. The targeting is completely based on who has seen your ads in your campaigns. When you create the audience, you select one campaign, or even one ad group, to measure impressions up to 30 days max. Your audience automatically updates as new users see your ads. You can create as many impression-based remarketing audiences as you like. You’d add them into a new campaign with a Target & Bid setting just as you would any other audience. This means you can select multiple impression-based audiences to put into one campaign if that fits your marketing objectives.
A few things to note:
- These lists can only be applied to Audience campaigns (Display, Native, and Online Video).
- You’ll need at least 1,000 or more in the audience before it is large enough to serve.
- Campaigns or ad groups must be “eligible” for this but I can’t find anywhere what would cause a campaign to be excluded. Maybe paused campaigns or ad groups? Maybe ones that aren’t serving impressions? Not sure here.
- You can use bid adjustments for these to push audiences that are worth more to you or decrease the bids for ones that are underperforming.
Uses for Impression-Based Remarketing
Well, there are endless possibilities here. A few ideas that come to mind:
- Promotion offer or Coupon Code to see if that offer will entice others
- Other messaging outside of your initial ad copy to:
- expand upon your services
- highlight the opposite of your initial ad copy (if you focused on key benefits in your first ads, maybe try features in this one)
- feature testimonials
- callout social proof
- try an upsell or cross-sell
- Highlight an upcoming sale
- Try a lead gen approach to get them into your funnel (newsletter sign-up, content download, access to a tool or calculator)
I can’t wait to see when this becomes available in my accounts. I sure am hoping for an update in the near future to connect in LinkedIn impressions (and vice versa across these two channels) someday.🤞
