What is remarketing? In the online sense of the word, remarketing involves showing ads on other websites to customers who have already visited your website. It can be very targeted, so you could only choose to remarket to people who have gotten to certain parts of your site, or who have abandoned your online shopping cart process. Shopping cart abandonment is not entirely uncommon when a customer wants to check prices and shipping costs, and then chooses to keep on searching.
How is remarketing done? It depends on the service. Some online advertisers may use a cookie, javascript, pixels, or an IP address to trigger ads on other content match services online. Usually, you will need to place code on any page of your website you want to use for remarketing targeting. After your potential customer visits your site, this code will trigger ads on other sites that are part of the advertising network. Google Adwords has a content match network, known as Adsense, that places ads on sites that contain relevant text in their body content. With Google’s remarketing program (now in Beta, and available to only a few subscribers) a specially targeted text or image ad can appear on sites people visit after they go to yours.
What are the advantages of remarketing? First and foremost, the conversion rates on remarketing are high. This is because the people who are seeing your ad have already been to your site. Remarketing is also a great way to build a brand online (which was previously almost impossible with PPC and SEO) because visitors to your site will now start seeing you all over the place. People who are using search engines to find out more information regarding a product or service are likely to visit review and comparison shopping sites that show Adsense ads to supplement their revenue. These sites may also already show ads from other remarketing networks. Best of all, your competitor may be monetizing his/her site with advertising, and this gives you the opportunity to advertise on the home turf of your competition. If you don’t want to do so, you can always list your competitor as an excluded channel.
What’s in the Adwords Remarketing beta? Some of their advantages vs. other sites is that you can target above-the-fold ad opportunities, go for a CPM or CPC model, and use day parting to catch customers when they’re most likely to make a call. At the time of this writing, there is not official news on the Google Adwords Blog, but Google has briefed search and marketing agencies like our own on the details. There is also some more information here.
How to remarket? Even if you aren’t part of the Google Adwords Remarketing Beta, there are other ad networks that have remarketing capabilities. You will probably want to do some comparison shopping to find out the logistics of installation, and to see if there is a minimum spend involved on each network. Many standard display and banner ad networks offer remarketing as a newer service, so be sure to ask your contact if online re-marketing is available.
As an online strategy, remarketing is sure to become more popular throughout 2010. Whether or not Google takes its beta mainstream, other companies have already discovered that previous visitors, especially ones who got to a certain page, represent a desirable demographic. Taking another crack at site users who abandon shopping carts is also smart, since a small change to your cart abandonment rate can yield big results, even after the fact. Finally, re-marketing on the PPC side is still fairly inexpensive, and can help you average down your cost per sale when you consider your budget as a whole. Given the alternative of losing a potential customer in a tough economy, remarketing can represent a significant new way of ensuring that money isn’t taken off the table by someone else.
Tags: adwords remarketing, remarketing
I look forward to using this new functionnality.