It’s a well-known fact that 97% of website visitors leave without taking any action. However, you don’t have to look at customers as lost when they leave your site because remarketing can get prospects back to your site.
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What is remarketing?
Remarketing is a form of marketing that targets people who visit your site (and don’t buy) by using banner and text ads on Google’s display network.
How does it work?
It’s pretty straightforward to get started with remarketing. You simply set up an “audience” (sometimes also called “remarketing lists”) within your Google account.
Google will give you a snippet of code called a pixel which you’ll have to install on your site. If you’re not sure how to do this, Google will email the code to your web developer and have them install it.
After the code is installed on your site the remarketing pixel sets a cookie on each visitor that comes to your site. The cookie tags them and adds them to a remarketing list, allowing you to show them ads at a later stage.
When you create your text or banner ads and select the specific audience you want to remarket to, those tagged visitors will see your ads as they browse other websites on the Internet.
If they come back to your website and buy, Google will automatically remove the cookie. If they don’t buy, your ads will still be displayed as they browse the web.
For example, if someone visits the shopping cart section of your site and leaves without buying you have the opportunity for your ads to follow them as they surf the Internet.
So, as they’re browsing Facebook or reading an article on CNN, you’re able to show your ads to these people, luring them back to your website.
You could create special ads offering a discount to make your offer more appealing and encourage visitors to return to your site and buy your product or service.
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Keep in mind that before you start a remarketing campaign, you have to update your privacy policy that informs visitors of your use of cookies.
Is part of Google’s terms and conditions, and you have to comply with it. Your privacy policy must also let users know how to opt out of remarketing.
Different types of audiences
An audience is a list of people who meet certain criteria. You could create a variety of different audiences based on different types of actions and behaviours.
To illustrate, I’m going to use an e-commerce site as an example. The simplest way to use remarketing for an e-commerce site would be to create three basic lists:
- Non-converters. These are people who visited your site, but they did not add anything to the shopping cart.
- Shopping cart abandoners. These consumers added something to the shopping cart, but for some or other reason did not complete the transaction.
- Buyers. You could always remarket to existing customers to make them aware of new products or special offers.
Why use it?
Just add up all the people who visited your site in the last 30 days who displayed a measure of interest in your product or services.
Perhaps they added items to the shopping cart, but for some reason did not complete their purchase. Maybe they got sidetracked at work. Maybe the price was just a little bit too high. Whatever the reason, they came close to buying what you had to offer.
This is where remarketing gives you a second chance (in fact it gives you multiple chances) to reach out to prospects and remind them that they would benefit from coming back to your site.
They have already been exposed to your brand and have already shown that they are interested in what you have to offer. Many may just need a little nudge to go from being a hot prospect to a customer.
What to do next?
The most important thing is to set up your very first audience by getting your remarketing code from Google and getting that installed on your website.
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Even if you decide you do not have the time at this stage to implement a remarketing campaign, by at least getting the code onto your site you can start building a remarketing list.
So when you do eventually decide to give remarketing a try, you’ll already have a remarketing list in place – a list of people that you’re able to show ads to.