Remarketing is a digital advertising tool that is ubiquitous across all digital advertising applications, including all social media platforms. Why is it so widely used? Because it’s very effective. And even if you’re not doing digital advertising right now, knowing about the power of remarketing will help you formulate your future online marketing strategy. Watch our webinar or read some tips below to dive in and gain some remarketing insights and ideas.
So, What is Digital Remarketing?
In order to provide a clear description of what remarketing is, I will provide a scenario:
A person goes to your website (either they typed it in directly or through search). In order to capture that visitor and get an accurate idea of who is visiting your site (and when), you would install one or several digital remarketing tags (or snippets of code). Once tags are present, those visitors are automatically collected in a list that you can make audiences from. Furthermore, those digital remarketing tags pertain to the platforms that you created them with (i.e. Facebook, AdWords, etc.). Once they’re in a list, you can then target those past visitors with customized ads on those platforms. The end goal of remarketing is that people will eventually convert or become more aware of your brand or initiative once they see your message again.
Digital Remarketing Example: Amazon
Amazon is one of the best examples of remarketing because they are super aggressive with their strategies. If you go to Amazon.com and look at a pair of shoes and then go to Facebook or search around the web, you’ll often see that exact pair of shoes in an ad that is encouraging you to make the leap and purchase them. This is a prime (no pun intended) example of what remarketing is and how it can work when properly executed.
Integrating Remarketing Tools
Most platforms will have similar setups and nomenclature. Generally speaking, when you are in the audience creation tool or ad creation tool and you’re looking at your targeting options, you will see something that pertains to site visits. The first time you set this up, the platform will give you a piece of code to install on your website. If you have a WordPress site, the setup will be straightforward. There are also existing plugins that are simple to set up if you don’t have WordPress. It’s usually as simple as putting the code in a header or in the main body of your website. You’ll know all is set and working when you begin seeing results via the platform. On Facebook, once the code is installed and your remarketing data is collecting, you can then generate audiences based on that data.
Customizing Advertising Audiences Via Remarketing
You can create an audience based on traffic to your entire site or to a specific page or pages, and also exclude certain pages. This allows for a tremendous amount of versatility tracking people and targeting areas of your website.
For Events
For example, let’s say you’re running an event and you’ve been driving traffic to your event page via partners, PR, and social media. Now your event is three months away and every single month you have a ticket price increase that encourages people to make a purchase. Well, if some people visit the event page, but do not buy a ticket, remarketing gives you the opportunity to incentive further through targeted advertisements. This is a core tactic that we recommend for all the event-based clients that we work with.
For E-Commerce
The event-based strategy is just as effective for e-commerce sites. Through remarketing, you can show people discounts for a product they looked at. This allows you to distribute a code, discount, or special kind offer to just those people, thus avoiding a mass-marketed discount that could hurt your margins.
A friend of mine uses remarketing for his fashion company. Whenever they need to move inventory when a new season comes around, they just target the people that have been to relevant site pages in the past month, and provide them with deep discounts codes.
For Services
If your business is expanding its service offerings or wanting to further market current offerings, you can track customers that have been on your website previously and introduce them to this new service or additional services in an ad.
Remarketing Lookalike Audiences
On Facebook, one of my favorite things to do is create Lookalike audiences, where the platform will determine which users are most similar/relevant to your specified audience.
Typically, the top qualified audience is most recent customers. The second most qualified audience contains those who have been on your website and are already engaged. In either case, you can create a Lookalike audience using the web traffic generated by your remarketing tag. This is an excellent way to introduce yourself to new customers who are more qualified.
Don’t Worry, Remarketing is Not an Invasion of Privacy (Well, Not Really)
Before I go further, I want to address a concern that is commonly brought up in webinars. People often wonder, “Isn’t that creepy? You’re tracking me around the web?”
It seems like a natural instinct to be cautious surrounding the ethics with this kind of digital tracking, but at the same time, these people have been to your website and they already know who you are and have shown interest in you.
Platforms do take steps to preserve confidentiality. For example, Facebook protects personal information (e.g. names), but does allow you to see demographics.
In the end, you’ll just have to decide for yourself whether the conflict outweighs the potential outcomes.
Digital Remarketing Questions Answered
Is Remarketing the Same as a Cookie?
It is similar to cookies, but not exactly the same. If somebody has cookies disabled, I don’t believe that it affects most of these remarketing tools. One thing that I will say is that certain industries that have very privacy sensitive audiences or extensive terms of service and privacy language on their website will need to be more careful. Installing remarketing tags could end up potentially offending some users.
What are the Costs of Remarketing?
There’s actually no cost associated with setting up remarketing tags specifically. On each platform you can generate tags even if you’ve never run an ad on the system. The tags can also be activated when it works best for your strategy. If in 12 months or 24 months you might have a need to use remarketing, you can go ahead and set up the code now on your site and let it start it collecting data. Although remarketing tags will only retain between 90 to 260 days of data, it does not hurt to have a system in place in advance.
Give Remarketing a Try!
Remarketing can bring forth various opportunities for new, fresh, and interesting tools within your marketing strategy. We hope you will give it a try. If you are interested in remarketing for your organization, but do not have the skills or capacity internally, JB Media Group would love to help.
