I recently read an AdWords Remarketing tips post which made me think of a few ways to improve your AdWords Remarketing campaigns by introducing a delay between when a person visits your site and when you start showing adverts to them.
Image from Stuck in Customs on Flickr
Buying Cycles
One problem with Remarketing is that it is hard to measure incremental value from it. A remarketing conversion tells you that someone who visited your site came back to your site and then bought something; the causal link between the advert and the purchase is not as clear as it is with search advertising.
Giving users time to complete their purchase naturally before you start showing them adverts avoids this problem whilst still taking advantage of the main feature of Remarketing; that people who have already been on your website are more valuable than people who haven’t.
For an ecommerce client we set up a 7 day delay on their remarketing to match the length of their buying cycle.
To setup a delay you need to create a remarketing tag as normal and then create another list using that tag but with a shorter duration. In this case they have 1 tag across their whole site with two remarketing audiences associated with it, one of them has a duration of 21 days and the other has a duration of 7 days. Then create a custom list containing everyone in the 21 day audience and no one from the 7 day audience. Bingo! Now you have to wait to see if it works.
Consumables
Another client sells a product which uses a consumable that they also sell. They reckon that people will need a refill after about 6 months. Using AdWords Remarketing, we are able to target people 6 months after they purchase with adverts for refills. Awesome!
Setting this up can be a bit more complicated.
If you want to target everyone who purchased but with a 6 month delay then you can use an existing Adwords conversion tracking code as a Remarketing tag. Then you can define your audiences as above.
If you need to target only people who purchased a particular product then you will need to insert a new remarketing tag into the conversion page only if the customer has bought the product. This might be easy or hard depending on your platform and web development team.
Seasonals
I manage several clients in the travel industry. I have setup a Remarketing audience for them that targets people who have converted 11 months down the line; just when they will be thinking about their next holiday!
Image from joiseyshowaa on Flickr
The maximum duration for a Remarketing audience membership is 540 days (nearly 18 months) so there is plenty of time to take into account all sorts of seasonal variation.
I hope this post has given you some Remarketing ideas. Leave a comment or find me on twitter if you have any other Remarketing tips.
Hi Richard,
Thanks for sharing your information.
I am testing a remarketing campaign for a client but there is something I just cant get my head around.
I have a new campaign for the remarketing and now have the audience but most of my budget is going on natural ads in the display network – 155 clicks on display network, 69 Impressions from my Audience, no clicks.
How do I reduce unwanted natural clicks in display network to allow for the remarketing campaign to expand as the audience gets bigger.
It seems as though to do remarketing you have to be prepared to spend a lot on the display network, or have I got this wrong.
We are currently using Remarketing to give a reminder for 30 days to all out website visitors that we exist, and plan to introduce the delay, negative pages etc. once we see it working.
If you have any thoughts on the above it would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you
Leonardo