We’ve all been there: sitting in front of the computer or scrolling along on your phone and seeing the one-millionth ad of the day. You can often ignore them but sometimes the ads jump out, not because they use bold fonts or bright colors but because you were just thinking about the very same product or service that’s being advertised via PPC.
As the consumer this can feel wild, like the device is inside your head, watching your every move and making note of your every thought. But as a business owner, you should know better.
This is the practice of retargeting ads and it’s a valuable one. No witchcraft of telepathy required.
When you’re paying to advertise your product or service, you want those ads to cut through all the noise and actually reach people who are interested in buying what you’re selling. That’s why you need retargeting.
First, let’s start with a typical series of events without retargeting.
A customer is looking for something similar to what your business provides. They enter some keywords into a search engine and end up on your website. Great news, right? This is a success of SEO and maybe even pay-per-click advertising. Not so quick.
The customer browses around the site, maybe even adds items to their cart or chats with the support, but ultimately leaves without making any purchases.
Without retargeting, this story ends there. So close to making a sale, yet still so far away. It’s frustrating and it can happen over and over again with piles of potential customers slipping through the cracks.
Here’s how the story can end differently, with a happy ending for everyone involved.
The same sequence of events takes place, but in this version, your business practices retargeting.
After the customer leaves your website, they are shown additional ads, often specifically referencing the items or pages they originally viewed on your site. You use the information you gleaned about them to show them just the right ad to make the conversion.
One of these ads catches their attention, so they click on it, come back to the website, and make the purchase, sign up for the email list, fill out a form, whatever the final desired action is. They’re happy, you’re happy; it’s all worked out and the credit goes to retargeting ads.
Although, if you want to tell people it’s all due to your superior business skills and product, we won’t argue.
The simple premise of retargeting is to show potential customers who have expressed some interest in your business highly relevant ads that convert them from potential customers to customers.
This can take a variety of forms so let’s look at some of them and compare.
Pixel marketing is the most common kind of retargeting. And no, it doesn’t mean the ads are blurry and pixelated.
Pixel-based retargeting works by putting a line of code (otherwise known as a pixel) on your website. The pixel then puts an anonymous browser cookie in each of the visitors’ browsers as they come to your website or landing page.
They then leave the site but the pixel allows your ad provider (e.g. Google Ads, Facebook retargeting) to start showing your specific ads to these visitors.
You’ll be able to glean lots of information about visitors to your website through this method and retarget them accordingly. Want to target a visitor who clicked on a specific product page but didn’t follow through to adding to the cart or checking out? You can do it with pixel retargeting.
Sometimes pixel retargeting can come in the form of serving very specific ads showing visitors the exact products they viewed on your site, a practice called dynamic retargeting. It can be beneficial in that potential customers are reminded of the exact thing they were interested in, but some may find it intrusive and disquieting.
List-based retargeting is a more traditional kind of retargeting where you show ads to existing customers or visitors who provided you with some level of personal information like an email address.
You can email these people directly or upload the list to your retargeting platform of choice and have the retargeting campaign address them according to what you already know. It’s a slightly less sophisticated technique but it can still be extremely effective.
The major con with list-based retargeting is that you won’t be able to go after customers who have only minimally engaged with your website, but you can achieve that through other methods.
On-platform retargeting is most used on social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. If you post a video on Facebook, you can choose to retarget specifically those who watched the majority of the video.
It’s a different way of gathering information on the potential customer’s interest in your business and can also work well.
Showing users things they’ve expressed an interest in is already how these sites work, so your ads will generally fit right in.
Going back to our little story from earlier, what if the customer targeted in the retargeted ad campaign sees the ads for the business they were interested in and decides they aren’t actually interested at all? Isn’t it all a big waste of time and money?
Simply put, no. And there are a few reasons for that.
Marketing and advertising are always going to be a numbers game. There may be lots of fish in the sea but you’re never going to catch them all, even the ones right near your boat.
What you can do is narrow the holes in the net you’re casting so fewer fish get away. But enough with the fish metaphors.
Let’s put it into hard numbers. If you liked math in school, this will be your favorite part.
Website visitors who have been retargeted with display ads are more likely to convert by a whopping 70%. That’s 7-0 percent. Not good enough for you?
How about the fact that retargeted ads have a click-through rate that is 10X higher than regular display ads?
What about the evidence that retargeting campaigns can produce crazy returns on investment, as was the case with one company, Watchfinder, which achieved a 1,300% ROI over six months?
Of course, every business will see different conversion levels with their retargeting campaigns, but the numbers show they can be incredibly effective. So effective, in fact, that you’d really be silly not to get in on the action.
But if you really want to increase the success of your remarketing campaign, follow these tips:
This may be the most important tip of them all, which is why we’ve put it at the top. Do you hear that? If you’re only going to pay attention to one of these, make it this one!
One of the worst things you can do is to bombard potential customers with too many ads. Customers have expressed frustration and annoyance regarding repetitive ads that seem to follow them around wherever they go online.
Don’t be the creepy business harassing would-be customers. It’s not a good look or a good strategy.
On the other side, use too few impressions and your ads may never breakthrough, even to the interested customers you are specifically going after. Show them enough to keep them thinking about your business but not so many you turn them off of it.
Essentially, you want just the right number of impressions. A Goldilocks amount, if you will. Not too many and not too few.
You may think that just because retargeting goes after customers who have already expressed an interest, that the ads don’t have to be as eye-catching the second (and third and …) time around.
Well, cast that thought from your mind. Lock it out and throw away the key.
Ad design will always be important. It may even be more important in retargeting.
You need to make sure the ads are recognizable and tie directly to your brand. Variety in ad type is also valuable here since customers can find the same ad over and over again much less appealing than a bunch of different ones.
This goes with tip #1 but it deserves its own shoutout. Don’t go after recent customers right after they’ve made a purchase.
If a customer is won over by your ads, decides to buy something, and then is immediately inundated with more ads, it will feel more like a punishment than a friendly suggestion.
An annoyed customer is not likely to become a repeat customer. And if you happen to make the critical error of serving them an ad for the very product they just purchased? Forget it.
You should be conscious of where each potential customer is in the sale funnel and make sure that your retargeting campaigns reflect that.
The value of the retargeting campaign compared to any ordinary ad campaign is that you already have additional information about the potential customers and their interest in your business.
Don’t waste that information by doing nothing with it. Create specific ads and different campaigns depending on what level of interaction the customers have engaged in and what product types they showed interest in.
As with any marketing campaign, a critical component is consistent monitoring and evaluation.
Tracking conversions, whichever conversion you’re aiming for, whether it’s sales, email signups, or views, is a great way to know how your retargeting campaign is going.
If something’s not working right, this is how you can find out and fix it. And if everything’s perfect, well, you’ll want to know that, too, so you can keep doing what works.
Find the right metrics that work for you and track them religiously.
As you may be able to see at this point, retargeting, while very beneficial, isn’t always the simplest strategy to implement. There are lots of different factors and best practices to stay on top of to get the process to pay off the way you hope.
If you want to be sure that you get the full rewards of a retargeting ad campaign, go to the professionals.
At PPC.co, we have a team of marketing experts that will help ensure your first-time visitors don’t stay one-time visitors. We do the heavy lifting on the retargeting front so the potential customers who are most likely to make a purchase are right there, ready to be wowed by your business.
Play your cards right and you’ll have swaths of new customers who keep coming back. That’s the potential for a crazy high return on investment.
Don’t leave money on the table by using a poor performing PPC marketing agency. Start using retargeting by engaging our PPC retargeting service.
Throughout his extensive 10+ year journey as a digital marketer, Sam has left an indelible mark on both small businesses and Fortune 500 enterprises alike. His portfolio boasts collaborations with esteemed entities such as NASDAQ OMX, eBay, Duncan Hines, Drew Barrymore, Price Benowitz LLP, a prominent law firm based in Washington, DC, and the esteemed human rights organization Amnesty International. In his role as a technical SEO and digital marketing strategist, Sam takes the helm of all paid and organic operations teams, steering client SEO services, link building initiatives, and white label digital marketing partnerships to unparalleled success. An esteemed thought leader in the industry, Sam is a recurring speaker at the esteemed Search Marketing Expo conference series and has graced the TEDx stage with his insights. Today, he channels his expertise into direct collaboration with high-end clients spanning diverse verticals, where he meticulously crafts strategies to optimize on and off-site SEO ROI through the seamless integration of content marketing and link building.
Throughout his extensive 10+ year journey as a digital marketer, Sam has left an indelible mark on both small businesses and Fortune 500 enterprises alike. His portfolio boasts collaborations with esteemed entities such as NASDAQ OMX, eBay, Duncan Hines, Drew Barrymore, Price Benowitz LLP, a prominent law firm based in Washington, DC, and the esteemed human rights organization Amnesty International. In his role as a technical SEO and digital marketing strategist, Sam takes the helm of all paid and organic operations teams, steering client SEO services, link building initiatives, and white label digital marketing partnerships to unparalleled success. An esteemed thought leader in the industry, Sam is a recurring speaker at the esteemed Search Marketing Expo conference series and has graced the TEDx stage with his insights. Today, he channels his expertise into direct collaboration with high-end clients spanning diverse verticals, where he meticulously crafts strategies to optimize on and off-site SEO ROI through the seamless integration of content marketing and link building.
When you want to use paid search marketing platforms, Google Ads often leads the list. Because of its versatility, simplicity, and popularity, it’s obvious why it’s a popular choice. But when you drop all of your PPC advertising money into one marketing strategy, you could lose some leads.
That’s why some businesses explore paid advertising marketing outside of Google, with many turning to Linkedin Ads.
Google Ads and Linkedin Ads are highly efficient ways to market your products and services to businesses and consumers. But each marketing channel has its advantages and disadvantages. Whatever you choose, make sure you discuss the matter with your web development company.
Below is a closer look at each option.
We think it’s reasonable to conclude that Google reaches a vast audience worldwide – its ad reach is a stunning 4 billion people. Google search handles about 70% of desktop searches, and many companies report that they get about 90% of their organic traffic from the search engines. Also, up to 95% of the mobile search market comes from Google.
People use Google’s search a lot, and having the ability to target search terms with specific search ads is a massive benefit of Adwords. People tend to search for very specific things in Google, so if you can customize your Google advertising for your targeted audience, you’ll receive plenty of leads.
So, we can assume that most people’s targeted audience uses Google to some degree. That’s a massive advantage for companies when they want to target an audience.
However, businesses that want to narrow down their search may have issues getting their Google ads settings right with both Google Ads. And if you blunder when segmenting your audiences, your digital ad campaign could suffer.
LinkedIn features a narrower audience – 500 million users – namely businesses and business professionals. But this more limited audience makes it the perfect place for effective B2B marketing. LinkedIn lets marketers serve online ads to decision-makers and vital audience members in several ways.
Summary: For B2B firms that want to reach decision-makers, Linkedin is a terrific advertising platforms. If your B2C company intends to increase its reach, Google Ads could be the best fit.
When you target your audience with Google Ads, you have a few options: location, affinity, technology, buyer behavior, demographics, and interactions with your app or website.
No matter how much you know about your buyer, you may struggle to avoid clicks from worthless leads that cost too much.
In some cases on Google, people may not even know what they’re looking for. You can try to advertise to your desired targeted audience on Google Ads, but it can be challenging to get to the precise people who will most likely buy what you sell.
When people sign up for LinkedIn, they usually provide many details, such as their occupation, title/job title, experience, industry, education, interests, and more. All of this information can be leveraged for great advantage when you start your marketing campaigns.
Also, LinkedIn users can join many groups, start conversations, and obtain followers. The data is priceless when you want to target a specific audience and market to them. LinkedIn also has a Matched Audience that helps advertisers match their email marketing lists and website visitors with users on LinkedIn.
Many marketing experts think that LinkedIn Ads offer more value. LinkedIn has refined targeting, and you can make your product known to them so that you can tell them about something they didn’t know existed.
Summary: For B2B and B2C companies looking for a broad audience, Google Ads has enough targeting features. But for B2B firms that want to target specific groups, LinkedIn Ads has about 100 segmentation methods for micro targeting.
When you want lead generation, Google Ads has a broader reach and is the most effective. First, you can bring in a lot of prospects to your site without breaking the bank. The audience you’re after on Google visits the search giant with the idea to find the best product or service. This makes generating leads easier.
Getting leads from LinkedIn can be more challenging. Users of the platform may sign in to read industry news or talk to group members. No matter how perfect your ad is, viewers may not be in the mood to buy anything.
That said, Linkedin has a way to target ad leads through in-site messaging, which can generate plenty of leads.
When it comes down to dollars and cents, LinkedIn Ads usually are more pricey than Google Ads. As in Google, you can select cost-per-click or cost-per-impression.
LinkedIn also features a cost-per-send for InMail advertising. Typically, you’ll pay about $5 for each click, $6 for 1,000 impressions, and .80 for each send.
With Google Ads, the average CPC is $1. But to leverage that low cost, you need to work on your audience segmentation. If you don’t your ROI may be below what you want.
Summary: Advertising budgets for each platform depends on several factors. On average, Google Ads cost less than LinkedIn Ads. If your B2B company has a tight budget, you may want to focus on a limited variety of LinkedIn ads instead of a broad range of Google Ads.
So should you advertise with Google Ads vs LinkedIn Ads? Yes!
What we mean is, it depends. The correct choice depends on your budget, product or service offered, marketing goals, and target audience. You should not assume that when you need a digital marketing campaign, Google Analytics Adwords is the only choice.
It’s critical to evaluate the market, understand who your buyer is, and make a data-driven decision about the best marketing platform to reach your well-defined goals. One type of company might do better with Google Ads, and another may find LinkedIn Ads preferable.
The great news is you don’t need to choose between the two platforms. Many businesses use both, as well as Facebook, Instagram, and others. If you have the budget, it may pay off to diversify your paid search advertising to get the best ROI.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Digital marketing is a classic marketing strategy that’s commonly used to supplement organic web traffic, but it’s hardly the most straightforward way to increase your site’s audience. In fact, from a technological perspective, it’s a rather fussy practice. That’s why brands that want to include a PPC marketing strategy in their overall strategic decisions need to work with an experienced agency. Agencies facilitate ad distribution, track clicks, and calculate fees – and the best ones can help their clients thrive. Unfortunately, there are a lot of subpar agencies and bad actors out there, and you need to know how to spot them.
So, how do you know if it’s time to fire your PPC agencies? Keep an eye out for these 9 red flags. They could indicate you’re working with the wrong agency and that it’s time to make a move.
Companies leave their PPC agencies behind for all sorts of reasons, but according to a 2015 report by the Society for Digital Agencies (SoDA), the most common reasons include outgrowing the agency’s capabilities, cost overruns, and dissatisfaction with their strategy. These are all valid reasons, and ultimately many of them can be reduced to an agency’s failure to generate any or enough growth. After all, disliking the agency’s strategy isn’t likely to be much of a problem if that strategy is generating major growth. Similarly, a brand is unlikely to view itself as having outgrown the agency is their accounts continue to grow.
Ultimately, what these different reasons for firing PPC agencies demonstrate is that, any way you slice it, no one wants to work with an agency that isn’t making them money. So, while it might take a little while for your PPC ads to gain traction, if you’re not seeing growth based on the launch of or changes to your PPC campaign, it’s time to move on to a different agency.
While most brands work with a PPC advertising agency to run their campaigns, it’s not only possible but advisable for you to set up your own accounts with the major PPC advertising platforms, which include sites like Google AdWords, Yahoo, and Facebook. Still, if you’re not the most technologically savvy, it can be tempting to let your agency do it for you. Don’t give in to the impulse. Instead, ask them to guide you through it so that you can ensure that you’re the one with owner access rights.
Unless you have the owner access rights to your company’s PPC accounts, you can’t be sure you have unmediated access to your campaign metrics or feel good/ confident that you’ll be able to transfer your accounts to another agency or bring them in-house if needed. In other words, your agency could be misrepresenting best results to you or could refuse to relinquish control if you end your contract. You need to retain those rights and then give your PPC agent the appropriate permissions to manage your campaigns. If they balk at this arrangement, show them the door.
Typically, when you look at your company’s profile on a site like Google AdWords, you’ll see that your PPC agency has set up specific goals to help your business grow. These commonly include such metrics as Cost Per Acquisition, Return On Advertising Spend, and Cost Per Lead, though there are plenty of other valuable metrics that are worth tracking. Such measurements assure you that you’re spending your Digital marketing money in the right place, help you budget for ad spending, and offer insights into what’s working and what isn’t.
Unfortunately, you’ll occasionally encounter PPC advertising agencies that fail to set up these metric reports, and they’re not to be trusted. Even if they claim to be using an in-house system, it’s your right to demand they use the standard reporting system for each PPC platform and to fire them if they refuse to. Dashboard-based metrics exist to provide consistent measurements regarding the success of PPC campaigns ad those are the numbers you want to reference.
In a similar vein, some PPC advertising agencies skip the core metrics noted above in favor of less valuable but more appealing “vanity metrics.” Vanity metrics don’t help your business make money and they offer limited insight into your operations. Examples of vanity metrics include any campaign value based on impressions, engagement metrics that don’t drive conversions, and even many of the behavior-based metrics that used to be considered the gold standard in website evaluation, such as bounce rate or time on site.
Ultimately, vanity metrics don’t serve your company because they can be created artificially. An untrustworthy PPC agency might drive up engagement numbers by sharing a great meme on your brand’s landing pages, which will drive likes and other reactions, but won’t actually funnel clients to your site or create sales. Similarly, you can get a huge number of impressions by getting your PPC new ads onto a very popular site, but if no one is clicking on it, all you’ve got is a tally of how many people visited/ web traffic to someone else’s website.
Having the right metrics is important, but if you’re going to meet your goals then your Good PPC agency needs to be adjusting your account settings regularly to refine your campaigns. At a minimum, that means accessing your account to regularly monitoring and fine-tune the settings at least once a week. Such regular check-ins allow your agency to quickly adjust your social media campaigns based on updates to the search engines algorithm, catch any conversion mistakes that could cost your company money, and even react to competitors campaigns.
Be sure that you not only ask your PPC agency how often they access and update your accounts, but that you’re also checking your accounts regularly for updates. The reality is that, although many companies run PPC campaigns, only 10% of AdWords accounts are updated weekly. If your PPC agency can’t meet that standard, ditch them for one that will stay on top of your campaigns.
Just as your PPC agency needs to be fine tuning your accounts regularly, they should also be reporting back on your campaigns at least monthly. While seeing week-to-week progress would be great, as with many kinds of growth, this can be hard to evaluate. Comprehensive, monthly reports, on the other hand, can help you see what your agency has been doing on your behalf, how your accounts are growing, and allow you to be an active participant in your Digital marketing strategy.
Never settle for a company that doesn’t offer substantive reporting. While great reports may offer added insights from your account manager or more labor intensive explanatory work, the majority of PPC reporting is automated – any company that doesn’t provide it is just lazy.
It’s unrealistic to expect that you’ll speak to the same person every time you contact your PPC agency; that doesn’t even happen at your bank or your doctor’s office. That being said, there should be one person who acts as the lead on your account because that allows them to master your brand’s voice, develop a big picture strategy, and generally build up a knowledge base around your brand’s needs and preferences. They might be busy or out of the office occasionally, but anyone whose experienced both approaches – a core account manager and a rotating cast of agents – can tell you that having a point person makes a difference.
If your PPC agency doesn’t have you working with a single, core agent, you may want to ask a few questions to get a better sense of what’s happening. Do they have an unusual in-house strategy, or are they having trouble with employee retention? Do they think it doesn’t make a difference? You can also request that they place you with a single representative, but if that’s not their standard practice already, you’re probably better off going elsewhere. It just doesn’t bode well.
Google AdWords isn’t a new program and there are plenty of other PPC programs out there, but if an agency is committed to this work, then they should have complete Google’s AdWords certification program. You can check on this by asking them to show you their Premier Partner page – it really is that simple. Not having one isn’t necessarily the worst offense a company can commit, but it’s a good indicator that you can do better and should commit your ads spend elsewhere.
Did you pick your PPC agency based on their portfolio of appealing PPC ads/ads or optimized images? That’s a great starting point – it certainly indicates that they can do high-quality work – but it’s not enough if they’re not actually showing you your brand’s own ads before they launch them. Obvious, right? It should be, but many entrepreneurs have been duped by PPC agencies who tell them that their ad is similar to another ad product, which is called ad copy; the client, not wanting to be pushy, walks away with their own notion of their brand’s ad, and meanwhile the agency may not have done any work at all.
Your PPC agency should be giving you the final say on all your paid ads, so if you’ve supposedly got a campaign running and you haven’t seen your ads, ask to see them right away. Odds are good that if your agency isn’t showing you your PPC ads before launching them that they either don’t exist or they’re extremely low quality for online visibility. Great PPC agencies are proud of their work and they want you to see it. Anything less should raise concerns.
Hiring an agency to manage your PPC campaigns will obviously cost more than just the fees for the campaign itself, but the costs involved in running ads with your agency shouldn’t be confusing. That’s because, ultimately, your money should only be going two different places – to the agency and to the ad platform – and everyone at the company should be clear on the split. So, when we say you should be wary about confusing fees, we’re not talking about total cost (that’s a matter for you and your budget), but rather about how the money is split up. For any payment there should be the fee to the agency and the ads spend and it should always be obvious what the division is there.
As popular as PPC marketing is with businesses today, many of the agencies that execute these campaigns don’t do a very good job. They’re wasting your ad spend and your time, and you deserve better. That’s why you should switch to PPC.co’s PPC Management Service.
At PPC.co, we’re committed to ensuring that your ads are reaching the right audience and we know that most agencies just don’t deliver that. Starting from our understanding that website conversions often top out at 2%, we emphasize PPC marketing that pairs first contacts with retargeting efforts to ensure that your brand remains a top-of-mind solution for past visitors. A non-converting visitor is often just someone who hasn’t seen the right content yet, and we want to help you make those connections.
What else makes our PPC Management program stand out? With dual Google Ads and Google Analytics certifications, we have a deep understanding of the systems & AdWords account that get your ads seen and can use tracking data to its fullest potential of web traffic. In fact, that’s why we start every client engagement with a full PPC audit, because even when we’re not leading the campaigns, our skilled professionals can quickly see what’s working and what’s falling short in your current campaigns. From the start, we put our expertise to work for you.
If your PPC agency has exhibited any of the above warning signs, you can’t afford to wait around for progress. It’s time for the protection of business and moves on – to PPC.co. Contact us today to learn more about our PPC Management Services and say goodbye to wasted ad spend and rock bottom conversions. Once you’ve seen the difference a top PPC agency can make in your campaigns, you’ll never believe you let anyone else handle your PPC needs.
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