Remarking and retargeting are useful components of Google Ads and a crucial part of any PPC marketing campaign, that is if you understand and use it correctly. Before we break down how best to use PPC remarketing campaigns, banner ads to increase the return rates of online advertising customers, we’ll explain exactly what it is, how it works, and ways to use it.
Marketers may know what remarketing campaigns is, but even experts may find they don’t know everything about it. This guide will help to plug those gaps and become the ultimate resource for people using PPC remarketing Campaigns.
Remarketing Campaigns is essentially targeting ads to existing customers based on customer data. The types and variety of ads will differ based on customer preferences, market data, and a number of other factors.
This type of marketing is highly effective at getting existing shoppers to return to a site once they have already visited. It works by showing them things they may be interested in. This can be sales, new products, add-ons to existing products and services, new content on the site, and other types of marketing material or promotions.
The purpose is to increase the rate of repeat customer traffic through highly specific targeted ads marketing.
The one thing to note about remarketing campaigns or strategies is that they rely on existing customer data to perform well. Remarketing compaigns is not a customer acquisition strategy so the distinction should be made. You can’t collect customer preference data on people who aren’t your customers yet right?
So basically, before you even create remarketing campaigns you need customers who are already interested in your site (which means past visitors), and who have at least visited your site before or past visitors). That’s step one, remember it.
The reason customer data is needed for remarketing Campaign(besides the fact that it targets customers’ interests) is that the primary way that remarketing data is collected is through everyone’s favorite internet snack food, cookies. In this case, we’re talking about specific tracking cookies that are stored on users’ browsers and then used to follow them around the web and show them remarketing ads, ok maybe it’s not that specific but you get a general idea.
This can be done with the click of a button in Google Ads, it’s a button labeled remarketing. It allows you to set the tracking cookie requirements based on several different factors, duration of stay, pages visited, etc.
Every time a customer visits your site, cookies are collected which store a variety of user data that is relevant to your marketing work. Part of that data allows you to target customers with ads so that they will be more likely to visit your site and shop again. This is essentially why it’s called PPC remarketing, you’re performing targeted marketing/targeted ads marketing to existing customers or interested parties, hence you’re remarketing to them.
This doesn’t always mean that you’re targeting people you’ve already converted, but people who may have visited your site and not yet converted. In a sense, you’re marketing to existing customers and potential customers who’ve shown interest enough to visit but haven’t actually made that purchase yet. If you think of it as shopping, they’ve clicked add to cart, but haven’t yet pressed that checkout button. You’re giving them that last little push to come back and checkout with their cart full of goodies (or whatever else it is you’re trying to get them to do).
Now that you know a bit about remarketing Campaign and how the data is gathered as well as what it’s used for, you can begin to formulate a remarketing Campaign strategy to get those customers and potential customers returning and converting, hopefully again and again. To facilitate easier understand of the strategizing process, we’ll break down the process into pieces that’ll be more digestible, even for the marketing novice (we realize some of you reading this may already have a great deal of marketing space, but we like to cover our bases, this is the ultimate guide after all).
Also called segmenting, this basically means dividing your potential remarketing audience into different groups or ad-target types. This should be fairly straightforward and based on the data acquired.
Segmenting your audience ensures you’re not targeting the wrong type of ads to the wrong people. You want your remarketing ad usage to be as highly targeted as possible with remarketing Campaign and dividing up your audience helps to facilitate that.
There are numerous types of ads and deciding which type of ads to run for your target audience will be based on the data you have available and what works best for that particular audience.
There are enough ad types to create an entirely separate section, so we’ll break down the ad types and their uses elsewhere. One thing to note about picking your ad types is that Google allows you to create lists based on your ad type preferences for the audience.
Additionally, you can filter data and sort targets based on many factors, this helps you to decide what types of ads may work best. After all, different types of people have different search habits, such as how prone they are to search on mobile, how likely they are to watch video ads, and other things.
As with anything in marketing, before you know what really works, you’ll have to test it first. In the case of PPC retargeting ads, you may have lots of customer data, but that doesn’t mean you can always account for individual taste.
That’s why it’s important to test your marketing efforts and allow the data to coalesce until you’re sure of what is and isn’t working. Like any other marketing strategy, pulling the plug too early on a campaign means wasted efforts, but by the same token, letting a bad campaign run too long is wasted money and effort as well.
Test your methods and figure out what works, what kinda works, and what doesn’t work at all.
Like every other ad you’ll ever run, search engine optimization is key. Once you have a good idea of what works, you can begin to optimize for search engines. This is pretty much the same process as regular ads, just more specified to your target audience.
This includes optimizing for conversions too. Sale ads, special features and other types of ads that show customers what they’re missing out on is a great example of ways to optimize conversion when remarketing.
Before we talk any more about Remarketing Campaigns ad types and getting your specific strategy together, let’s talk about narrowing down and filtering your audience so that you know you’re targeting the right people. No matter the strategy, if you’re targeting the wrong audience, it’s likely wasted effort.
Imagine folks wanting to see a comedy show arriving at a talk on timeshares, you’d instantly lose your audience and nobody would buy a timeshare.
You can honestly target an audience in any number of ways. You can eliminate targets on the same basis as well. But essentially you’ll want to break your groups of targets down into manageable groups.
Beyond the basic demographic targeting options, which serve to narrow down audience gender, age-range, and other factors, there are a number of other things to look out for when trying to decide who to target.
For instance, one strategy is to target customers who hover on particular product pages. You could assume they are looking for a particular style of product or looking to see which one is cheapest or has the fastest delivery, factors such as that.
Knowing these possibilities you can create an audience category and then select ads that will target their interest.
As we said earlier, there is an endless number of ways to target a potential audience. Think about what you’re trying to do, what customers you’re trying to increase, and target according to those metrics.
It’s just as important who you don’t target in some sense. If you already have a segment of your market that regular ads are working for, then you don’t want to waste time and money remarketing to them.
One last tip on audience targeting is to narrow things down as much as possible. Target particular customers for particular URLs and make that a separate list. Say you want an audience to target sneakers, you can select the audience and target the ads to get them to shop specifically on your sneaker product pages.
In many cases, the more precise the targeting, the better.
Once you have all of your data, or before if you prefer, all of the setup to create lists of audiences and to target them for tracking and data collection can be done from the admin tab of your Google Ads account.
From the admin tab, you can set audience definitions based on a wide array of factors. This lets you customize your target audience to a great degree and gives you control over data tracking.
You can then create lists of those audiences and name them whatever you choose or even sub-divide them even more so that you can keep track of them even better. You’ll need to agree to some terms and conditions and be an active Google Ads Remarketing user, but once the “paperwork” is complete you’ll have access to create lists and also to determine how long you’d like your tracking cookies to stay stored on a user’s computer. This helps you set the targets for short-term or long-term campaigns or for whatever duration you’d like.
You can even set the frequency at which any given user will be shown your ads. It’s a good idea to set reasonable limits on these as too many ads can turn users off entirely. Remember, the idea is to nudge them into conversion, not scream at them until they convert.
There are a number of remarketing campaigns options that Google Ads allows you to choose from. Rather than just list them for you, we’ll discuss the main ones and ways they can be used to target an audience.
You can think of this as baseline marketing. This feature shows ads to browsers as they search the web or use apps on Google display network/display ad network. These are the conventional ad type and are best targeted towards the “browsing” type of users. Those people that go from page to page and typically like to look at lots of different things.
This type of remarketing shows ads to users of products that they’ve looked at before. This is good for those users that “shop” a lot (perhaps on an ecommerce site) but leave the cart full without checking out with it. This works on window shoppers too, the ones that don’t add to the cart but like to view product pages.
This is targeted remarketing optimized for your mobile website visitors or mobile app. As we said at the beginning, all that data allows you to know what users are browsing on and how often. If you know that your audience is frequent mobile browsers, then this option will help you target them.
This is just what it sounds like. It targets audiences and shows them search ads as they search Google. This display ads in their search results. This type of marketing works best on those users that just need a subtle reminder of what you sell or do. Those users that are on the doorstep of converting and just need a nudge are good for these ads.
Just as it sounds, this shows video ads to users as part of the Google display ad/ads network or for users of Youtube. This is great if you know that users are constantly watching videos. A short impactful ad can grab attention and make people want to traffic your site again and hopefully convert.
The most specific of the marketing types, if you correspond with customers via email, you can upload these to your Google Ads account and it will serve up ads as long as customers are signed into Google services.
Now that you know all about the ad types and how to use them, the last thing to worry about is SEO. Just like any other Digital marketing campaign, you’ll want to optimize all the elements of these ads to maximize rank and conversion chance.
We’ll break it down into sections so that you understand the different optimization strategies to make your ad campaigns work best.
This sounds simple, but you want to make sure your ads will work to drive traffic and convert. This can be a long process as you test and retest to ensure accurate results but this is key to the whole campaign.
As we talked about, you can adjust your audience settings and frequency of ads on the fly. You should be routinely checking and testing these to ensure your target market is correct and that you have the ad density correct.
The wrong audience target can mean wasted ads. Too much ad saturation for users can make users less prone to revisit instead of more prone. Finding the balance is tricky but worth putting the time into to get it right.
This should be self-explanatory but you’re looking at three things in particular. ROI, CTR, and IS. That’s the return on investment, how much money you’re getting for every ad dollar spent, click-through rate, how many times customers follow through and click to your site, and impression share, basically how much recognition your ads are getting. One quick note on impression share, if this is too high, you’re likely upsetting some customers.
Just as tricky as with standard Digital marketing campaigns, making sure the page is relevant, the text is useful and the page is able to tell potential customers what they want to know about the product or service is key.
You should be used to optimizing your landing pages for keywords and user experience. The process here is the same, make sure the users are getting what they want out of the landing page and continuing on to convert.
There’s no magic formula for remarketing but the general rule of the thumb is to target customers who have the potential to revisit and convert. You’re not mass marketing to everybody who’s ever visited your site. Some of them can’t be converted and others will return on their own.
That’s why we said to make your audiences as specific as possible. This lets you target just the niches of customers that are useful to you and eliminates a lot of the non-contenders.
Our other tip is to stay focused on whatever it is you do. You might call it brand focus. You want to draw in people who’ve visited your site. They likely already know a bit about you, so stay on brand and on point. In this way remarketing and PPC can help to do nothing more than improve your brand online.
Lastly, accept what you can and let go of what you can’t. You won’t win every target audience, not everyone you remarket to will convert and some campaigns may have more success than others. Particularly during sales or the holidays, you may see more from your remarketing than during other periods. Accept it and limit your risk or change your strategy so that you don’t waste ad dollars. Once you find your own rhythm, you’ll likely be winning more conversions and spending less.
There you have it, our ultimate guide to PPC remarketing. Hopefully, it’s taught you everything you ever needed to know about run remarketing campaigns’ target selection and everything in between to make your campaign a success & up on Digital marketing.
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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.
