AdWords Remarketing: A Step-by-Step Guide

Retargeting, or remessaging, is an advertising strategy that allows you to target users who have visited your website with ads to entice them to return to your site. It is generally used to encourage users who didn’t convert to come back to complete a purchase or other conversion step. But, it can also be used for a variety of reasons including product upsells, branding and social engagement. AdWords Remarketing is Google’s version of retargeting advertising. It is an easy platform to get started with retargeting in an interface that you’re already used to as an AdWords customer.

Setting up AdWords Remarketing

Identifying Your Audiences

Audiences are the groups of people you want to target or groups of people you want to exclude from targeting. Audiences will be unique to your business. You will need to determine which pages will be triggers to retarget users and which pages will remove that retargeting — each of these is an audience. You will include or exclude these audiences for each ad group to ensure you are targeting the right people. This is achieved with custom combinations, discussed in detail below.
1. Audience: People who visited a key page

• If a user viewed a page with details about a specific product or service, target them with ads about that offering

Custom combination: People who added an item to a shopping cart but didn’t complete the purchase

• The “added to shopping cart” audience included and the “complete purchase” audience excluded
• Entice these users back to complete the purchase with a free shipping or discount offer

2. Audience: People who signed up to receive information about future product releases

• When the product is released, target these users with ads for that product

Custom combination: People who visited part 1 in a content series but didn’t return for part 2

• The “viewed part 1 page” audience included and the “viewed part 2 page” audience excluded
• Delayed targeting (discussed below) can be used to schedule targeting at optimal intervals

3. Audience: People who submitted your contact form

• When users land on your thank you page, they become part of this audience

Custom combination: People who view your contact form but don’t submit it

• The “viewed contact form” audience included and the “viewed thank you page” audience excluded

Use your analytics sales funnel to find key points to retarget users. At this point in the process you should have a list of URLs that you want to use to tag visitors to retarget them and a list of pages that should deactivate the targeting. You will want to organize these pages into either unique audiences or combinations and give them descriptive names. These names will be used in the next step. You may want to create a spreadsheet that shows every audience and combination you want to create:

Audience and custom combination targets are set at the ad group level. So, you do not need a campaign for each combination; you can create a retargeting campaign with ad groups for each custom combination or free-standing audience that you have identified. You do not need to put any keywords in retargeting ad groups as the ads only display based on the audiences you define.

Creating Remarketing Lists

Once you have identified your audiences/custom combinations and created the ad groups for each, you will navigate to the Audiences tab within AdWords. If this tab isn’t visible, click the arrow to the right of the tabs and check the box next to “Audiences – Display Network only.” Here you will select your retargeting campaign and the first ad group you want to set up.  Alternatively, you can click on Shared Library and Audiences from the fly out on the left side of the Campaign view within the AdWords UI. Click on the New Audience button and choose Remarketing List. Remarketing lists are how you define your audiences and generate the code that you will place on your site to cookie visitors.
Create a remarketing list for each of your previously defined audiences. You will want to enter a descriptive title for ease of management, and you may want to use the description in case there is a question about what audience you are targeting.
Membership duration is how long the cookie should stay active once the user is tagged. This will be different for every business and may be different for each target. If your product has a long buying cycle, you may want to increase the membership duration. However, you do not want to retarget people for long after their decision process is complete as you may annoy those who no longer want to see your ad.
Tags are the code snippets that you will place on your website. For this initial setup, you will choose “create new remarketing tag” each time. When we discuss delayed retargeting at the end of this post, we will use “select from existing tags.” Save the new remarketing list and proceed through your list until you have a tag for each audience. Once you’ve created the remarketing lists you will click on the list name under the “Tags/Rules” column to access the code. I recommend pasting each tag into its own notepad file and saving it as the name of the Audience. This will help you organize everything for implementation in the website.
Send the tags you saved along with detailed instructions to place the code only on the specific pages indicated for each tag to your developer. Make sure he or she knows to place it between the body tags and specify that it should not replace any other AdWords or Analytics tracking code you have on the website. These tags are used in addition to the conversion-tracking and statistics-tracking codes you may already employ.
Make sure to verify that the correct code was placed on each page. This step is vital and frequently done incorrectly, leading to poor ad targeting.

Creating Custom Combinations

Once your remarketing lists are created, return to your retargeting campaign, choose the first ad group and visit the Audiences tab again. Select “custom combinations” if it isn’t already selected. At the bottom of the white box displayed on this page there is a link that says “new custom combination.” Click this link to create your combination of audiences.  Enter the name of the custom combination and a description. In most cases you will leave “all of these audiences” selected in the first drop down.
Click on the “select audiences” drop down and change the “interest category” drop down selection to “Remarketing lists.” Now you want to add the remarketing list that initially tags the user and click the OK button. In the case of the example shown below, we are going to target all users who placed a product in the shopping cart but didn’t complete the purchase. So, we want to add the remarketing list named “Used Shopping Cart.” After saving this setting, click the small blue “add another” link and change the first drop down to “none of these audiences.” Here you will add the remarketing list that removes the cookie that was placed by the tag from the previously included remarketing list. In our example below, we add the remarketing list named “Completed a purchase” because we do not want to retarget people who did convert.

Remarketing Ads

Once you’ve assigned custom combinations to each ad group, you’ll want to upload text and banner ads that match the goal of the ad group. Remember that remarketing ads are being served to people who have already seen your website. Also, you may be targeting people who took specific action on your website. Your ad creative needs to reflect this. Depending on the audience you are targeting, you may want to use ads that:

• Offer a discount or free shipping as incentive to complete an abandoned purchase
• Offer a complementary product if they’ve recently purchased from you
• Remind the user why you are better than your competition
• Show the user a photo of a product he or she viewed
• Ask a recently converted user to subscribe to your newsletter for product updates
• Try a different message than used in other ad campaigns

Testing ad creative is even more important with remarketing campaigns because you are appealing to people who didn’t perform an action you wanted them to perform. They have already seen your website and left for one reason or another. Maybe they were just interrupted and need a reminder about your business. Or, they may not have liked your prices, shopping cart or product selection. You need to carefully test your ad creative to ensure you are appealing to the users instead of leaving them with a negative view of your brand.

Remarketing Landing Pages

In some cases, you can direct users back to regular pages within your website when they click on remarketing ads. For instance, if you are retargeting people who looked at a pair of jeans but didn’t add them to their shopping carts, you could retarget them with an ad featuring the jeans and bring them to the product detail page for those jeans when they click on the ad. But if you are offering something new in the ad, such as a discount, or if your ad has drastically different messaging than is reflected on your website, you will want to develop custom landing pages for your remarketing efforts. The landing pages need to deliver what is promised in the ad, such as a code for free shipping or a list of products related to the one they recently purchased from you.

Frequency Capping

Frequency capping is a setting at the campaign-level that allows you to limit the number of times your ads are displayed to each user in a 24-hour period. There is no magic number for frequency capping, although it is believed that a rate between 7 and 12 impressions per day is ideal. You will want to test how changes to frequency capping affect your campaign. I recommend starting with a larger frequency cap and reducing it after you gather initial data. Continue to gather data and make frequency changes until you find the point where your campaigns perform the best. The default setting is “no cap on impressions,” which will very quickly make your target users feel stalked, so you will want to change this setting to a lower number right away.

Remarketing Campaign Optimization

Your remarketing campaign must be optimized like all other advertising campaigns. You will want to test various ads and landing pages as well as different custom combinations. You may find that certain combinations don’t produce the results you need for your ROI goals. If you no longer want to target those audiences, you can simply pause the associated ad groups.
You may also find that some combinations perform very well but the ads are not running in high positions. In that case, you may decide to increase the bid for that ad group to see if you can generate additional sales at a profitable level.
Finally, you will want to vet the Networks tab in your remarketing campaign, just like you do for regular display network campaigns. You will most likely find that there are websites that simply do not perform and should be excluded. Alternatively you may find sites that result in a large number of conversions, in which case you would add them as managed placements so you can test bid changes on an individual level.

Advanced Tagging

Once you are comfortable with setting up remarketing lists you may want to try more advanced targeting techniques. The possibilities are virtually limitless if you have a large website. Additionally, you can manipulate the duration settings of tags to create more advanced scenarios, such as delayed targeting.
Delayed targeting is useful for many businesses. Some examples are businesses that:

• Sell products that expire or need to be replaced at various intervals
  • Target users every 3 months to schedule an oil change at your car dealership
• Offer complementary products that users may buy after using the first product they purchase
  • Target users with baby clothes ads a month after purchase of baby bottles
• Sell products that are only purchased during specific times of the year
  • Target users one year after they purchased travel to a vacation destination
• Have a series of educational blog posts scheduled every two weeks
  • Every two weeks, target users who saw the previous week’s post

To set up delayed targeting, you will create two remarketing lists with the same tag. For this example, we are going to target people for 30 days, 15 days after they read a blog post.  To accomplish this, we create a regular remarketing tag to cookie the people who view the blog post page. The duration for this tag will be 45 days (30 days plus 15). Then we create a second remarketing tag but select the “Select from existing tags” option and select the tag created in the previous step. Set the duration for this tag to 15 days. You will place this tag on the blog post page and create an ad group for this targeting. Within the ad group you will create a custom combination and include the 45-day duration tag and exclude the 15-day duration tag. This will prevent your ads from displaying to users for 15 days after they are cookied but will allow the ads to display for them on the 16th through 45th days.

Conclusion

Whether you’re doing simple retargeting to increase conversions or advanced retargeting to maximize all possible opportunities, AdWords remarketing is an easy-to-use interface. The most difficult part of the process is identifying your audiences and custom combinations. Once that is complete, optimization is only slightly more involved than a normal display campaign. Adding retargeting to your advertising program can accomplish any number of goals if implemented correctly.

Source : blueglass

DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME ON SOCIAL MEDIA.

Social Media may be the biggest buzz in the business, but it’s proving a waste of time and money for most companies.

In spite of all the hype and the investment and the technology and the data, marketers are still struggling to master the medium. Everyone’s getting seduced by the concept, but failing to face the reality – and the facts are these:

1. The numbers are nonsense.

A recent study of Social Media carried out by Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired magazine, found that “the number of users, active and actual, could be as small as one-third [of published numbers]. And nearly one-half of user accounts could be fake or contain no user profiles” that could be useful to marketers.

The analysis found that up to 36% of G+ users, for example, were merely ‘Ghosts’ – they had not even filled out a profile. And around 49% of Twitter followers were completely fake or spam.

In China it’s just as bad, if not worse. A recent report from the HP Labs ‘Social Computing Research Group’ found that an incredible 49 percent of all retweets on Sina Weibo come from fraudulent accounts. Incredibly, those automated fake users accounted for about 32 percent of Weibo’s total tweets.

2. Most of the posts on Social Media aren’t noticed by anybody.

Even if we were able to reach real people, the likelihood is that many wouldn’t notice.

Given the relentless rate of updates, most Facebook users only see somewhere between 10-35% of their personal feeds, according to recent research. That means that they never even notice something between a scary 65% or a terrifying 90% of their own – yes, their own – personal feeds.

What’s more, many of their feeds (if they ever notice them) come from people that they don’t even know. Recent estimates suggest that people don’t know 20% of their Facebook friends: they just accepted their friend requests to increase their friend numbers – or because they thought they looked cute.

3. Most brands make matters worse by being most active at times when consumers aren’t.

Most brands are choosing to communicate in Social Media on the days when users are less on-line, and at times when they’re less engaged.

Data shows that the majority of brands are most active during weekdays and afternoons, whereas Social Media Users are most active in peak evening hours (7pm-11pm) and weekends.

If you were trying to waste your time, effort and money you couldn’t do it much more effectively.

So it’s no surprise that – when it comes to actual advertising – 31% of Facebook ad impressions are never seen by anyone, according to research released by Comscore on January 18.

What kind of impression is that?

4. Even when we do connect with them – most consumers simply don’t want to have a relationship with brands on Social Media.

From every analysis I’ve ever seen, people don’t use social media to engage with brands – it’s a fact. They want to connect and engage with friends and family.  They want to meet new people. They want to access news and entertainment. They want to explore and learn and be entertained. But they simply don’t go on Social Media to engage with brands.

And when they do choose to interact with brands, it’s for specific benefits – it’s nothing to do with any desire for brand engagement.

Last year’s IBM study (“From Social Media To Social CRM”)hilariously identifies the reasons why consumers say that they follow brands on social networks – and it contrasts these reasons with the reasons that corporations believe that consumers follow their brands. And the contrast is cruel, really cruel.

Businesses said that they believed consumers were following them on-line to learn about their new products, their exclusive information and – believe it or not – because they wanted to “Feel Connected” with their brand.

Whereas consumers were quite clear that they interacted with companies on social sites for two simple, single-minded, dominant reasons: Discounts and Purchases.

These same reasons – Discounts and Purchases – were the two things that the Corporations said they believed were right down at the bottom of the bottom of the list of consumer wants.

So there’s a huge disconnect here. Companies are employing Social Media to build brand engagement. But Consumers only really want deals, promotions and transactions – nothing else.

More recent research just released by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute reveals that only around 1% of fans of the biggest brands on Facebook are actually engaging with those brands. Last October, the Institute measured the percentage of ‘People Talking About This’ as a proportion of overall fans of the top 200 brands on Facebook, and found the ratio to be a miserable 1.3%. If you subtract new likes, and only included more engaged forms of interaction, the result was even more pathetic: 0.45%.

That’s not engagement – that’s lunacy.

5. Consumers don’t even trust the links they’re recommended by their friends – let alone the links they get from brands.

There are some amazing findings in a massive (and, I mean, massive!) research study among (believe it or not) 253 million people, that was carried out by Facebook in partnership with the University of Michigan and released (very quietly) in January.

One of the things they investigated was – how many people would click on a link that was recommended by a Friend. And the answer was quite unbelievable.

Of the entire 253 million, the percentage who said that they would click on a link which was recommended by a Facebook friend amounted to the massive amount of……0.019%.

6. So it’s no wonder that Consumers and Brands aren’t clicking.

The click-through rates on Social Media remain breathtakingly underwhelming.

According to a recent report by EdgeRank Checker, the click through rate for links posted to the news feed by the bigger Facebook Pages (Pages which have over 100,000 fans) is only 0.14%, which works out at only 1 click per 715 impressions. Pages receive merely 0.00093 clicks per fan, roughly 1 click per 1000 fans.

For all Pages with over 1,000 fans, including those with few fans, link posts only have a 0.35% CTR, just 1 click per 280 impressions. That’s 0.00236 clicks per fan, according to PBT Consulting.

You might as well wander out into the street and chat to people – it would probably be more effective, more pleasant and a lot more social.

Social Media is Serious Business.

All these statistics add up to one conclusion. Social Media needs to be taken seriously.

Too many marketers treat their Social Media activities as a test, a trial, an add-on to other activities – or as something that they simply ‘need to be seen doing’. It’s no surprise, therefore, that most end up disappointed with the results.

But serious marketers are achieving dramatic success.

Coke had almost 32 million Facebook fans at the end of 2011; Disney had almost 27 million; Red Bull had over 21 million. These are huge numbers, from brands that have got the formula right.

And over the last year there have been some amazing – and amazingly successful – Social Media campaigns.

We Are Social’s ‘flu-season’ campaign for Heinz UK was creatively inspired and drove extraordinary results. Crispin Porter’s “Small Business Saturday” campaign for American Express attracted almost 3 million fans and drove dramatic business growth into its retailers. Jung von Matt’s Facebook campaign for Obermutten Tourism was both brilliant and powerfully effective.

In Asia, brands like Air Asia are leading the way. Their Twitter campaign is the most effective of any airline in the world, and Ask Air Asia is a pioneering concept in the industry.

All these brands are treating Social Media as serious business. They are rigorous in the disciplines that they follow, relentless in campaign measurement and fully resourced to deliver and respond.

I will identify some of the most powerful and effective Social Media campaigns over the coming months, and describe the formulae that I believe are essential for Social Media success.

But we all need to continuously learn how to manage Social Media better – so please share with us examples of recent Social Media campaigns that you believe have been creatively brilliant and/or brilliantly successful.

Because it’s about time that every business began to take Social Media seriously.
Source: chrisjaques