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How to Research and Launch a Retargeting Campaign

Retargeting is an online advertising practice that serves your ads to users after they leave your website. Your ads appear all over the web, allowing you to stay in front of your audience even when they’re browsing other sites.  The average American is exposed to over 3,000 advertising messages daily, but most can only specifically recall 2 ads that they’ve ever seen.  Retargeting is a great way to combat so-called “banner blindness,” people’s tendency not to recall online ads, and help you launch a successful branding campaign and remind users of your products and services even if they aren’t on your site.

Here are some important considerations prior to launching a retargeting campaign:

Determine Your Objectives

Take a moment to think about your marketing goals.  What, specifically, are you trying to accomplish?

Do you have only a few website visitors?  If your goal is to drive initial web traffic, retargeting is not the right solution.  You should work on improving your organic search rankings with SEO, and should implement a mix of paid search and display advertising campaigns to get people to your site.

Do you have some traffic coming to your site, but want to improve your conversion rates?  In this case, retargeting is a great solution.  Even if your web traffic isn’t quite as high as you would like it to be, it still could be a good idea to add retargeting into your marketing mix.  Adding retargeting to existing search or display campaigns is a great way to court new site visitors without forgetting about your previous visitors.

If you’ve decided that retargeting is the right (or one of the right) solutions for you, follow the steps outlined below to get started.

Segment your audience

Divide audience into segments based on purchase intent and show them ads accordingly.  Site visitors who only go to your site’s homepage may not yet know much about you, so you should target them with branding ads to get them more familiar with you and your product or service.  However, if a user goes to a specific product page, they may be closer to buying.  In this instance, you may have better results showing ads with specific deals or incentives tailored to the product they looked at.  The most successful retargeting campaign will not treat all site visitors alike.

Set a Frequency Cap

It’s highly recommended to set a frequency cap for your retargeting campaign.  You want your brand to be remembered, but you don’t want your users to feel overwhelmed.  Setting a strict limit on the number of times any given user can see your ads will prevent them from feeling like they’re being followed around the web, as overexposure can lead to negative associations with your brand.

In addition to negative brand associations, you don’t want to run the risk of “banner blindness,” the very problem retargeting sets out to defeat.  If you expose your users to your ads constantly, they will begin to ignore them, diminishing the effectiveness of the retargeting campaign.

Set Conversion and Burn Pixels

A conversion pixel is a snippet of code which tracks when the user converts (for example, makes a purchase or fills out a lead form).  The burn pixel is another snippet which tells your retargeting provider to stop serving ads to the converted user.

This is particularly important if you’re targeting ads related to a specific product or service.  If you’ve been showing a user an ad for a particular suitcase, and then the user purchases is it, there is no constructive purpose to continuing to show them the ad.  If anything, it is likely to have a negative effect on the user who could easily get annoyed seeing ads for a suitcase they already own!

Test!

Retargeting can improve conversion rates by up to 300%.  But don’t take my word for it.  If you implement a retargeting campaign, test the results yourself by comparing your traditional display ads’ performance with your retargeting ads’ performance.

And don’t forget to constantly A/B test the copy and creative for your retargeting ads to make sure you’re always putting your best foot forward.

About the Author:

Caroline Watts is a marketing associate at ReTargeter, an online ad platform specializing in retargeting.

Every fiber in my being tells me it’s wrong…

It shouldn’t be like this…

I shouldn’t behave like this as a professional marketer, psychologist, and family man…

And I know many of you will drop me down several levels of respect when I reveal it…

Because there are some things we shouldn’t do as marketers (human beings!) no matter what the rewards…

But I’ve got ONE deep, dark secret which I’ve been holding way too long and it’s killing me…

So I weighed the options, considered the consequences, and have decided I’m ready to reveal the truth.

And the truth is (I totally can’t  believe I’m going to say this)…

I LIKE “SOUTH PARK”

There.

It’s out.

The shameful truth… I’m so embarrassed.

It started about 10 years ago when I had an 11 year old patient who started talking about the show, and I needed to tune into what he was saying.   (At the time, I had to watch LOTS of adolescent shows and listen to adolescent music to stay “hip” and able to connect with the kids)

And, what can I say, it got me…

I would feel a sense of inner disgust (even if you love it, you’ve gotta admit, it’s totally gross and “wrong”), but was simultaneously glued to the screen, then finally laughing my a__ off… all by myself while my wife left the room.

I knew I was hooked when I kept watching even after I had retired from my psychology practice.  ”Just one more show” I’d say to myself.

So there you have it.

Someone you might think is perfectly respectable, a pillar of the community, known to rock a room with a suit and tie and a highly intellectual marketing speech, secretly and maniacally laughing at an adolescent TV show any chance he can get.

Why am I telling you this?

Because if I were in your target market and you didn’t know my deepest, darkest secret, you’d be missing out on a whole set of metaphors and stories to use to connect with me.

And you know what?

MOST marketers do NOT know their market’s deepest, darkest secrets.  Most marketers barely know their market’s demographics (and are stumped when I ask them the difference between the demographics of their prospects and the demographics of their buying audience)

Getting at the market’s deepest, darkest secrets is at the core of effective emotional marketing.

To do it, you’ve gotta know how to interview people in a group to get them sharing, and make it socially acceptable to share things which they think are evil.

OH… and you’ve got to be comfortable with your OWN deepest, darkest secrets as well, or else you’ll prevent your audience from sharing theirs with you!

In a few weeks I’m going to be launching a very low end monthly webinar all about emotional marketing…  I hope you’ll watch for it and join us.  (I’m going to price it at a no-brainer level at first, maybe even as low as $17/mo, because in assessing what people really still need who’ve been through my systems, it’s this kind of personal experience in critiquing sites from an emotional perspective, finding emotional hot buttons, and translating them into the right consumer language and imagery to drive purchase)

Keep your eyes out.

Dr. G

PS – “OMG, they killed Kenny!”

Hyper Responsive Club |  Total Conversion Code | Emotional Interviewing Service | Coaching |  Hourly Consults

PS – In my opinion, anyone spending more than $1,500/mo in AdWords should at some point have Bryan review their campaigns.   Perry Marshall himself suggests there are many things Bryan knows about AdWords that Perry does not.  Here’s my sneaky affiliate link for the consultation with Bryan Todd.  Oh, and just in case you’ve never heard it, here’s a link to a very revealing interview I did with Bryan a few years back about what distinguishes the winners from those who continue to flop and flounder in Adwords

Now there’s TWO quality scores to contend with… oh joy oh joy!!!

Even better, there are NEW CHANGES to MSN’s quality score which are about to rock your world.

Never fear, Nicole Mennicke from Rocket Clicks to the rescue.

Below you’ll find a SHORT MP3 and MSN Quality Score Cheat Sheet .

(Don’t ever say I didn’t give you nothin’)

Dr. G

RocketClicks PPC Management |  Do It Yourself |  Coaching | Total Conversion Code | Choosing Profitable Markets

Please download the Cheat Sheet here

But AFTER the merger, chaos and confusion rules the day.

Rocket Clicks to the rescue!

Have a listen as Jerrold Burke, one of our top Managers, reviews best practices not only for solving post-merger crises (higher costs, CPAs, loss of traffic, etc), but for working with MSN going forward.

Don’t anyone ever say I never gave you anything!

Dr. G

www.RocketClicks.com

It’s kind of a mysterious animal, and difficult to get a hold of.

In this very information dense interview filled with practical tips, you’ll learn some of Rocket Clicks best practices for setting it up, and maximizing your changes for profitable conversion.

Listen now please…

G

PS – Remarketing Cheat Sheet Here

I frequently hear people talking about so and so as an “AdWords Genius.”

But when someone says that, I immediately know that they don’t thoroughly  understand AdWords.   Because saying someone is an “AdWords Genius” is very much akin to pointing out a good French speaker and saying “Look at him, he’s a French Genius!”

There aren’t any French Geniuses.  ”Genius” implies an innate ability unattainable by the average person.

In French, there’s  a basic level of fluency which becomes progressively more natural and embedded in a speaker’s brain the more time they spend in France interacting with native speakers in the culture.

Pretty much ANYONE could attain this level of fluency if they decided to spend enough time in France.  (Or Montreal!)

It might APPEAR to an outsider, struggling in their first few hundred hours of studying the language that this other person was a French Genius, but the truth is, it’s just a reflection of the time and energy they spent in France.

Moreover, an argument could be made that the person who chose to spend just a few hundred hours studying French to achieve basic fluency has a more balanced life, and will achieve more in their business dealings in France than the one who dedicated all their time and energy to appearing like a French Genius.

You wouldn’t spend a lifetime studying French if your goal was only to be  comfortable enough in the culture to do business profitably with the locals. There’s definitely a point of diminishing returns… there might be 80,000+ words in the French Dictionary (I’m guessing), but the masses rarely use more than 5,000 or so.

It’s the difference between efficiency and effectiveness!

Similarly, there are NO AdWords Geniuses.

Rather, there’s a basic level of fluency which most people reach by spending a few  months immersed in the machine.  From there, there’s only an incremental ease with which they work in AdWords depending upon how much time and energy they put into practicing.

There certainly ARE hundreds of nuances to AdWords, but many of them can’t be leveraged by anyone who properly considers AdWords only PART of their business and doesn’t intend to be a full time PPC manager.  There are only about a dozen AdWords things you really need to master to achieve a basic fluency. (Campaign Settings, Keyword Groupings, Match Types, Spit Testing, Basic Content Network Logic, Placement Targeting, Conversion Tracking, etc)

Anyone can do it. (Well, any detail oriented person… a lot of purely creative, right-brain types have trouble, in my experience)

The REAL leverage point in AdWords isn’t in AdWords at all.

To maximize your AdWords profits you really need to understand what’s on the customer’s mind BEFORE AND AFTER the click.

Knowing what’s on their mind BEFORE they click helps you get the customer at the most efficient rate (high CTR, OPT IN, and SALES RATES), but more importantly shows you how to TAKE THE PROSPECT OUT OF THE COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT.

(AdWords is brutal… you want the customer to feel that you’ve almost psychically read their mind so they stop their search and start studying what you’ve got to offer in the context of a “go to relationship” with you, and hopefully you alone!)

Knowing what’s on their mind AFTER the click is critical so you can maximize the value of every customer.

And THIS is perhaps the most important part.  Because Adwords is such a competitive auction environment, no matter how good you get at efficiency, it’s effectiveness, or maximum visitor value, which wins the game in the long run.

In other words, if you’re running Adwords at only a small profit and plan to just let it ride, you’re probably planning a losing game.  To truly dominate your market in Adwords, you’ve got to engineer your whole business such that you’re the one who can afford to pay the MOST for clicks.

Yes, you read that right.

Sure you want to buy them efficiently, but you want to be making so much from every visitor that no matter what happens in the auction you can afford to outbid the next guy.

And here’s the thing…

YOU control what happens after you’ve got the opt in or the customer, NOT GOOGLE!

So why get sucked into spending all your time inside a machine someone else controls?   Get it running profitably and then turn it over to an agency to achieve maximum efficiency and volume (e.g. Rocket Clicks), then spend the majority of your resources maximizing the VALUE of each visitor by researching what they want, building back end products and services, segmenting and servicing your list, doing joint ventures, etc.

That’s where your leverage point really is, and that’s how you build a solid and secure business.

Ask yourself this question… no matter what the price of the highest end product you’re currently selling in your business, how can you add a zero?  What would you need to find out from your market?  What would you have to deliver to  be worth 10x what people are currently paying?

And if that’s TOO outrageous for you, how about, what would it take to achieve  DOUBLE OR TRIPLE the price?

Because that’ll change the whole economics of your business, and you’ll find yourself thinking quite differently about the Google PPC auction.  (You’ll probably also find other advertising vehicles open to you which you previously thought were not cost effective)

Worth thinking about, right?

Your humble (OK, not so humble) AdWords servant,

Dr. G

“Outsourcing Disasters and Duplicating Failure”

The desire to duplicate oneself and offload work is only human nature. In fact, it’s one of the strongest elements I’ve observed in the entrepreneurial mindset.

So it’s only natural that people want to COPY other sales systems, and OUTSOURCE all the work involved in building their own.

The problem comes when people don’t take the time to ensure they’re copying SUCCESS, and when they try to OUTSOURCE something they don’t really fully understand or know how to supervise.

Because here’s the secret…

The success of a sales system doesn’t lie entirely in the words on the sales page, or even necessarily in the system as a whole.    It relies much more on the understanding the writer has of the market. And since copycats can’t legally plagiarize the whole system, absent this understanding, they wind up copying an empty shell.

Moreover, it’s rare that a WHOLE system is successful. Lacking an exhaustive understanding of the market in which the system operates, people are prone to copy the failing elements just as easily as the successful ones.

In other words, many competitors are succeeding in spite of bad marketing, because just a few elements are right on target.  Without thorough research and market intelligence, how do you know you’re not duplicating their failure?

There’s also a lot of talk these days of just outsourcing your marketing, or your market research, Glenn-Style.

Now, I’m totally in favor of getting help to scale up your operations. In fact, I’ve been working through John Jonas’ materials, and they’ve helped me to hire no less than 8 people in the Phillipines now.    (You can watch the Outsourcing Webinar Replay through my affiliate link here.  John has a lot of very useful advice for hiring full timers at $300/mo, and provides some training to get them started.  I have a LOT of good experience with his hiring advice and resources, but can’t really say one way or the other about the training he provides for the outsourcers — I’d prefer you used them to do things you already do very well and just want to offload from your plate)

There’s a LOT you CAN outsource. You CAN outsource all the grunt work of setting up your automatic intelligence machine, doing some of the initial scanning of social media conversations, installing and managing your websites, installing wordpress blogs and plug ins, doing routine backups, setting up your surveys, programming scripts and databases, running through the first set of codes for your survey analysis, transcription, audio editing, video editing, article distribution, social bookmarking, data entry, a very, very rough first draft of your copywriting, and so on)

But in my opinion, you can’t outsource the STRATEGIC THINKING AND MARKET IMMERSION necessary to succeed in a project, especially in today’s competitive adwords auctions.

Somewhere along the way, if you want to build a REAL business, you’re going to have to spend a few hundred hours immersed in the market yourself.

Because no one’s really going to care about it like you do.

And because without doing this, you’re NOT going to pick up the subtleties which allow you to connect with the market above and beyond  your competitors.

You simply won’t know what your customers “smell like”, and they’ll sense your templated, outsourced approach.

Because prospects in any market can “smell” honesty, integrity, and passion when it’s poured into a project.

In my experience, the people who try to outsource strategic thinking and market immersion wind up with MORE work, not less, in the long run, because their systems simply don’t perform.   (You CAN partner with someone to champion a market for you, but only if they’re tested and proven in their entrepreneurial and strategic thinking abilities… and if they’ve got enough upside potential and skin in the game to make it worth their while)

A long time ago, I heard Brian Tracy say “if you want to make a mark in your market, make 100 phone calls to prospects and I promise you you’ll never look back”

At the time, I was starting a psychology practice in the midst of the collapse of  indemnity insurance (doctors could no longer get so easily reimbursed for their high session fees as the big companies cut off the gravy train).   My colleagues were all terrified, complaining, and going broke.

What did I do?

I made a few hundred phone calls to every psychologist, psychiatrist, counseling center, etc. I could find on Long Island.  I asked them if they had any patients they were having trouble working with.  I asked how I could help them.  I asked if I could volunteer to see clients for free at their clinic for a day.   I asked if I could work for them in any capacity whatsoever.

I also set up focus groups and individual interviews with people considering seeing a psychologist or counselor.

18 months later I had a private practice with 65 patients. (By the way, for any psychologists considering advertising, one of the critical insights was that no one looked for psychologists, only for counselors, ’cause “you’ve gotta be sick in the head” to see a shrink, “but everyone needs a little counseling sometimes” )

Why?    I knew what the market wanted cold.  I had more connections than any of my peers.   I WENT THROUGH THE IMMERSION EXPERIENCE.

I’ve got several coaching students now who are really getting the value of this.

One of them spent the bulk of this year doing low-end consulting with literally hundreds of people looking for help with a particular software program.   He’s now set up a lucrative PPC lead funnel in this VERY competitive space, and I’ll be utterly shocked if he doesn’t have a million dollar business in 18 months or less.

Another one got so psyched about immersion, he decided to make 1,000 phone calls to prospects in his market.  ONE THOUSAND.   Then he developed a training system based on his experience.  (I can’t imagine anyone else’s training system in that very, very competitive market could possibly be any better.  I can’t imagine any prospect not instantly sensing this after just a little exposure to his materials)

Moreover, both of these gentlemen are NOW in the ultimate position to leverage themselves and outsource their work.   NOW they can replace themselves, and begin building multi-million dollar enterprises.

I guess what I’m saying is,  we’re all in such a hurry to get away from the market, most of us never get into it deep enough to truly succeed.

And so we look for the short cuts…

And wind up copying failure, or outsourcing things we don’t really understand.

I’m not invulnerable to this…  I’m human too, and always fighting a tendency to get lazy.  (Plus, when you get a little money and can easily afford the help, it’s easy to think “I’m above this now”)

But when I look back at my successes, the #1 thing they all had in common were a passionate immersion period in the market, right there in the trenches with the customers and competitors.

Have YOU really immersed yourself in your market?

Something to think about,

G

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