Reaching Your Past Website Visitors With Remarketing
Imagine someone coming to your website and almost picking up the phone to call or completing that contact form or almost clicking that "complete order" button in the store checkout. Unfortunately this happens on your website everyday. Studies show that conversions do not always happen the first time someone visits your website, in fact, they usually dont. The buying decision process can take up to six months or longer. But once that customer who almost bought from you or almost contacted you leaves your site you've lost them, right? Now imagine being able to stay in front of that "almost" customer until they decide to make that decision to buy from you, and imagine being able to do this with little cost. This is called "remarketing" and we do this for our clients. Let us explain how it works...
If I said the word “remarketing” and asked you to define it, you might come up with a definition that makes sense, but isn’t exactly what I had in mind. No, it’s not referring to the marketing of used and pre-owned products or even promoting a product over and over to the same person, but then again, it kind of is.
Remarketing is actually a pay-per-click marketing term used to describe the process of showing display ads to Internet users who have already been to a website that contains remarketing HTML code. Quite a mouthful right? Let me break this down a little further.
A major prerequisite for successful remarketing involves utilizing a special snippet of HTML code called a pixel. This pixel is used on the website that will be marketed. The pixel creates a cookie within a user’s browser so that from that point forward, a web user will see special display advertisements for the site they just visited. This cookie does not last forever and typically expires after 30 days if the web user doesn’t go back to the site in that time frame.
At this point, I hope you’re wondering where these ads are shown. Remarketing is a service that’s specifically available through Google Adwords, so ads for this service can be seen on the Google Display Network (GDN). Thousands of websites are a part of GDN and allow Google to place ads on their webpages. Thanks to that cookie that is created by the pixel, Google knows to show a display ad to a past visitor whenever they visit a site that is a part of the GDN. Please note that your site does not need to be a part of the GDN to use remarketing.
I visited backcountry.com and then saw an ad for their site a few minutes later. That's remarketing working!
Chances are you’ve been to a website that has the remarketing pixel embedded in the site and seen ads for that very website in other places after you’ve left. That’s remarketing in action!
Remarketing is designed to remind people that you still have products and services that are available. Web users will often stumble on and off websites very quickly, which doesn’t give website owners much of an opportunity to make an impression. Remarketing works to close this gap and allow you to deepen the impact on a web user. This is especially important considering roughly 97% of web visitors do not convert during their first visit.
Say you have a visitor who adds an item to their shopping cart, but never completes the checkout. With remarketing, you can show that user ads that offer special discounts to get them to come back and make a purchase. On the other hand, you might have a user who did make a purchase. Here, you could use remarketing to show them ads for some of the other great products that you carry. Realistically, the sky is the limit with what you can do.
Overall, remarketing is an extremely flexible service. Saying it’s all about showing ads to people who’ve been to your site before is an oversimplification. There are many uses for it; like targeting users who’ve never made a purchase or who’ve only viewed specific pages. You could even target users for long periods of time versus short periods of time. Only thoughtful experimentation will reveal what’s the most effective way to leverage remarketing for your business.
Remarketing is truly a great way to reconnect with your past visitors and leverage the brand recognition you’ve already worked hard to build. If you are interested in trying remarketing contact your IMAVEX account manager today!
