The Rise of Remarketing

With so many choices for consumers online, it is getting increasingly harder to convert customers during their first visit to your website. 

Consumers are getting ever more savvy and using multiple devices on which to research products and companies; and compare prices across multiple retailers, before they finally convert. 

This makes our job as marketers trickier than ever. Not only in finding solutions to track users’ visits across multiple devices, but also to encourage those users to return to complete their purchase on your website instead of a competitor’s! 

As a solution to this problem, remarketing (or retargeting if you prefer; the terms are used interchangeably!) was born. Remarketing has been growing in use and becoming more intelligent over the past few years, but it’s now, that the rise of remarketing has become particularly pronounced.

Does remarketing actually work? 

When was the last time you abandoned a website and were then haunted by a banner in every nook and cranny of the internet for the next few days (and sometimes even weeks)? Our guess is probably within the last week! 

No doubt it made you frustrated…and confused (How do they know?!). But, we bet you didn’t forget that company name in a hurry; and perhaps even returned to purchase.
As annoying as remarketing is considered to be; it’s extremely effective. 

In Q 4 of 2015, SaleCycle.com reported a 75.45% abandonment rate across all sectors. That’s the percentage of users who exited from a website with items in their basket, before completing their purchase. Of those who were remarketed to via Display; 9.9% clicked and 30.1% of those people converted. 

Combine remarketing efforts with abandoned basket email campaigns and your chances of capturing sales from abandoned users increase further, with a 26.7% conversion rate from the 26.9% of people who clicked the email.  

These are stats from just one source, remember. 

So, how does remarketing work?

The exact process will depend on which platform you use in order to run remarketing. It can be set up and ran through Adwords quite easily. 

There are three key steps to remarketing implementation:

• A remarketing tag (a small snippet of code) will need to be added to every page of your website to allow for data collection. 
• Remarketing lists then need to be created. The remarketing lists determine the type of user they were and what actions they did or did not carry out. A remarketing list may capture data on all people who visit the basket but do not check out for example. 
• Finally; create campaigns to target these particular lists of people with relevant adverts and messages. 

Retargeting is managed within Google Adwords and the adverts can run anywhere on the Google Display Network (a network comprising thousands of blogs, informational websites and other sites that partner with Google).

The facts speak for themselves

In a competitive marketplace, if you are not actively attempting to recapture lost customers you have already lost the game. 

If your business is either lead generation or ecommerce; you currently invest in PPC marketing; and you have conversion tracking in place; you should be remarketing. End of. 

Of course there are some products and services which aren’t suitable for the service, but you should at the very least investigate the option and see if it would be a suitable solution for you. 

Are you thinking of launching a remarketing campaign, or are interested in finding out more? Contact Affinity Agency today to discuss your goals. 

Written by Kerri Ware, Senior Account Manager