This week we’re taking a look at remarketing (also known as retargeting), the name given to online advertising that is targeted to a specific set of visitors to your site.

Remarketing is a very smart way of delivering targeted ad messages: instead of broadcasting the same message to everyone on the offchance they might be interested you’re communicating with smaller parts of your audience, people you know to be interested in your products and services.

Tailoring the message

If normal online advertising is like standing on the corner shouting through a megaphone, remarketing is like dropping pieces of paper with personalised messages into people’s pockets.

When someone visits your site, a cookie gets placed on their desktop or mobile device. When they’re browsing the web afterwards, the cookie recognises them and displays your ad on the sites they’re visiting.

These sites can include large Australian media sites, and also overseas websites that serve ads locally. It’s an extremely low-cost way of getting your brand some high-profile ad placements.

An improved experience all round

In many ways, this is how all display advertising should be. Businesses get better click-through-rates, publishers get more revenue from clicks and consumers get ads that are directly relevant to their interests.

It’s a powerful method of advertising, but the really good news is that remarketing is very easy to set up, and you probably already have access to the tools you need to get started.

Provided you have administrator-level access to both Google Analytics and Google AdWords, and that both accounts are linked, you can get set up in a few minutes.

Set up

Here's how you can set your site up for remarketing.

• Define a segment of visitors to your site; for example, people that view your landing page but don’t convert.

• Set up an AdWords campaign to market to this list of people.

• Upload your ad creative and/or write your text ads.

• Sit back and watch the numbers!

Of course, the fun doesn’t stop there. Here are some ideas for making the most of your remarketing campaigns:

• Pay attention to the path you send remarketing prospects on.

• Run a standard Display Network campaign alongside your remarketing campaign, and compare the conversion rates

• Regularly optimise campaign bids, placements, and all creative elements. Test, test, and test again!

We’re really only just scratching the surface with remarketing; believe me, it’s going to be big. Publishers will always back ad programmes that give them maximum revenue, and given this it’s no coincidence that Google is pushing remarketing so heavily.

And as with any nascent marketing platform it’s currently quite under-subscribed, which means you can expect to be paying less per click than more competitive ad channels.

Damion Brown is Principal Consultant at Data Runs Deep, a web analytics consulting firm based in Melbourne. 

He works with organisations to help them find the right mix of digital analytics platforms, then train internal resources in how to work with and interpret the data. To find out more visit datarunsdeep.com.au.

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