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miercuri, 26 ianuarie 2011

SEOptimise

Not Using AdWords Remarketing? Don’t Delay! (Actually Do)

Posted: 25 Jan 2011 08:13 AM PST

I recently read an AdWords Remarketing tips post which made me think of a few ways to improve your AdWords Remarketing campaigns by introducing a delay between when a person visits your site and when you start showing adverts to them.

Image from Stuck in Customs on Flickr

Buying Cycles
One problem with Remarketing is that it is hard to measure incremental value from it. A remarketing conversion tells you that someone who visited your site came back to your site and then bought something; the causal link between the advert and the purchase is not as clear as it is with search advertising.

Giving users time to complete their purchase naturally before you start showing them adverts avoids this problem whilst still taking advantage of the main feature of Remarketing; that people who have already been on your website are more valuable than people who haven’t.

For an ecommerce client we set up a 7 day delay on their remarketing to match the length of their buying cycle.

To setup a delay you need to create a remarketing tag as normal and then create another list using that tag but with a shorter duration. In this case they have 1 tag across their whole site with two remarketing audiences associated with it, one of them has a duration of 21 days and the other has a duration of 7 days. Then create a custom list containing everyone in the 21 day audience and no one from the 7 day audience. Bingo! Now you have to wait to see if it works.

Consumables
Another client sells a product which uses a consumable that they also sell. They reckon that people will need a refill after about 6 months. Using AdWords Remarketing, we are able to target people 6 months after they purchase with adverts for refills. Awesome!

Setting this up can be a bit more complicated.

If you want to target everyone who purchased but with a 6 month delay then you can use an existing Adwords conversion tracking code as a Remarketing tag. Then you can define your audiences as above.

If you need to target only people who purchased a particular product then you will need to insert a new remarketing tag into the conversion page only if the customer has bought the product. This might be easy or hard depending on your platform and web development team.

Seasonals
I manage several clients in the travel industry. I have setup a Remarketing audience for them that targets people who have converted 11 months down the line; just when they will be thinking about their next holiday!

Image from joiseyshowaa on Flickr

The maximum duration for a Remarketing audience membership is 540 days (nearly 18 months) so there is plenty of time to take into account all sorts of seasonal variation.

I hope this post has given you some Remarketing ideas. Leave a comment or find me on twitter if you have any other Remarketing tips.