Have you had any of those ‘de ja vu’ moments when you’ve visited a website and BAM! all of a sudden you start seeing ads everywhere on other websites and social media pages reminding you of a product you previously checked out?

It feels like these adverts are saying ‘Hey there! remember me? I’m still here, come back and buy me!’

This is called remarketing. Remarketing is a form of online advertising targeted to people who have visited your website, as a reminder of your services or products they were interested in.

This article talks you through how it works and how it can help your business gain more sales.

Benefits of remarketing

There are many benefits to be gained from remarketing, including:

Improves brand recognition

Remarketing can help provide on-going reminders of a brand by displaying ads across the web or via social media. This can help strengthen and increase recognition of your brand.

Improves conversion rates

Remarketing can can help drive visitors who previously checked out your products/services back into sales by reminding them of the products/services they were interested in.

Improves relevancy of advertising campaigns

As you are targeting people who have already shown an interest in your products/services by visiting your website, you are directly targeting a prospective customer.

Types of remarketing advert campaigns

There are two main types of remarketing adverts enabling you to target your website visitors:

• Display adverts – are made up of content and imagery you specifiy such as a designed graphic promoting your business services or specific products you want to promote.

Or

• Dynamic adverts – enabling you to have automatic content shown to a visitor based on what they previously viewed on your website – such as a product they viewed or added to cart but did not proceed to checkout.

How remarketing ads display online

There are a number of different ways to have your remarketing adverts display online, however two popular methods are:

Google Adsense

This method displays your advertisment across Google’s display network i.e. website owners who allow for advertisements on their website where they gain a small renumeration amount per advert click.

This network of websites is particularly made up of popular high traffic websites.

Example websites that your advertisements may display on include Ebay, Gumtree, YouTube, Sydney Morning Herald, Willy Weather and many many more.

You can choose different ways for the ads to creatively display (such as slideshows of products) or add animation and buttons to attract attention.

There are many different layout options e.g. banner advertisements, sidebar advertisments and mobile display ads.

You can read more about AdSense here.

Facebook Remarketing

This method displays your advertisments to your website visitors when they are using Facebook.

The ads can display in their Facebook news feed and on the sidebar (when viewed on Desktop devices).

How does it all work?

When someone visits your website a ‘cookie’ is stored which recognises they visited your site and viewed particular pages/products.

The remarketing campaign works with this cookie information and displays relevant adverts to this person. When the visitor clicks on one of your ads they are returned to the page/product they were previously interested in.

In order to create remarketing campaigns, you will first need relevant advertising accounts.

Remarketing via Google Adsense is managed under a Google Adwords account.

Facebook remarketing is managed under a Facebook Business Manager account.

If you want to advertise on both mediums, you will need an account for each method.

A snippet of tracking code (which Facebook call a ‘pixel’) needs to be generated within the campaign method and added to the pages on your website. You may need the help of your website designer to add this for you.

You can then create a number of adverts to suit your particular needs and define how much you want to spend on each campaign such as a daily rate or a set campaign amount.

How do I know its working?

Campaign providers such as Google Adwords and Facebook will provide you with statistics so you can see how many people have clicked on your ads and how much you have been charged.

You can also integrate your website with analytic software such as Google Analytics to get further statistical information for tracking your campaign results.

You will get excited when you start to see your adverts displayed on major websites! But remember not to click on your own ads as each click charges your account.

Technical stuff

Depending on how your website has been developed and the type of remarketing campaign (e.g. remarketing visited products from a large ecommerce website), it can be quite technical to set up.  You may need to work with a web developer to help get you started.

Dynamic adverts require you to provide an import of data based on your website products – including product titles, descriptions, pricing, page links and links to images in order for them to display in the ads. Getting all this data compiled and maintained so that it remains consistent depends on what software your website has been developed with and whether it is something that needs to be manually generated or can be automated.

Another technical challenge with displaying dynamic adverts is that you will require a unique ID to be added to the code of each page corresponding to the product ID in the data feed in order for the campaign to work.

Getting things to work is not always a simple process and depends largely on the software used on your website.

Need a professional to do this for you?

Digital Spice provide remarketing set up, campaign creation and monthly management services.

We understand each client has their own requirements and campaign budget. Contact Digital Spice today to discuss your digital marketing needs.