Remarketing, the act of serving ads online to users who previously visited your website, used to be reserved for big companies with bigger budgets. But as self-serve remarketing platforms have come online, remarketing is now an affordable, effective, can’t-miss opportunity. With remarketing campaigns, your small business can serve ads to targeted users on sites such as The New Zealand Herald and Facebook all for the price of just $2/day.
What, exactly, IS remarketing?
Remarketing lets your business target visitors to your website with advertisements as they surf the web. It works by dropping an anonymous cookie on your visitors’ browsers. As your cookied visitor browses the web, the cookie lets ad platforms know to serve your remarketing ads to them.
Your business can segment remarketing campaigns to show targeted ads to certain groups of website visitors. For example, you can serve ads to users based on which sections of the website they visited. Remarketing campaigns can also be filtered with additional targeting, such as location and demographic information.
Why is it so effective?
If you’ve ever worked in sales, you know the importance of the follow-up call or email. We all hope to do business the first time we meet a prospect, but that’s not the way it works. People and businesses take time to make a decision to buy. Research suggests that only 2% of sales occur at a first meeting. If you only pursue that first meeting and forget the follow-up, you’ll miss out on a lot of potential customers who have already been educated about your business.
Traffic to your website works the same way. In fact, only 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit. Remarketing helps you reach the other 98% of visitors who are interested in your products and services but don’t convert straight away. Remarketing ads make it easy for a user to visit your site again, build brand recognition and keep your company top-of-mind with your potential customers. When the user is ready to buy, it’s an easy and seamless decision to return to your offerings.
You CAN Afford It
If you’re making any marketing or advertising efforts to get traffic to your website, you can afford to invest in remarketing. It’s a cost-effective way to fully capture the value of your website visitors.
Remarketing may look likes it takes a big budget (your ads will serve on big name sites like The New Zealand Herald, The Washington Post, The Guardian and more), but it’s actually surprisingly cost-effective.
We recommend all small businesses remarket directly on Facebook and the Google Display Network, rather than relying on third-party platforms. There are many good third-party platforms out there, such as AdRoll, that you can use to manage your remarketing on both networks in one place. Third-party platforms make managing your remarketing a bit easier, but there’s a cost associated with this convenience.
Here’s what’s great for small businesses about running their remarketing directly through Facebook and Google:
- You set the budget. There’s no minimum monthly or weekly spend.
- Choose how you pay. You can pay per impressions (CPM) or only pay for clicks (CPC).
- Lower CPCs and CPMs. A third-party platform is essentially a middle man adding a layer of costs to your advertising bill.
Remarketing Best Practices
Ready to start your remarketing campaigns? Here are some general best practices you should follow:
- Remove converted visitors from your remarketing campaigns so that you’re only serving ads to users who haven’t yet become a customer or lead.
- Set a frequency cap so that users will only see your ads a certain number of time a day to avoid ad fatigue. (This feature is currently not available on Facebook but it is on Google.)
- Set the duration on your remarketing list to match the length of your sales cycle. You can target people for up to 180 days on Facebook and 540 days on Google.
