Ready to dive deep into the remarketing world? We get asked this a lot–most often when working with Edge Marketing clients for the first time or by newbie-marketers and small business owners learning to hack the ropes of digital marketing campaigns for the first time.
While we recommend getting to know the ropes of remarketing and retargeting (read this recent blog post here to learn the difference between the two), once you’re ready to start designing your remarketing efforts you’ll likely come up against another set of decisions–and be stumped for which way to go.
Missed our earlier article about the ins and outs of remarketing? Not to worry–read on for a quick summary overview of what remarketing can offer your brand, business, and digital campaign. Further to that, we’ll subdivide remarketing efforts into dynamic remarketing compared to standard remarketing ads so you can decide which will help you achieve your business goals and then cap off with a quick 101 about remarketing campaign best practices.
The Basics of Remarketing Ads
First things first is summarising what remarketing ‘is’ as a digital marketing strategy; from there, we’ll give a quick summary about standard and dynamic remarketing and then further explore the differences between the two below.
If you’re wondering which you should prioritise in-house, read on. We’ll cap off this article with a few industry best practices that you should strive for (or, at the very least, keep in mind) when designing your first dynamic marketing campaigns.
Remarketing
In short, ‘remarketing’ is a top-level (umbrella) term that means to re-engage potential customers, leads, or viewers who have come across your website, brand, or offer before.
Some online experts limit the definition of remarketing to only include email marketing efforts that are meant to re-engage potential buyers when they abandon their purchase carts or interact with your brand/website without following through to a sale.
That said, our digital marketing team considers remarketing to include all forms of marketing tactics and tools meant to bring existing leads (however lukewarm they may be) back in your orbit. This means remarketing to leads who may have dropped off through email campaigns, Google Ads campaigns, targeted social media paid advertising, and more.
Standard Remarketing
Working with a finite ad spend? No problem–standard remarketing may be the solution for you. Standard remarketing (sometimes referred to as static remarketing) means to hit your audience with the same version of your ad, offer, or remarketing campaign without any personalisation. This can be effective when your existing marketing systems don’t have the capacity to segment your remarketing list into further demographics or you’re a beginner who has yet to learn the ropes of personalisation.
(Examples of personalisation could include showing lost leads recent products they have viewed or targeted discounts based on purchase history. Personalisation also = dynamic. More on this below.)
While standard remarketing campaigns traditionally show lower ROI than dynamic ads, it can be a good way to test the water when you’re first trying to re-engage lost leads. If you simply want to test your messaging about one product launch or offer, standard remarketing can be a good way to prompt or remind your audience to re-engage. (Or not–depending on your messaging effectiveness!)
Dynamic Remarketing Ads
Dynamic remarketing is the practice of tailoring your messages, offers, and ads to suit the online behaviour, purchase history, or demographic profile of lost leads. Some examples of dynamic remarketing (what we mentioned above includes personalised offers) could be offer past buyers a discount to repurchase the same product as before or following a warm lead back to their inbox with a one-off discount for a product they viewed on your website but didn’t buy.
It should be said that dynamic marketing ads aren’t blitzed out to your full audience–instead, they are directed at individuals who have previously visited or engaged with your brand. The ROI and conversion rate on dynamic remarketing efforts tends to be much higher than standard, static remarketing tactics–that said, they can also be slightly more complex to design in-house. More on this below.
Got the basics? Good. You can probably see how and where there are pros and cons to each type of the two remarketing strategies; fortunately, you can also decide which you’ll pursue first based on your experience with digital marketing tools and resources in-house.
Based on the data that shows dynamic ads traditionally show better ROI than static ads, we’ll explore dynamic remarketing ads strategies further below. This shouldn’t prevent you from designing a standard remarketing campaign if that’s your choice! Once you’re ready to explore the world of personalised remarketing, read on below.
Diving into Dynamic Ads
If you’ve decided to take the plunge into dynamic remarketing campaigns, we’ve got your back. First things first will be examining the two critical factors you’ll want to include when designing your campaign. (Or, setting up and getting ready to go so you have the data needed to create an effective campaign online.)
Google Ads
This is a big one. Among the many benefits of connecting your website to Google Ads and the Google Display Network is the opportunity to collect key data about your online leads and customers. Beyond what a traditional eCommerce platform can collect (for example, actual purchase history) Google Ads can ‘follow’ website visitors and leads to create a more holistic profile about their online behaviour, interests, and preferences.
The critical factor here is making sure that you’ve connected your Google Ads account to your shop website. Responsive display ads are based on personalised information–for example, exact products the lost lead once viewed or which other brands and products they are interested in. To make sure that Google Ads can collect that data it needs (what products or interests the lead engaged with on your website) it will need to crawling your site.
Further to that, you’ll want your website and eCommerce shop to be well organised with SKUs (product identifiers), names, and images as these will help you design your remarketing campaign collateral and help Google contextualise the viewer’s product interests online.
Google Analytics
Likewise, Google Analytics must be active and the remarketing settings turned on. Further to that, your two Google products (Ads and Analytics) must be linked.
We’ll go into more detail about the various Google features, services, and platforms another day but for now, know that the driving factors of automated, dynamic remarketing campaigns are driven by:
- Your eCommerce website/shop
- Google Ads
- Google Analytics
You don’t have to have a Google Merchant Center account to enable and run effective digital remarketing campaigns. That said, if you do have an active account with a well organised product feed, you can leverage the product data in your Google Merchant Center account to filter product information through to the other Google platforms. More on this another day.
How To Increase the ROI of a Dynamic Remarketing Campaign
Ready to roll? Now that you’ve got the basics live, up, and running, there are a few things you’ll want to keep top of mind when running a dynamic remarketing campaign. Think of these as best practices–it may take a few trials to get them right, but if you can benchmark your campaign surrounding the following, you’ll have a leg up on the competition.
- Ad Placement:
Always double and triple check that your brand offer and products or services are relevant to the viewers that you’re targeting and that where your brand ads and messages are being displayed are relevant and aligned. While it may seem like a good idea to simply post your remarketing ads any and everywhere possible, we would advise against displaying on third-party websites that are completely irrelevant to your business (waste of money) or worse yet–detrimental to your brand. (Website showing your ads feels off-side? You don’t want to be associated with them.)
- Trial a Different Dynamic Ad Layout:
Warning–not all ads look the same! Further to that–not all ad layouts will best present your offer, products, or services, to your intended audience. We recommend trialling a few different ad layouts to see which best displays your brand’s offer–further to that, we recommend mining your remarketing campaign data over time to see which layouts have resulted in the best conversion results and ROI.
- Check Your Data Feeds:
Your remarketing campaign can only be as effective as the data it’s given to work with. (Much like the old age–garbage in, garbage out.) From regularly reviewing your eCommerce site, Google Analytics dashboard, and Google Merchant Centre account if you have one, making sure that all product data is relevant and up-to-date is the best way to make sure that the ads being delivered to your audience are accurate.
- Refine Your Campaign Segments Over Time:
Like any good digital marketing campaign, remarketing efforts can be better refined and defined over time based on real-time user and campaign data. From further segmenting your remarketing lists based on live results to learning which ad messaging results on the best CTRs, the powerhouse trio of a well optimised eCommerce site, Google Ads, and Analytics can help you take the guesswork out of marketing campaigns in time.
We recommend reviewing your campaign results once per week (mind you, staying on top of product data and feeds may be a daily job). Further to that, you’ll want to review campaign results monthly to see where real-time feedback can help you tweak, adjust, and increase your ROI in time.
Become a Remarketing Expert with the Edge Marketing Blogs
Think you’re ready to dive in? The world of digital marketing strategies and remarketing campaigns can result in a significant uptake in lost leads, repurchasing behaviour from existing customers, and converting leads who have visited your website to paying customers. While the art to defining and designing dynamic remarketing campaigns may take a bit of leg work, you can see an enormous return on investment that makes it well worth its while.
Interested in learning more about the digital marketing tools and platforms that can help you bring an effective dynamic remarketing campaign to life? The Edge Marketing team is one of Australia’s go-to agencies when it comes to all things digital marketing. We support both our clients and online community to achieve their best advertising results by designing effective digital marketing, web development, and SEO projects as well as educating our readers online.
If you’re interested in learning more about the digital marketing ropes so you can action your own dynamic remarketing campaigns in-house, follow on with our blog. We regularly explore the worlds of paid advertising campaigns and can help you get started connecting and converting warm leads today.
