Have you been hearing buzz about using retargeting lists in Google Adwords as a way to reach your potential customers as they surf around the internet? Maybe you’ve been dipping your toes into the world of retargeting but you’re looking for ways to improve your campaigns. With a little bit of time and a good understanding of your customers, you can easily set up a retargeting campaign to reach the perfect customer with the perfect message, drastically improving your conversion rates along the way.
Setting Up Basic Adwords Retargeting
Most companies are casting a pretty wide net with retargeting. It’s as simple as turning on the Google created “All Visitors” retargeting list in Google Analytics, importing the list into AdWords, and designing some ads. With this done, basic retargeting is set up.
Targeting all previous site visitors is great and I suggest that nearly all of our clients take advantage of this easy and cheap way to reach potential customers. But… If this is the extent of your company’s retargeting efforts, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity.
How To Take Your Retargeting To The Next Level
Boosting conversion rates with granular targeting is not a matter of putting in long hours or having ninja level technical chops, but it does require you to put a little thought into who your customer is, and how they interact with your website.
Let’s start off by thinking for a few minutes about how you might use the website of a home builder you are considering purchasing from.
You probably landed on their homepage and poked around for a few minutes, then maybe you found a page with craftsman floor plans. After looking at a few plans, the dog starts barking, you get up to find one of your kids coloring on the walls, and the search for your dream home has been delayed yet again.
Rather than just blast this user with basic branded retargeted ads, what if you could target them with an ad specific to their interest in craftsman homes?
Taking it another step, you could target users who have looked at more than three craftsman home plans, read your “About Our Process” page, and clicked on a contact page, but has not actually contacted you. This lead is on fire and deserves more than a generic message. How about offering this customer a special deal for Free Kitchen Updates in their new craftsman home?
These ads speaking directly to a browser’s interests are much more likely to get a click than a generic branded ad.
Creating Highly Targeted Audiences
Setting up this kind of granular targeting is done in the Audiences section of Google Analytics. Using the audience builder tool, you can target users for retargeting based on a huge number of variables including time spend on your site, visits to specific pages, completion of certain actions, the amount of money spent on your site, and much more.
Even better, you can layer these targeting methods, giving you the option to target our Craftsman Home loving dad with super specific offers.
A quick look at the audience builder might seem a little overwhelming considering all of the options available. The key is to focus on your customer and the way they interact with your site. Once you understand the segment of your audience you want to focus on, then start figuring out how to single them out based on their behavior on your site.
With a little creativity and a great understanding of your customer, hyper-targeted retargeting helps you deliver the right message, to the right customer, at the right time. If you’re doing it right, you will see the results of all your hard work in your bottom line.
Resources
The best instructions on how to setup retargeting lists and use them in AdWords comes directly from Google. Here are a few support documents you may find helpful.
- Creating and editing retargeting lists in analytics
- retargeting audience examples
- Importing retargeting lists into adwords
Have questions about how your company could use retargeting to deliver highly targeted ads to customers? Drop us a line, one of our Digital Marketing experts would love to talk it over with you.
