WHAT IS REMARKETING?
Mark goes to Amazon to buy a new TV, and then he changes his mind and goes to CNN. Then all of a sudden Mark starts seeing Ads for the TV from Amazon on CNN, how is that possible? Well that is called Remarketing, and Amazon is Remarketing to Mark.
Remarketing lets you show ads to visitors who've previously visited your website as they browse the Web. When you use remarketing, you can install a JavaScript code on a category of webpages that you want to promote. That JavaScript is referred to as a TAG (as in tagging someone to find them later) or a PIXEL (an invisible image pixel that triggers the tag). Some marketers say FIRE A PIXEL (as in shooting the visitor with a pixel, and then the pixel will tag them), and if they want to stop remarketing to that visitor they call it BURN A PIXEL (as in destroy the pixel that was tagged on a visitor to stop remarketing to that visitor)
Here, is an example of remarketing, you could add a TV tag on all of the webpages where you sell televisions. You can then create an Adwords campaign to show highly relevant messages (such as ads displaying a remarkable offer on TVs) to people who've visited your webpages on your website, and you can show the ads across other websites that have Google AdSense installed.
If you still dont get it, here is an animated video explaining in more details how Remarketing works.
WHY USE REMARKETING?
Remarketing is a powerful way to stay engaged with your target audience. Presenting them with highly relevant ads and offers across the Websites that they browse daily.
This ensures that your brand is on top of their mind when theyre ready to buy, and it can radically improve your return on investment (ROI). You can combine different targeting methods, such as interest categories, demographics, or keyword campaigns.
Another use case is you can install a remarketing tag on a popular third party Fashion blog, and if you wanted to expand the reach of your fashion brand, you could target only women between the ages of 18-24 who have not yet visited your site (but did visit the blog), and present them with an offer that is tailored to them.
REMARKETING DONE WRONG
The popular remarketing agencies and their affiliates want you to believe that you must remarket to everyone. Of course, they are telling you to do this because they make money from it, the more you spend the more they make.
Marketing companies who sell remarketing services are like stock brokers, its not their money, so they take high risks without consequences. They usually go by this saying What is the worst that can happen? We lose the client, big deal there is thousands more to go.
Most marketing companies use the most basic analytics to measure the ROI. They simply tag everyone and hope the conversions will pay off the advertising expense, and if they dont then they start spending less until the client realizes it is a waste of money and quits.
Even those that make money fail to realize how much money they are wasting. Here is an example of how remarketing will fail miserably. A potential client called us about TEA Software, and wanted to learn how we can help him with his remarketing campaign.
His website was getting 300,000 unique visitors per month, and he was planning to invest $15,000 per month to retarget the clients.
First I told him that he had a problem with the budget because if he was to target all 300,000 he would have to spend at least $2.00 per visitor over a month to make the remarketing effective. If he was serious about it, then his budget would have to be $600,000.
Using the formula found on the bottom of this page, we concluded that out of 300,000 visitors he would only need to remarket to 7000 of them, and at 40% conversion rate he would make gross profit of $120,000. Even if he was to convert at only 10% he would still come out positive every month.
If he was to target the wrong 7,000 visitors he would have a high risk of losing money or barely breaking even. If he was to target all 300,000 visitors, then he would clearly lose most of his budget as the number of real customers would not change. Even if he paid for all 300,000, he would not get more than 7,000 customers that would consider buying from the website.
The biggest money waster in remarketing is fake human like bot nets and poor engagement traffic (visitors who never intended to buy from you). The bots browse your site, you tag them, and then as they browse the rest of the internet they deplete your budget. The poor engagement visitors (who have no idea you are remarketing to them) would get extremely annoyed seeing your ads all over the place and start telling their friends that your company is creepy, and your company put a virus on their computer.
USING BIG DATA PSYCHOGRAPHICS TO REMARKET
TEA software is able to detect bots and other threats, along with poor engagement visitors and AVOID tagging them for remarketing. That automatically eliminates 60%-80% of visitors that you would remarket.
The next question is how do you choose whom to remarket to from the remaining traffic, and what kind of ads should you be showing them?
TEA can be used to create compelling segments by mixing Threat Analysis, Visitor Behavior, and Predictable Psychographics.
For example lets assume that we have verified that Visitor A is a real human (low threat score in TEA), Visitor A is clearly interested in your product (high engagement in TEA), and visitor A engaged with your price drop down right before leaving your website (Psychographic). Assuming there is more visitors like Visitor A we can create a rule to tag them.
The idea is to predict why Visitor A did what he did (psychographic), and come up with a remarketing resolution for it. In the case of Visitor A, you may want to fire a remarketing pixel at them right after they engaged with the price. If Visitor A happens to checkout than the remarketing pixel would be burned if Visitor A did not checkout than the remarketing pixel will be left alone.
For Visitor A segment you might want to have a remarketing pixel that will trigger a banner advertisement for 10% off coupon that expires this week. If the visitor happens to click on that ad, using a shopping cart like Shopping Cart Elite you can trigger a smart discount that will be driven by a referrer tag in the URL, that will automatically enable the discount, apply the discount on the website for the visitor, and it will also acknowledge that the discount was applied as a banner on top of the website.
TEA software is programmed with a dozen rules for remarketing, you simply enter the JavaScript for each rule to segment different ads, and it does the rest for you.
REMARKETING COMPANIES
If you are looking for remarketing companies, here are two excellent resources to look at:
Remarketing Reviews from Moz
Remarketing Reviews from FindtheBest
Remarketing is at its early stages, but if you think its creepy, you havent seen creepy yet. You will be seeing a lot more creepy in the coming years when technology, big data, and AI gets bigger, and
Remarketing on Google Glass
Co-Founder of Wired describes Remarketing