Welcome to our PPC Shop Talk Series! Today the PPC team is going to be talking about PPC ad remarketing or retargeting, what it means, and some strategies behind it. We tend to get a lot of questions regarding what's the difference between the Display Network and remarketing in general, why one might be better suited for you, when the other might be and how we can bring people back to your site that might leave, follow them, and understand a little more about your customers.
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Hi, welcome to our PPC Series. Today we're going to be talking about PPC ad retargeting, what it means, and some strategies behind it. We tend to get a lot of questions regarding what's the difference between the Display Network and just remarketing in general, why one might be better suited for you when the other might be and just, kind of, how we can bring people back to your site that might leave, follow them, and actually use own behaviors to target them and understand a little more about your customers.
So remarketing, really, is just-- basically, when somebody come to your site, you, basically, are allowed to tag them with a cookie. And what that cookie does is, it actually kind of sends back a signal to the Google Display Network, when you're on one of their sites, that says, hey, this person has actually visited this site. And based on that characteristic, you actually get to target them with an ad. What we tend to see is, it works really well for branding purposes. Or if it's a product that people tend to shop around for, it's easy to get in front of them and just wave your hand and say, I'm still here, feel free to come back to our site. So another great thing about ad retargeting and remarketing is the fact that you can set the list size to refresh itself. So if you don't even want somebody that came in on day one after 30 days come out of the list, you can do that. There's also very advanced remarketing options for you, also.
Remember that one? Explain how that works to them. Because that's a really advanced level of remarketing, but it shows you, like Dave said, you have the basic-- you put the tag on the site, it puts them into a bucket, and then when they're on a display network site like YouTube, you can put an ad back in front of them. A more advanced strategy is something that soccer.com uses.
Yeah, so basically, what happened is, I was looking for a very specific kind of soccer cleat. I didn't end up purchasing, so I left the site, and over the course of the next couple of days, I would continuously see ads for the soccer cleats that I was looking for. The exact kind.
So that's kind of the benefit of remarketing, is, I went through to the home page directly, went to a specific page on the site, didn't convert, left the site. And then, because I went to that specific page and was put into a specific list, they were able to target with a specific set of ads, which basically were built under ad groups, for each product type. So then I was able to see ads based on something that's very relevant to me, something that I'm actually interested, and still shopping for. So it's a great way to get visitors back to the site.
It's cheaper leads, too, because the person already knows you. They've been to your site, somebody, got a remarketing list, you have to go to their site. Yeah, no, and I think there's definitely a lot of strategies around that. But you pointed out something pretty interesting, too, in the fact that you could actually set how long you want to keep somebody on a list so that's actually particularly useful if you have some sort of recurring product orders, where somebody might-- let's say, for a packaging company, and you sell bulk packages, they might be doing and order every three months, so you might be able to expand it a little bit more longer and hit them with ads that time period, so you can kind of catch them in the sweet spot.
Now I guess we wanted to go in a little bit of the differences in strategies behind why you might use retargeting over general display targeting. There's a lot of different ways to do it. Retargeting is one method where it's based more on behavioral. Somebody visits your site, and that's why they're eligible for the ads. But there's a couple of different ways to do it as well, based on keywords and placements. And I don't know if you guys have any reasons you know why one might benefit the other, or just explain some of the differences between those. I personally think it's on an account-by-account basis for a display network. For remarketing, I think just about any pay-per-click campaign that has somewhat of a sizable budget should be doing it.
And the simple fact is that it's proven that 90% of accounts that I've managed in the past and currently get cheaper leads on remarketing. The person went to their site, and you're just reminding them a week later, two weeks later, 30 days later-- hey, you were looking at the site for something. Don't forget about it. Where a display network is, you can set placements in specific types of pages and stuff, but you're targeting an ad to a new person, or remarketing and retargeting, it's somebody that already knows who you are.
Right. Yeah, I mean, I get questions about ad retargeting or remarketing all the time. If you set up ad retargeting on Google, you don't want to really size down or limit the topics you're going to cover. You don't to want to limit any of the sites because that's specific to real person that visited your site.
So they already showed interest.
Right.
Exactly.
The Google display network, you're catering to a specific topic, specific interests, keywords, so, from that, you're playing more to either demographic or, really, the type of person you want to see, not necessarily someone who has actually visited the site in the past. So anyway, that's a great way to draw in new visitors who may have never heard about your company but would probably be interested in your product offering.
Yeah, and I think that makes a lot of good points out there. So you I want to just kind of through out a tip of the day to you regarding remarketing. It's fairly easy to set up. You could do it to right at Ad Words, and you could do it tag based. And a fairly new feature-- I think about six months ago-- has been implemented that you could actually update your Analytics code and use that as retargeting as well.
So there's definitely a couple of different ways to go about doing it. If you are managing an advertising campaign, it's definitely worth trying. I think we've all seen a lot success across the board with it. So that kind of wraps up the conversation.
And you guys, feel free to tune in next week. We'll get another interesting topic. If you guys have any questions, feel free to go onto the forums, and we can answer them as they come in.