Everyone Is Doing Re-targeting Wrong
Everyone from small time Internet marketers to Amazon.com is raving about re-targeting.
Just one problem…
Everyone is doing it wrong.
Well, they start out doing it wrong and then they learn what I’m about to tell you.
If you give me the next 5 minutes, and read this entire post, I’ll explain everything to you. I’ll tell you how I took one of my clients from losing money with re-targeting to earning $6.36 for every $1 he spent.
The Wrong Way To Do Re-targeting
When I started out doing re-targeting my first time I did like most everyone else does. I started dropping pixels on EVERYBODY!
For one particular client I was even bragging about having 1.6 million people pixeled.
High fives were all around.
Except it was all just testosterone filled vanity. We tried running ads to these 1.6 million people who had visited our pages, and we lost money.
There were some sales, but not enough to cover the ad cost.
With my tail tucked between my legs I clocked out for the weekend. Drank some beers with friends and forgot about it all.
Sunday night in the shower it hit me though!
You ever have that moment? That moment when you get an idea so good you want to run out of the shower naked to write it on your white board.
The Right Way To Do Retargeting
I realized in the shower that Sunday night that I was an idiot. (temporary idiot)
I was wasting 78% of the ad budget.
The way re-targeting works is when a visitor lands on your page the browser tags them with a “cookie.” The cookie is a little piece of code that tracks their activity online (anonymously).
The cookie allows me to be able to show them ads about my products because they landed on my site. I don’t get to see any other information than “they landed on my site.”
Well, if you’ve ever taken a look inside of a Google Analytics account then you know about “bounce rate.”
Bounce rate is the amount of people who land on your site and immediately leave because they weren’t interested.
It’s very common for a site to have a 60% to 80% bounce rate.
This client had a 78% bounce rate.
Why does this matter for re-targeting?
Well, if 78% of the visitors I’m dropping a cookie tag on were leaving right away because they were not interested, then that means 78% of my ad spend was being wasted.
Are you seeing the magic yet?
If you stop re-targeting all those people who bounced, then you’ll stop wasting money on people who were never interested in the first place.
The solution was to “hide” the cookie tag until about 45 seconds and then tag them. This allowed all the bouncers time to leave our page and only re-target the ones who were truly interested.
It’s a simple piece of code that basically waits x amount of seconds before dropping a cookie tag on your visitor.
All of a sudden our ads were profitable.
HUGELY profitable!
Now for every $1 dollar my client spent on re-targeting he was making $6.36 back.
How To Get The “Cookie Hider” Code
It’s pretty easy for any programmer to develop this code. It will only cost you $100 to have it made for yourself.
You can either get one created on Freelancer.com yourself, or I’ll give you mine.
Instead of a free nugget of code I’ve been working with a software developer to create a free software that does the cookie delay. The software we developed is called Code Delay and it works with all types of code, not just re-targeting pixels.
Go to http://codedelay.com for your free account now.
If you are creative there are a lot of things you can do with this tool. I’m interested to hear all about the creative ways you use this tool. It’s a small startup so we need all the feedback we can get.
For now it’s free, but we do plan to charge for this eventually. Just fair warning.
This article is just a small taste of what you’ll find at AdSkills.com. We are the largest online school dedicated solely to teaching different types of online advertising. Our courses are updated frequently and backed by millions of dollars in real life tested campaigns.
