No Leaks! Remarketing, Retargeting and Look-a-like Audiences Explained
3 Simple Tactics To Increase Your Conversion Rates
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These terms seem to be used interchangeably. So, before we start, let us define what we mean (in this post) about those terms.
Retargeting
Targeting people who have interacted with your ads, or site (who have not become a lead or customer).
Remarketing
Targeting people who are either leads or customers of your business.
Look-a-Like Targeting
One other strategy or tactic that falls under retargeting/remarketing is using what is called a look-a-like audience targeting. A look-a-like audience is an audience you can build on Facebook or Google ads and use in campaigns. In order to utilize this, you need to take an existing audience — say people who have signed up for a newsletter. Then Google or Facebook finds an audience similar to the people who have already signed up to your newsletter. That is your audience for your campaign. You can use look-a-like audiences for any audience you create (from your own efforts) as long as it is over 100 people in one country.
Best way to think about audiences is through a customer journey sales funnel:
Now, that we understand how we are going to use these terms, let’s understand why retargeting, remarketing and look-a-like audiences are critical to your business.
Retargeting
The number of people who come to your site initially from an advertisement and convert into a lead or a sale is really low (probably under 5%). These people could have dropped off for a number of reasons. Perhaps they misunderstood what they were supposed to do, were not ready to buy, only researching options, got distracted, got scared when they saw the cost, did not have their credit card handy, were browsing on their phone, etc. Because they did not convert the first time, they saw your website, it doesn’t mean they are not interested in your products or services. Again, any number of reasons could have taken them away from what they were doing.
Outside of the human element of site drop-offs let’s make the monetary argument for retargeting.
You could be spending $3 and up to get someone to click on your ad and come to your site. Retargeting them with paid ads is significantly less expensive. If we use a $30 CPM (cost per mille or one thousand impressions) then we would show our ad to them 100 times for $3 after the initial click. Yes, you have to spend more than you initially did to potentially get that client. Using retargeting you may convert 3x clients with less than 3x the spend. Rule of thumb to use is dedicate 20% of your marketing budget to retargeting.
Another additional benefit with retargeting is we can walk our customers down our sales funnel digitally. What does that mean you ask? Well, think about the process someone goes through when they are researching buying an item or using a service. Depending on what stage they are they may have a lot of questions about the product or service. Like, how they work, what they need to do, benefits, etc. Because you know where they exit in your funnel you get the opportunity to send the next message, to them, in your sales funnel. So, you continue to push them along until you ask them to buy or commit to the service.
Using buying a laptop as an example
Someone may start their search on BestBuy looking at prices. They may have looked at gaming laptops and chrome books. Two massive differences in price and functionality. BestBuy wants them to buy a gaming laptop so they could be sending them content (in video or text) about the 10 benefits to gaming laptops (outside of gaming) or it could be showing them comparisons of them both. Next, they be sending them “buy now” ads. If they still don’t bite, then they send them promos or coupon codes for the gaming laptops. By now, you have thrown everything and the kitchen sink at them to get the sale.
Using a cleaning service as an example
Search starts as “Home Cleaners in City.” They go to your site but do not book a consultation for costs. So, we know they are interested in cleaners. Maybe they were afraid of the costs or worried about people they do not know coming into their house. Now, we want to alleviate those concerns. How you ask? Well perhaps we send them ads with testimonials or an ad that shows how many hours they get back if they hire our cleaning service asking them how much their time is worth to them. After they view or respond to those ads, we hit them a “Spend more quality time with your family, hire our cleaning service.”
As you can see, retargeting lets you can answer a lot of the questions your future customers have via digital ads (page posts, content or videos) with minimal costs.
By this point, we hope, there is no question as to why we would retarget potential customers. It’s a no-brainer.
Remarketing
When someone buys from you once they are more likely to buy from you again. As long as you met or exceeded their expectations.
We remarket to people to increase our average order value and add value to the initial purchase.
Here are a few remarketing scenarios to help further highlight possibilities
Products
- Upsells — The odds are increased they will buy multiple items from you especially if there are special one-time deals for them to consider post-purchase.
- Recurring Revenue — The products you sell work on a subscription model. The customer bought one product, however you offer a one-time discount to the purchaser if they turn it into a monthly subscription.
- Cross-sells — If they buy a phone case from you, they may need a screen protector and a charging cable which you offer as a discounted bundle.
Services
- Education (Upsells): Another example would be offering them courses or books to buy that would allow them to do a lot of the stuff you do for them on their own. The books or courses could be affiliate programs where you get paid.
- Retainer (Recurring Revenue): You realize they may want your service in the future. After the initial work you offer them a retainer at a semi-discounted rate.
- Referrals (Cross-sells): Maybe they need hosting for their website, and you send them to GoDaddy using their affiliate program. If you have a service-like web design, you may offer them a referral to a digital marketing agency. That referral could be a quid pro quo arrangement you have with the company where they send your business or maybe they pay you for leads.
Whatever business there are always lots of opportunities to sell a customer something after an initial purchase.
Beyond the Initial Sale — Email & Advertising Promotions
Again, if you have a promo, launched a new product or service, updated a product, etc. you want to let your customers know about it. How do you do this? Well, digitally speaking, you send them emails and/or send ads to them. Either way, the point is to get them to buy from you again.
Look-a-Like Audiences — Where Do They Fit In?
At any stage of the customer journey, Facebook and Google can create look-a-like audiences. So, you can target a look-a-like audience of people who purchased your product or target a look-a-like audience of people who signed up for a consultation. The minimum size audience Google and Facebook need to create a look-a-like audience is 100 people from the same country. For optimal results, it should be 1000 or more.
Retargeting, Remarketing and Look-a-Like Audiences sound awesome but how do you start doing this?
There are two components to setting this up — pixel and tracking setup, audience setup and campaign setup.
Setting Everything Up
The Pixel and Tracking Setup
In the simplest terms, you add both the Google and Facebook tracking pixels to your site. Then create the events you want to track in both Google and Facebook. We normally use Google tag manager to set all of these up.
When we have the pixel and tracking setup and working properly. Then, you can start on the next element to this which is the campaign setup.
Audience Setup
In, both Google and Facebook, you create audiences based on behavior or place on your website your customer exited. So, depending on the data points on the customer journey you are collecting you would decide at which stage you want to create the audience. Is it ad clickers? Or is it someone who went to a specific page on your website? Again, depending on how you envision the customer journey for your product or service you define when, where and with what you want to retarget your potential customers.
Campaign Setups
You are selecting the audience you want to target and creating the campaign you want that audience to see. Goal being, to move them down the funnel.
Remarketing Setups
Again, these are specific to your business and the tools your business utilizes. For instance, if you are not emailing your customers regularly then an out of the blue email promotion may not have the results you want or expect. Or, if the ecommerce platform you use does not support upsells or one-click sales then you may have challenges meeting your marketing expectations.
If you are capturing purchasers of your products or services on your pixel and CRM, then you could start running remarketing ads to them with the pixel data in Google and Facebook.
How would you set that up?
Well, you could pick the audience in this case purchasers and send a campaign to them about a new product or service they may want to purchase. Simple, right?
Look-a-Like Audiences Targeting Setup
This works identically to Remarketing Setups. Again, you pick the audience you want to create a look-a-like audience for (100+ people in the same country) and build the campaign around that target. No guarantee you will achieve the same results that got you the 100+ sales or leads from the initial audience.
In closing, retargeting, remarketing and look-a-like audiences are all things any/every online business should be utilizing.
Happy Marketing,
-Michael
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