Wash away those bad habits with these 5 simple remarketing strategies

As you collect data about marketing hits and misses of 2012, perhaps you’re feeling even more pressure than ever to perform even better this year. Not to worry marketers, if you already have a remarketing campaign in place, below are some New Year’s Resolutions to build on successes in 2013.  If you haven’t started a remarketing campaign yet, what are you waiting for? More than 90% of site visitors do not purchase on a first visit. Check out that stat and how to go after the 90% with a handy presentation from SEOMoz.org on remarketing and how to make money previously posted on this blog.

Raise your right hand and make me a promise, this year you will:

1. Control Your Message: A sure fire way to ruin a brand? Advertising on questionable sites. Exclusionary measures when operating a remarketing campaign are often overlooked, but an absolute necessity to any marketing plan. At a very basic level, be sure the ad isn’t displayed on sexually suggestive sites, pages with foul language or anything spewing gross/bizarre content. If you’d like to refine placement even more, you can modify who the ad is displayed to by any number of remarketing demographics such as topic, age or gender. (more…)

Put your competition out of their misery

You have a product or service that you want to sell, and you know you need an online presence to keep up with your competitors. You also know there are a lot of ways to market and advertise online these days. How do you get started?

You’ve likely heard of Pay Per Click (PPC), and you may or may not be familiar with Remarketing and Display advertising. These types of online advertising all have something in common: they target searchers who already know they want to purchase your product or service, making converting them into your new customers a much easier task. The harder part seems to be getting your ads in front of the searchers that want to see them, but this can be effortless as well if it’s done the right way.

(more…)

Affiliate Summit West last week held a treasure trove of information for every kind of online marketer. One presentation from our friends at SEOMoz.org about advanced Retargeting Tactics really caught our attention. Note: here at Advertise.com, we believe that there is an art and science to Retargeting which is why we call it Remarketing.

Display marketing has come a long way since the early days. The web user has evolved into a lean, mean, content seeking machine.  If they don’t already know what they are looking for, they definitely know what not to look for – ads. Banner advertising has to accomplish more than just branding with hopes of bringing someone to your website. Your ads should target, attract, engage and offer value to all who see it.  Luckily, Remarketing empowers marketers like you to accomplish all of these goals with grace and efficiency.

We recommend that marketers of all levels check out the Remarketing presentation below.  You’ll cover some basics, best practices, how to make the most of it and what to expect whilst using some great examples.  It also has some funny moments.

Please share your experiences with Remarketing in the comments below!

-Advertise.com Team

If you haven’t yet read about the new Comscore study,  ”When Money Moves to Digital, Where Should It Go?,” we’ve got you covered. Just read on for the highlights you’ll want to have handy for those water cooler chats you know are in your future.

Researchers analyzed the effectiveness of 103 online display advertising campaigns from 39 advertisers covering seven industries.  They looked at six media placement strategies including Audience targeting, Contextual targeting, Efficiency pricing, Premium pricing, Retargeting, and Run-Of-Network ads.

The upshot? Remarketing far surpassed every other strategy for delivering impacts.  It provided a moderate level of reach, indicating that this is a must-do for every marketer.  Below is a plot of the effectiveness of each strategy by lift in search and site visitation overlaid with the relative reach of the strategy, as evidenced by the size of each bubble.

Overall the study reinforces the value of Remarketing by highlighing that it’s not the click that’s the driving force –it’s the view.

Here are some highlights:

–Searching using trademark terms demonstrates a clear interest in a brand and a desire to learn more about it. Retargeting generated the highest lift in trademark search behavior at 1,046%.

–Remarketing performs significantly better than the other placements. This is likely due to the fact that consumers being retargeted have already expressed an interest in the brand and are prequalified.

–In building the model of branding effectiveness, one strategy clearly outperformed the rest: retargeting. This strategy works well in every scenario and should be considered for both direct response and longer term branding objectives.

–RON in combination with ‘retargeting’ would drive both short- and long-term effects at scale.

comScore vice president of Advertising Effectiveness Anne Hunter noted that one of the key findings is just how effective Retargeting is at generating lift. “However, if marketers want to continue to enjoy the benefits of this highly effective strategy, they must also deploy it responsibly and in a manner with which consumers are comfortable.”  In fact that is just the stance we take (see “Remarketing’s Sensitive Side.”)

For even more of the nitty-gritty details on the study, check out MediaPost,  Adotas or many of the other search- and marketing-themed sites.

–The Advertise.com team

Our CEO Daniel Yomtobian was invited to speak on the Intro to Remarketing Panel at SES San Francisco. Below is the excerpt from his presentation introducing Remarkeitng; What it is, How it works and its benefits. Enjoy!

Being ingrained in the online marketing industry we like to think we’ve seen it all. It would be downright selfish not share some of the successful campaign ideas we’ve seen implemented by our advertisers. By now the ad industry is catching on to the power of Remarketing so we’d like to share some non-traditional approaches on getting the most out of Remarketing. These ideas may be slightly off the beaten path but they prove to be innovative ways to utilize the Remarketing technology.

Remarketing at its most basic level allows marketers to get in front of viewers who have already shown interest in a product or service by following them and showing ads for the product or service they initially eyed as they surf elsewhere on the Web.

Virtual Newsletters:

The point of sending a newsletter emails are to keep your customers in the loop with what’s going on at your company and stimulate more business. Depending on the audience, you might be informing them that you have a sale running or that you have new line of merchandise on your website.  But there are some limitations: 1. You need the users email 2. You can’t send the same email multiple times because that’s spamming.  But what if you could target your previous visitors with your newsletter in banners with updated info about your company?

Enter… Remarketing. Remarketing can be used sort of like a mini-newsletter providing your visitor with news and information about company news, product releases, or promotions, it’s up to you.  Here’s how it works: a customer visits your site and leaves.  July rolls around and your site has a new feature, product or sale. While the visitor is off in cyberspace they see your ads with your messaging along with the relevant details. You’ve just taken your newsletter online to your past users without a single email address…awesome right?

Audience extension:

Audience extension can be a very powerful way to utilize Remarketing. The best way to explain what this can do for your online marketing strategy is to give an example:

Let’s say you are a frequent blogger and have garnered enough viewers to sell ad space. Your blog, SkiingBlog.com has thousands of viewers but doesn’t quite hit the desired viewership that one of your advertisers, SkiGloves.com is seeking.  What to do? Rather than leave advertising money on the table, think creatively with Remarketing. If SkiingBlog.com has already tagged its visitors with the intent to follow up and encourage them to return, you can instead offer this ad inventory to SkiGloves.com.  Practically speaking, this means that if a visitor comes to SkiingBlog.com, leaves and heads to their favorite Sports or News website, he will be served  an ad from SkiGloves.com.  In turn, the viewership of ads on your site is exponentially larger adding in the viewers on sites like SkiingMagazine.com

Phew! That was a mouthful!!

So you see, Remarketing can be used for many different online marketing campaigns. While in its traditional form Remarketing has proven to boost ad response up to 400%, these are just a couple of creative ways to get more of a good thing.

Happy Remarketing!

Remember the “helping hand” from those Hamburger Helper commercials? He always came just in time to help enrich dinner for the busy family finally giving them some quality time. We at Advertise.com like to think of ourselves as the helping hand for shopping carts–we find users who have abandoned shopping and use our secret blend of herbs and spices to bring them back to convert! How do we do this? Our secret recipe: Remarketing.

Recently we came across some research from SeeWhy that sparked our interest, according to their findings, below are the top 5 reasons why users leave the checkout process when buying online:

1. Shipping and handling costs were too high 44%
2. I was not ready to purchase the product 41%
3. I wanted to compare prices on other sites 27%
4. Product price was higher than I was willing to pay 25%
5. Just wanted to save products in my cart for later consideration 24%

These numbers aren’t shocking; we’ve all been there, about to press the “purchase” button when something stops us. In fact, SeeWhy found that the shopping cart abandonment rate is currently 71 percent. That means that more than 7 out of every 10 customers that start a shopping cart process fail to complete it. And during 2009, 88 percent of U.S. online customers abandoned at least one shopping cart, or 136 million people in total.

That’s a lot of abandonment going on, and while there is no way to avoid shipping and handling costs, there is a way for retailers to get back in front of those individuals who have left their site.

SeeWhy goes on to note “This is where remarketing is absolutely essential. Website visitors that have just abandoned a shopping cart are your very best prospects. After all, they almost purchased…but didn’t quite.”

Remarketing empowers marketers to get in front of viewers who have already shown interest in a product or service by following them and showing ads for the product or service they initially eyed as they surf elsewhere on the web.

This means for the percentage of people that leave a site because they aren’t ready to purchase or they are comparing prices, a retailer can reengage with that visitor through a targeted advertisement. These ads can be specific to the product that they were originally debating, or just a friendly call to action like “Free Shipping” or “10% off”.
Harking back to the results of our survey with SEMPO, to back up SeeWhy, in our research we found that Remarketing is the most underutilized online marketing technology.

Remarketing is underutilized and shopping cart abandonment is sky high. Coincidence? We think not.

Remarketing…retargeting…behavioral targeting…all terms that you’ve probably heard. Recently they have become almost as popular as the Justin Bieber and more scandalous than Lindsay Lohan. In light of all the recent news surrounding this technology we felt compelled to debunk all the myths that have come up. So here are the Top 4 Remarketing Myths we’re here to clear up.

Myth 1: Remarketing invades consumers’  online privacy

When you first hear about Remarketing, it’s natural for some to think first about consumers’ privacy. How does an advertiser know someone visited their company’s website? Are advertisers taking personal information and selling it to other advertisers? Do others now have access to this personal information? The answers are 3 fold: 1. no, 1. nope and 3. absolutely not!  Advertisers utilizing Remarketing know when someone visits their site because they are able to anonymously “tag” them with a cookie, not unlike one you would receive from a shopping cart remembering your order or a website’s analytics code. Nothing about the visitor’s personal information is known except that they visited a particular website. This “tag” stays with the visitor when they leave the advertiser’s website and allows advertisers to serve a relevant ad later in the visitor’s internet surfing.

Myth 2: Billing on views is not an effective way to advertise

There has been a lot of controversy when it comes to attribution with Remarketing. Some advertisers are concerned that paying for “the view” rather than “the click” is not an effective way to increase ROI.  To bust this myth, we are turning to cold hard statistics. A recent study from comScore (reported by ClickZ)  showed that Americans are 49 percent more likely to visit an advertiser’s site if they have previously been exposed to display ads. As the report states, “display advertising, despite a lack of clicks, can have a significant positive impact on consumer behavior.” We see display ads all the time and they may not always compel us to go to that particular site immediately. But just “viewing” that ad keeps that particular product top of mind when we do go back and search.

Myth 3: Low Return on Investment

Advertisers face the pressure of ROI and have to ask themselves “what did that ad do for my business?” Often this question is posed with a short-term view. This desire for an instant result has given Remarketing a reputation for having a positive, yet low return on investment. The longer term view presents a more accurate picture in this case. When it comes to Remarketing the ROI is incremental, meaning the return is built over time. The advertiser is only targeting their past users, so it may take multiple views of an ad for it to resonate. Additionally, the ability to segment the users based on their interests is key.  A targeted message is often what captures the attention of a user and compels them to come back and convert.

Myth 4: Low Engagement: users aren’t interacting with the Remarketed ads

The last myth we keep hearing time and again is that engagement with Remarketing ads is low. We can only imagine this myth is a result of a misuse of the technology. When Remarketing is used correctly and users are segmented properly we have seen user engagement rise 300-400%! This brings us to our next teaser; advertisers should look for networks providing a Remarketing technology that targets users not only by the sites they’ve visited but by the products they researched…

All four of the myths above have contributed to the slower-than-expected adoption of Remarketing technology. We hope that education will increase Remarketing’s utilization in the industry.  At Advertise.com we have retained 98% of advertisers that tried Remarketing, making our advertisers a belieber believer.

-The Advertise.com team

Earlier this week, Laurie Sullivan, writer and editor for Mediapost, posted her conversation with Advertise.com’s CEO Daniel Yomtobian. The two of them discussed the launch of our new CPA Remarketing platform as well as what is next for Advertise.com.

Catch the full story here.

Did you know it takes 10+ visits to your website to build a habit?In the spirit of March Madness we’re doing something a little wild and crazy here to boost that a bit. This month we’re offering up a $5,000 match credit on a Remarketing campaign. We take all the risk and you pay only when an actual conversion occurs. You heard right: we’ll match your deposit up to $5,000 totaling $10,000 worth of users being brought back to convert.

It’s amazing what a little post-click advertising to visitors who’ve left your site will do. In fact Remarketing has  been proven to bring people back for conversions.

Want to learn more? Watch the video. Ready to get started?  Fill in the contact form and one of our marketing experts will contact you.

-The Advertise team