The Retargeting Playbook

How to Turn Web-Window Shoppers into Customers

Adam Berke, Gregory Fulton, Lauren Vaccarello

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118881163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

How to reach the 98 percent of people who leave your website without converting sales

The Retargeting Playbook is a complete guide for digital marketers about how to reach the 95 to 98 percent of people who leave a brand's website without converting. Retargeting gives advertisers the ability to stay in front of those people to bring them back and close the deal. For that reason, retargeting has emerged as a must have marketing channel, yet there is a lack of content that explains how the technology actually works and best practices for using it. Even marketing managers at large, sophisticated brands and agencies don't have a strong grasp of this evolving channel, and there are few good neutral sources on the topic. Meanwhile, retargeting is the cornerstone of any holistic digital advertising strategy since it improves the results of every other channel if implemented correctly. Unfortunately, most marketers are only utilizing the most rudimentary retargeting tactics and barely scratch the surface of its potential.

• Explains how to stay in front of potential customers and convince them to come back and close the deal

This book will be required reading for media buyers at digital agencies, in-house marketing managers at companies in any vertical, performance marketers, and ecommerce managers.

Chapter 1
Why We’re Writing This Book

Over the past three to five years, retargeting (or remarketing as it is sometimes called) has become a must-have marketing channel, alongside search-engine marketing and e-mail, for marketing to existing customers.

Retargeting has risen to this elite spot within the digital-marketing mix because it is a proven way to increase conversions and win customers who would otherwise be lost. When people look for products and services online, they seldom convert on their first visit. In fact, depending on the industry, 95 to 98 percent of people leave a website without taking the desired business action, such as make a purchase, fill out a lead form, download software, and so on.

Instead, people visit a site, then they check out competitors, they price compare, and sometimes they just get distracted. Retargeting allows you to stay in front of those people, who you know are interested in your product or service (why else did they visit your site?), and ensure they come back to close the deal.

However, despite the massive growth of retargeting adoption there is a notable lack of content around how the technology actually works, and little information about best practices for advertisers to take advantage of the channel. This is due to the fact that, historically, this type of technology was only available to large brands and agencies. Retargeting-technology vendors maintained high minimums since large amounts of manual work had to be done to execute campaigns. Despite the development of new solutions that make retargeting available to any size business, knowledge has remained locked up inside the technology vendors themselves, and perhaps a few savvy, performance-oriented ad agencies. Our goal is to unlock this information so that any marketer, whether you use self-service tools yourself or partner with an agency, can make more informed decisions about how to implement a best-in-class retargeting strategy.

WHAT IS RETARGETING AND WHY DOES IT WORK?

The common understanding of retargeting is that it is the practice of serving ads to people who have previously visited your site. However, there’s more opportunity within retargeting than just showing people the same pair of shoes they just looked at on your site. To unlock these opportunities, it is important to first understand what makes retargeting effective.

To understand this, let’s first look at what makes search-engine marketing so effective. Google is one of the great success stories of the Internet age, and much of that success is related to the fact that Google has a magic box that almost everyone in the world (except for maybe a few Microsoft employees) goes to and types in exactly what they want to buy, where they want to travel, and what kind of content they’re interested in.

That type of data is called intent data and it is the most powerful data to use for ad targeting. It’s the online equivalent of someone raising their hand and saying, “Hey, I’m interested in your product.”

FIGURE 1.1 The Google Search Box Is a Key Way to See User Intent

When you run a search campaign on Google, essentially what you are doing is buying Google’s intent data. Google is essentially a machine for capturing intent, and AdWords is an interface for selling it to advertisers.

Retargeting works so well (with performance similar to or better than search engine marketing) because it leverages the same intent data set. However, instead of someone typing something in a box that they’re interested in, they express their intent by the behaviors they exhibit on your site. That might be visiting a product page, or by starting to fill out a lead form, or by putting something in their shopping cart.

However, people online seldom visit a site and immediately complete their purchase on their first visit, or submit their info, or whatever the business behind that site is hoping that they do. People shop around, they price compare, they look at competitors, and they just get distracted.

That’s where retargeting comes in. With retargeting, marketers are able to tap into their intent data and target ads to very specific people who have raised their hands to say that they’re interested in your product, but need to be followed up with before being won over as a customer.

FLAVORS OF RETARGETING

With the increased popularity of retargeting over the past few years, it has become common practice to relate other marketing tactics to retargeting. This can cause some confusion, as these tactics are all very different from the true retargeting (now sometimes referred to as site retargeting) we cover in this book. Examples include search retargeting, social retargeting, behavioral retargeting, and so on. It’s almost as if there’s no such thing as just targeting anymore, despite that being a more accurate term for many of these tactics. This misuse of the term retargeting can cause confusion as to what these other tactics actually are, what marketing objectives they solve, and what metrics should be used to gauge their performance. True retargeting (which is what this book is about) has sometimes come to be called site retargeting within the industry in order to clarify some of this confusion. However, to further clarify the issue, here’s a summary of some other tactics that sometime use the retargeting moniker, but should not be confused with the type of retargeting covered in this book.

Search Retargeting

This tactic involves targeting people with display ads based on terms they search for across search engines and other web publishers where searches occur, such as comparison shopping sites. A more apt name might be search targeting since it is simply targeting people based on a particular characteristic. Similarly, we wouldn’t call buying a TV commercial during the Super Bowl “sporting-event retargeting.” This tactic appeals to marketers for some of the same reasons that retargeting does—search activity is a signal of intent. However, there are a few limitations to keep in mind when evaluating this channel. One is that scale for highly targeted keywords can be difficult to achieve. Since Google’s move to SSL for all logged-in users, search referrer data from the largest search engine (+80 percent market share) is not available.

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SSL is defined as secure sockets layer and is an Internet protocol that uses secure communications on the Internet. If enabled when logged into Google apps, Google will automatically convert you to https:// instead of http://. This does provide additional security, but when SSL is enabled and you are logged in when searching on Google, search referral data is lost.

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Second, when users show intent by searching for something on Google, they are immediately interested in finding out more about a product and clicking on a link. This is not the case with search retargeting when they might see a display ad several days or weeks later while reading a site. For those reasons, it is best to think of search retargeting as more of an upper-funnel awareness channel. It allows for targeting users who have expressed interest in keywords relating to your product, but lacks the scale for highly specific terms, and does not reach users at the crucial moment that their intent is expressed.

Social Retargeting

With the emergence of paid advertising options across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, this term has become a catch-all for a range of tactics, making it particularly confusing. In practice this generally refers to targeting specific people based on their social actions. For example, targeting people who like your brand’s Facebook page (fan retargeting) or targeting your Twitter followers. Some people have also referred to retargeting people on Facebook through Facebook Exchange (FBX) Social Retargeting. However, this would be more accurately described simply as retargeting people on social media inventory, if a distinction must really be made.

E-mail Retargeting

This one gets confusing because it is a term that is used to describe two unique things. Most commonly, it describes the tactic of e-mailing people who perform (or don’t perform) a particular action on your site. Usually this involves sending people who abandon their shopping cart an e-mail about those items: a discount, a notification if they’re selling out, and so on. However, sometimes people refer to “e-mail retargeting” as the act of placing a retargeting pixel in an e-mail to adjust their campaigns based on who does or doesn’t open an e-mail. An example would be a daily-deal or flash-sale site that might not want to retarget people who open their e-mail because they already know they’re reaching these people for free (aside from the cost of acquiring that e-mail address in the first place.) If people who read the e-mail don’t click through, it can be assumed that they’re not interested in the deal that day, so media spend shouldn’t be wasted to further entice them. Alternatively, a brand might want to aggregate people into a retargeting segment who read their newsletter since they know these are highly engaged people. Either way, this is simply a targeting criterion and not truly e-mail retargeting as described above.

To address the proliferation of the word retargeting, the typical form of retargeting we cover in this book...