Episode 003: Using Remarketing to Boost Your Website's Sales

 

Episode Summary: 

Site visitors are hot leads but often don’t buy on their first visit. In this episode, Julie walks you through how to use remarketing to specifically target those visitors and encourage them to visit your site again (and make a purchase this time).

 

Episode Links:

https://business.facebook.com/ https://www.adroll.com/ https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/  https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod 

 

Episode Transcript:

Announcer
Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to the Savvy Business Method with your host, Julie Feickert.

Julie Feickert
Hello and welcome to episode three of the Savvy Business Method podcast, where we talk about how to plan, start and grow your small business online. I'm Julie Feickert, and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. I'm so excited to tell you about my YouTube channel today. I finally got it up and there are a bunch of short videos on there. They're about one to three minutes each. So, it's really quick tips for you guys. So after this podcast, can you please go over and check it out? I'd love to get the feedback. And of course you remember to hit the subscribe button over on YouTube. I have a lot more videos coming and that way, you'll be notified when they're available.

All right, so let's launch into today's topic and that's remarketing. You have probably noticed that very few people buy from a website the first time they visit and that's really frustrating, right?

Like, if only we could convert more people on their first visit. And yeah, there are always going to be things that we're going to be trying to do to continue to get our conversion rates up. But in the end, there are always going to be individuals who need to come back multiple times before they're ready to make a purchase and those are hot leads, right? I mean, they already know our website. They've seen our products. They're interested in buying this sort of thing and so in theory, they are going to be the easiest leads to convert on their next visit.

So how do we market directly to them so that they come back to the site that second time and place an order? And you're going to do this using the same system big companies do. Let me tell you a quick story.

A few years ago, we moved into a new house and the Washer and dryer that came with the house were clearly not going to last. The washer was making funny noises. The dryer wasn't consistently heating up. I mean, it just wasn't a good situation.

Now, I have four children and two businesses and a mastiff. If you've ever seen the movie Turner and Hooch, that should give you like a mental picture of what I'm working with here, so you could imagine that having my washer and dryer break is going to go badly. It doesn't matter what day it happens. So one night I grabbed a glass of wine and I started looking at washers and dryers online and in the middle of my search I popped in to check Facebook and sure enough, there was an ad for the washer dryer set I'd seen on a big website five minutes earlier.

This is what is known as remarketing. My internet browsing history of viewing that product on a website was being used to show me hyper-targeted advertising. And there's a reason so many big companies use this marketing method. It works so well. And here's the best part. You as a website owner, even if you are a very small company, can use this method too.

So let's talk about remarketing, which you'll sometimes also hear referred to as retargeting. This is where we show ads specifically to previous site visitors to encourage them to return to our website and hopefully make that purchase.

Okay. So specifically, how do you do this? Right? Let's get down to the nitty gritty details. So the first thing you're going to need to do is pick companies to work with. Now, when I look at my remarketing campaigns for my companies, I generally split them into two buckets. The first one is Facebook. Facebook, as the biggest social media platform in the world right now, is a really great place to run remarketing ads, partially because people practically live on Facebook, right?

Your customers are on there constantly, and so running ads on Facebook can be really effective. Now there are a couple of ways to run remarketing ads on Facebook and one of them is to work with Facebook directly and you do this through their Business Manager system. If you don't have Business Manager set up yet for your business, this would be your first step. Just Google business Manager Facebook and it will come up and they will walk you through the whole process. It is not difficult. They really want your business and your money, so they make this really easy.

Okay. The other set of remarketing ads I run for my businesses are what I call general web ads and these are going to be ads that are going to appear basically everywhere but Facebook, so if you go to say your favorite news website, you'll often see ads there for maybe a pair of shoes that you saw on Zappos or Amazon will show you something you were searching in the last couple of days.

So these are general web ads. They just appear on all sorts of websites. Website owners can sign up to serve them and so by working with general web ads, you're generally catching your customers pretty much everywhere they browse. Now for general web ads, I recommend working with a company called Ad Roll and there are a bunch of these companies out there, but Ad Roll's been around I think the longest and they're definitely the big one in the industry. They're pretty easy to work with. They have reasonable policies and procedures and so I don't really see any reason not to work with them. Ad Roll also has the ability to run Facebook advertising for remarketing as well, so you could run both your general web ads and your Facebook remarketing through one system if you want, or you can split them up and run your Facebook ads through Facebook Business Manager and run your web ads through Ad Roll.

Okay, so once you've chosen which companies you want to work with, the next step is to place a pixel on your website. Now a pixel is a small amount of code that you place on the back end of your website and it allows for tracking of the customer behavior on your website. If you use Google Analytics with your website, if you have integrated your email service provider, the company sending out your newsletters and that sort of thing, you've already worked with pixels. There's just a little bit of code.

Now with remarketing, you will need a pixel for each company you work with. So if you're just working with Ad Roll, you need an Ad Roll pixel. If you're going to be working with both general web ads and Facebook ads through Facebook business manager, then you need a pixel for Facebook Business Manager as well. Both companies are really good about giving you incredibly detailed instructions on how to get this installed.

Depending on the eCommerce software that you are using, some of them make it ridiculously easy to do this and some make it a little harder. But uh, don't let this stop you. This is not difficult. You just need to get it done.

Now the thing to remember about the pixel is this is how these companies track visitors to your website. It's kind of like a calling card. It allows Facebook and Ad Roll to find and identify those same people when they visit other websites. Now, probably the biggest thing to keep in mind is that you cannot collect any data until you have your pixel installed. There is no way to go back and collect retroactive traffic data. So if you are planning on launching a website, I would really encourage you to get these pixels installed before you launch, so that you are gathering all of that traffic information.

If you already have your website up, get these pixels installed today. Even if you're not sure if you want to use this method of advertising yet, you can still be collecting that data.

Okay, number three, you want to set up your audiences and so this is really about deciding who you want to show ads to. Now, if you're a brand new website or you don't have a ton of traffic, it probably makes sense to show the ads to everyone. You really need to have at least a couple of hundred and preferably a couple of thousand people who have been tracked to the pixel for these ads to be worth your time and energy, because the ad rates are for the cost per thousand impressions. So that's the ad being shown a thousand times. If you only have 200 people on your list, then even that thousand impressions is going to be everyone's seeing your ad five times and that's a way to make everyone really tired of you really quick. Right?There is such a thing as ad fatigue and you do have to be careful with it.

Okay, so let's say you aren't really tiny or you didn't just start and you have some decent traffic. You want to keep in mind that Facebook holds that data generally, at least right now for 180 days and Ad Roll holds that data for 120 days so you can really play around with your audiences here. You could have an audience, for example, of people who have visited a page on your site in the last 30 days versus the last seven days and you could test and see which of those are going to work better for you.

I generally recommend that once you have more than a little bit of traffic, that you start to think more seriously about intent. So by intent, I mean what are the signs that someone is more likely to come back and purchase and so for example, you should definitely have an audience set up for people who abandoned their shopping carts, right?

Like, those are your hottest leads. You definitely want those people to come back. Also, people who have visited multiple pages on your site or key products can also be really hot leads that you would want to make sure that you target. You know, the good news here is that at the moment at least, both Facebook and Ad Roll's minimum budget for an ad campaign is like $5 a day. And with Facebook you can usually split test that amount. So really you can do a bunch of small runs to kind of see what works best for your business.

You know, do people who visited two or more pages in the last seven days outperform people who visited your site in general in the last 30 days, for example. These are the sorts of things that you can test and work out.

Now, while the minimum budgets for both Facebook and Ad Roll are really affordable that you still have to keep in mind the pricing that you're paying. Like I said earlier, the pricing is based on what's called CPM, which is essentially the price per thousand impressions. Now this pricing is going to fluctuate throughout the year, so your $5 minimum campaign is going to get you way, way more impressions in say June than it is at the end of November when a whole bunch of companies are bidding for that same space.

It also really depends on the industry you're in. If you're in a highly competitive industry or if the types of customers that you are targeting are also highly targeted by other businesses, you're going to pay more and that $5 minimum ad spend isn't going to go as far.

Okay. Number four: you need to load your ad images and start running ads. It sounds so easy, right? When people click, they'll be back on your website. So just real quick, let's talk about the two different kinds of ads that are really common with remarketing systems and the first are called static ads and these are just images jpeg or gif images that you upload into the system and generally their purpose is to remind people that your company exists and to come back. These work really well if you have good brand recognition or if you have a very limited product selection.

So let me give you an example. One of my companies, we develop and sell robotics curriculum for middle schoolers and high schoolers. This is not a very crowded market so we're pretty much one of the only people doing this. And so if I put up ads and just say robotics curriculum, people generally remember who we were because that's probably the only robotics curriculum site they've been on in months. So those static ads can be really effective if you have that recognition there. They can also be really nice if you're advertising a special offer. So if you're running a free shipping weekend or come back and save 10%, something like that, they'll static ads can be really handy. One thing you need to be careful of, though. If you're going to do an offer, the offer has to be easily redeemable. So if you're running a site-wide free shipping sale, great. Everybody get free shipping when they check out.

If you're running an offer specifically to the people you're targeting with your ad, you're going to need to direct them to some sort of landing page or have a way of getting them that coupon code. It can technically be in the ad, but you're probably gonna run into problems because very few people write things down, right? But the goal here is if you make it hard for people to redeem the offer, your ads will get kicked by Facebook and Ad Roll. You do not want that to happen. That's points against your account, right? Because it looks like you're being fraudulent and trying to trick people.

So just be careful. If you're going to do a special ad or special offer of some sort, you really need to make sure that it's going to be super easy for people to understand how to redeem that offer.

The other type of ad you see really commonly with remarketing are called liquid or dynamic ads. And that's the example I gave in the beginning, right, of that washer and dryer I was looking at. These are the ads that will generally show you the exact product that you looked at on someone's website. These are really effective. So you might ask yourself, why wouldn't I just use those? And there's a couple of downsides to them.

One: they tend to be more costly. They also tend to require more tech setup. There are often minimums to run these ads, minimum budgets that you need to meet. It's changing all the time. So I can't really give you good specifics that would last more than a couple of months, but just be aware that these ads, you know, there are some downsides to them, but once you are spending enough, once you have a sophisticated enough system going on, these can be a really effective way to sell your products through remarketing.

Okay, so even if you are not completely convinced you want to run out and start doing remarketing, I would still encourage you to get your pixel set up immediately so you can start gathering data. This is not a fast process, unless you have very large traffic numbers you're working with. So you know, you want to get those set up generally at least several weeks to several months in advance before you would need to run your ads. Because once you have lots of data, your ads will be more effective.

So setting the pixel up is kind of an insurance policy, right? So you're gathering all that data so you can wake up one day and say, oh, I want to go use my remarketing ads to advertise my Black Friday sale. Well yeah, you probably should have set those up, you know, 30 to 60 days in advance. Okay? So just something to keep in mind. Go out and do the pixels now and that will preserve your opportunity to then go out and do remarketing and the future.

Thanks for joining me today. I hope this is helpful and that you are feeling inspired to use remarketing in your business. If you have feedback or ideas for other shows, you know, I would love to hear them. Visit me at SavvyBusinessMethod.com as well as on Facebook and YouTube and I look forward to seeing you next time.

Announcer
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe for more great content and to stay up to date, visit SavvyBusinessMethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.

 

Episode 003: Using Remarketing to Boost Your Website's Sales