The result? Maybe 2 or 3 percent of this traffic makes it through your website’s funnel and converts. It’s why we get asked the following question a lot: How can we make all these investments in Search more effective? While it’s not always easy, there are several existing options available.

For example, we are focusing on capturing all traffic (including your valuable search traffic) in very specific remarketing audiences. Yes, there can be a lot of work in the tagging part, but we also found some different, creative approaches to remarking that have really worked. I think a good remarketing campaign is the perfect way to make better use of your search traffic and start with conversion driven display campaigns.

For starters, let me say that I think remarketing in itself is not successful without putting some effort in a good campaign.

You will have to invest time in tagging, building audiences, remarketing lists and smart custom combinations. Equally important, these preparations need a matching follow-up in the display ads you’re using for remarketing. You need to make it more appealing by creating a touchpoint with the website section your audience has visited.

So far, I think this is a well known story for all of us. However, this doesn’t work out every single time and for every type of customer. That is why we tried something else for a couple of our customers.

Think about it and ask yourself the following question: Why should a conversion always take place after the very first click when it comes to remarketing? It didn’t happen before when you sent the visitor from Google to a product specific page either, right? Aren’t there better ways for you to convince people in seeing they want your product?

My answer is it’s very possible and the answer is right in front of you if you look for it. We used YouTube for a successful remarketing campaign and it paid off. And it’s so easy!

You can find all the possibilities to advertise within your Google Adwords account and there’s not one good reason why you shouldn’t use YouTube to share your coolness in video with the whole world.

At a later stage, I will give you some results from one of our cases, but first, here’s what we came up with. Let’s say you are a festival and you’re using remarketing to persuade “non converters” to visit your awesome festival.

What is the real advantage in remarketing these people with your most sexy display banner and sending them to the same pages they already visited before?

Here’s a thought: it will only make very little difference, if none at all! However, there are tools at hand that can make a difference. So we are now selling the experience first, not the product.

So, instead of resending people to the same website pages they already visited, we are now sending them to the branded YouTube page. Not just the branded YouTube page of course, but to a specific video that sells the experience we know people are looking for.

To get back to my example: “Awesome Festival” should remarket people with video’s of new headliners they confirmed, like the video below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is exactly what we did for one of our customers selling a similar kind of product, screaming out the cool experience and creating more desire to purchase and get this experience. And it worked.

As you can see below, video is outperforming images and text. Remarkable, because both other remarketing ads are sending traffic directly to the relevant website pages.

I think key to this succesful remarketing campaign lies in a very good Search strategy, sending very well segmented traffic to destination specific pages.

Of course, you can only do so much if it comes to conversion rate, so what’s the next best thing? Capturing your Search traffic, and capture it well! Don’t try to always hit that conversion by sending people to the same pages over and over, if there are more effective ways of converting that customer.

The takeaway: do something different in making your Search traffic more effective. I like to call this Remarketing the long way – it rocks!

For whatever reason you get asked, there’s always a test you can simply roll out: Optimize your shopping cart.

Optimizing your Shopping Cart is a very nice and clean way of starting your conversion optimization process. It’s where the customer has done everything on your website you wanted him to do. It’s where they are screaming to give you their money. Hence, it’s where you can make very quick wins on improving the ROI on your website.

In my opinion, I’ve seen a lot of conversion processes held up by questioning yourself if you have the data in your analytics or adwords account to start such a test. Now don’t get me wrong: if you’re working with a party that is already running tests on multiple areas of their website, this is an issue you have to pay attention to.

Still, if you’re at the start of a conversion process, is there really any better starting point for optimizing your conversion rate? I still fully encourage you to look into analytics, check for pages with high bounce rates or low goal completions. But when it comes to setting up a conversion test, there’s also the mentality of just doing it!

Getting Started With Shopping Cart Optimization

To give you an example, with one of our new customers we were starting up conversion testing. Actually, the conversion rate wasn’t that bad for a starting point.

Conversion rate overall was at 1.95% but when looking at the conversion rate from the first step of the shopping cart, roughly 44% completed their transaction. Still that means that without optimization 56% drops out. Now of course people are going to be dropping out… but less is better, meaning more ROI from each of your traffic generating channels.

Now, we all want to go for the big difference in conversion tests. But why not start with making all the obvious improvements right under your nose?

You easily create a first test and equally important, you create time for your data analysis to start the next (big) test. I will give you some insights in what we did for the example case I mentioned.

In all fairness, our contact mentioned to us they had the feeling a lot of people were dropping out of their shopping cart.

So we checked the complete shopping cart and here’s what we found:

• The regular site navigation + header & footer was a distraction in the complete shopping cart.
• Buttons to proceed further into the shopping cart were not the same in the shopping cart. Both in location and color.
• At the very first step of the shopping cart, the displayed product was linking back to the product page.
• Information for registration was not prefilled into fields for delivery and billing.
• Every page was screaming for social communication and newsletter sign-ups.

We’ve improved all of the mentioned items. Header, footer and regular navigation were minimized. Buttons were all revised and aligned with the steps in the shopping cart. Most clicks that could lead to leaving the shopping cart (including social media buttons) were removed.

Finally, we let more information be prefilled on pages in the shopping cart. As you can see these aren’t the most spectacular changes, but they are changes that make a difference and you can use them for a lot of website shopping carts!

Now perhaps the most interesting is how exactly we did this. For a lot of projects, we like to work with the Visual Website Optimizer and what we did was the following:

The variations of the existing shopping cart pages were all made available by adding a query parameter to the url and on the first step of the shopping cart we started a session so visitors would have the entire shopping cart in either the old or new variation.

We set up a split url test in Visual Website Optimizer and all traffic was split 50-50 on the first step of the shopping cart by settings in Visual Website Optimizer.

A final note: the best thing you can do with these kind of tests is wait and not panic if conversion seems to be lower at the start of your test. In our case, as you can see, the new variation seemed to be converting less. Given time and data this turned around to a 1.2% improvement in conversion for the entire shopping cart. Easy money!