Remarketing For Conversion: The Long Way Rocks!

We all try to send loads of search traffic to our websites. We invest loads of money in high rankings in the organic SERP’s and we make sure we have some huge budget we spend, spend, spend on clicks.

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:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxPu7-tuqh8[/youtube]

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!