Remarketing Best Practices: Creating Ads
By Angela Seckinger — Nov 8, 2018 11:00 AM

Welcome to part three in our series about remarketing. In our previous post, we walked through segmentation and audience settings in Google Analytics in preparation for launching your remarketing campaigns. Today, in part three, we will explore best practices for creating and optimizing remarketing ads including: aligning offers along the different stages of their visitor journey, how to optimize ad performance, and what elements to test for refining ad delivery.
Crafting the Right Offers
One of the most powerful aspects of remarketing is the ability to personalize your remarketing ads based on the products and services a person most likely prefers but was not quite ready to purchase. For example, someone who visits your pricing page is probably going to be ready to buy sooner than someone who has just visited your blog. Tailoring your ads based on the web pages they visit and how they interact with your site will make them more likely to click-through and convert. At minimum, be sure to create different ad groups dedicated to each of these basic phases of the sales funnel.
Below, we highlight 5 visitor scenarios and some highly-related offers that you can craft to drive return visits to your website based on their visitor data.
- Homepage only visitors are typically in the top of the sale funnel. If they visit your homepage only, your remarketing ads should be focused on more general, high-level messaging designed to generate awareness and drive them to a specific optimized landing page where you fully control the experience. Unlike the homepage that is designed for multiple purposes. The intention here is to capture them as an initial lead/prospect and get them into the first phase of your prospect funnel. It’s your first date, so to speak.
- Product page visitors are typically in the middle of your sales funnel and are starting to consider making a purchase. For this visitor stage, your ads should include an offer for consideration materials such as mid-level product white-papers or case studies. For BtoC websites, send a specific offer for the product, product category or complementary items they visited. In addition, for this stage of BtoC visitor, now is a good time to consider Dynamic Remarketing, which is an advanced tactic for those that have a shopping feed. Dynamic remarketing shows ads that contain exact products and services they viewed on your site. Learn more about Dynamic Remarketing for Google Ads.
- Visitors who are reading your blog, downloading ebooks, or other formats of your content, should be offered additional related content such as same topic webinars, and more importantly, this is a great time to drive visibility to any customer case studies. This visitor is getting much deeper into your sales funnel. Your goal here is to show the visitor exactly how they will benefit from using your products. From a dating perspective, you are now getting serious enough to start meeting friends and family, so to speak.
- Visitors to the pricing pages and/or shipping information pages, are typically at the bottom of the sales funnel and are probably ready to make a decision. These visitors should receive offers that feature a stronger, more detailed call-to-action such as your most popular case studies, more advanced product focused white-papers, or even a free trial or one-on-one demo; especially for those that are repeat visitors. Here, your goal is to show the customer the experience they would have if they were already a customer.
- Cart abandoners make it all the way to the shopping cart but abandon the order without completing. Here, your strongest offers are usually needed since these are typically your most valuable visitors throughout the website journey. Be sure to consider your overall offers as well. Be careful not to offer a discount to these groups regularly, as that might trigger behavior where they habitually abandon orders just to get better deals. Consider other options with your offers. Just be sure that offer makes sense for the value of the visitor in that stage at that time.
Improving Ad Performance
The following recommendations are geared specifically towards improving the ad experience for the visitor.
Keep your ads fresh and exciting to encourage clicks. To resonate with your visitor, remarketing ads must first be relevant. To be relevant, those ads must speak to the prospect’s specific needs at that time. The more meaningful and timely your ads are, the greater their impact. In addition, the longer the exact same ad runs, the less effective that ad becomes over time. According to ReTargeter, clickthrough rates fell by 50% after running the same ad set for five months. The best way to convert people who you have been remarketing to for a while is to change your ads. When you change the benefit, the offer, or a combination of the two, you can typically expect an increase in performance for a period of time.Improving Ad Delivery
Other key tactics related to improving performance include methods for when and where your remarketing ad gets delivered. The beginning stages of these recommendations were featured in the 2nd post in this series. There, we reviewed how to segment audiences for the best delivery. Now, we will review additional ways to refine ad delivery which will not only make your ad spend more efficient, but will result in improving conversion rates as well.Last, keep in mind visitors are less and less likely to follow a linear visiting or buying pattern through your site. They may come to your site through different paths, different devices and will even convert through a different path than they were originally introduced to your site. Your overall goal is to continue the same experience and story throughout so that you build the relationship for the visitor and assisting them along the way in their purchasing and customer journey.