How Remarketing with PPC Boosts Your Bottom Line

In traditional bazaars around the world, shop keepers will use every trick they have to get you to buy: lowering the price, showing you more wares to entice you, and sometimes even following you out of the shop in an effort to clinch the sale.

Depending on your mood and their skill, it can be either charming or infuriating. Today’s online tactics strive to be more strategic and tactful, but the goal is still the same: how to get people to buy once, and buy again?

Remarketing with PPC is the online version of following your customers out the door. Remarketing (aka retargeting) gives you a second chance at getting people to buy once they’ve left your site.

Approximately 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to buy. With only 2% to 4% of initial website visitors converting, it’s essential to have a strategy in place that reengages with the 98% who bounced. A well-thought out PPC strategy that includes remarketing can help increase brand awareness and boost your bottom line.

How Remarketing Works

If someone visits your website and then bounces (leaves) without converting, you can get them to reengage by showing them ads. This works through a piece of code called a pixel. When they visit your site, they get “cookied” with this ad code, and when they browse the web they see ads related to your offers.

Busting Misconceptions about Remarketing

Before we get into the benefits of remarketing with PPC, I want to bust a couple of misconceptions I sometimes hear about retargeting. One misconception is that it’s creepy and/or annoying. If retargeting was creepy, then no one would click on ads enticing them to reengage. But people do click on retargeting ads and convert.

Retargeting *can* annoy people, but only if you’re doing it wrong. An example of doing remarketing wrong is clumsily trying to retarget people who have already converted, rather than doing something more skillful like showing them another product or offering or upselling them. It’s not only annoying, but ineffective, to show people ads for something they’ve just bought (it happens).

Not only do most customers not find retargeting creepy or annoying, 72% of millennial shoppers are favorable to retargeting, according to Kissmetrics.

4 Ways Remarketing with PPC Boosts Your Bottom Line

Businesses in just about every sector use remarketing to drive more sales and grow their customer base. Here are four ways remarketing with PPC can help you boost your bottom line.

1. Lower Cost Per Conversions (CPC) and higher ROI

Clicks on remarketing ads often have a lower cost per click (CPC), and therefore a lower cost per conversion, than clicks you get with search campaigns. Search ads have higher conversion rates than remarketing ads because of the inherent motivation to convert when someone does a keyword search and comes upon a search ad.

But search ads are also more expensive than retargeting ads, so that doesn’t mean you should just stick with search and forget about retargeting. This is especially true if you have an ecommerce site. With ecommerce, cart abandonment is high, so retargeting is essential.

A factor that affects CPC and ROI with remarketing is how competitive your industry is, but typically the cost per conversion for remarketing campaigns is lower compared to search campaigns.

Often remarketing ads offer higher ROI that translates to a faster return on your investment.

2. Boosts Brand Awareness

Retargeting helps ensure your audience doesn’t forget about you. If a customer is repeatedly exposed to your brand, they’re more likely to buy from you. Because remarketing typically has a lower CPI (cost per impression) than search ads, it makes for cost-effective branding.

It’s partly an appeal to people’s psychology that makes remarketing effective. As I’ve written before, when a customer sees you all around the Internet, they subconsciously think your company is successful enough to have a huge marketing campaign across multiple channels. With remarketing, you don’t need a multi-million dollar budget — just a few low-cost, strategically placed ads.

One caveat: you do have to make sure you’re not hitting them with your ads too often or for too long, or they’ll get “banner blindness” and not see your ads. But used wisely, retargeting is a powerful boost to brand awareness.

3. Incredibly Specific Ad Targeting

I’ve written before about how you can get super-specific with your audience targeting with Facebook ads. The same is true with remarketing.

You may not want to retarget every single person who visits your website, because it’s simply not cost effective. Someone may visit your website but not be able to afford what you’re offering, or they may have accidentally stumbled on your site, been doing research for someone else, or any number of factors that might not make them part of your target audience.

With remarketing you can filter your remarketing cookie pool with niche targeting options. There are many targeting options, some of which include social media demographics, life events (such as getting engaged or moving), job titles, and recent purchases.

Selectively targeting your audience is especially beneficial when you have a large retargeting audience and need to narrow it down to only those who are likely to convert.

4. Personalized Ad Targeting

With remarketing, you can create highly targeted but also personalized ad campaigns based on which pages of your site a user visits. You can also personalize on what action they take, such as leaving an item in a cart without converting.

With personalized ads, your ad appears only to relevant users as they browse other websites in your ad network. These personalized ads may also appear when people search online with keywords related to your products or services.

Bonus: 5. Free Conversions

This 5th benefit of remarketing with PPC is a bonus because it’s not something you can rely on, but it’s a nice possible side benefit. While you can’t count on this to completely minimize your costs, one side benefit to remarketing is that sometimes you can actually get conversions for free. That’s right, for free. This is possible with what’s called view-through conversions. This is when someone sees your PPC remarketing ad and instead of clicking on it, goes directly to your website and converts.

Do you have a PPC remarketing strategy in place? How has it worked for you? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Computer nerd turned business owner, leveraging an extensive sales background with a knack for digital marketing. Adam founded and currently runs ParaCore, a pay-per-click marketing company focused on generating leads for high-growth clients.

Author: Adam Arkfeld

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How Remarketing with PPC Boosts Your Bottom Line

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How Remarketing Works

Busting Misconceptions about Remarketing

4 Ways Remarketing with PPC Boosts Your Bottom Line