A few weeks ago, a prospective client called to discuss their paid search and display campaigns. Their ultimate pain point was that they felt they were spending too much money on their audience remarketing campaigns for both search and display. Additionally, they were getting a few quality leads from those campaigns and out of that, a majority of them were not sales. This is not the first time I have heard that (and probably won’t be the last). Almost immediately, it was clear they were having problems because they were targeting the wrong audience.
Who Am I Targeting?
Retargeting is great… when done right. The idea is to stay in front of a shopper after they have visited your website and hopefully bring them to your website again if they did not convert the first time. This is critical in the consideration stage of a shopper’s journey because even if you do not get a direct conversion, remarketing campaigns tend to assist with conversions.
Primarily because your remarketing audience is built on first party data, you already have a huge advantage with targeting. The issue, however, arises when you target an audience based on all website traffic. There is nothing wrong with targeting an audience based on all visits to the website, however, not all website visitors/shoppers are created the same. Even if returning visitor data for your website is increasing, visitors to your website are there for different reasons and don’t always to convert. This means if you rely solely on targeting all website traffic as an audience, you may not get the results you expect to see with conversions–and you’ll probably end up spending more money to improve conversion metrics.
How Do I Target Them?
Try a different approach; first, identify actions on the website that matter to you or are more likely to lead to a conversion. This could be interactions with 3rd party tools on the website, clicks on buttons, image views of a products etc. Then, track visitors who were performing said actions with the intention of creating an audience out of that traffic. You may need to sharpen your event tracking skills to deal with this part. It is important to remember that tracking visitors who have spent a lot of time on the site is not necessary because it does not indicate engagement.
Next, send this data to a web analytics tool like Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics. At this point, you can see which events or engagement points are increasing or decreasing based on traffic. Create an audience using these events and then using your advertising platform, target these audiences within your search and display campaigns. Works like magic! In tests we’ve run, we saw a 52 – 65% increase in conversions and conversion rates, and an average lift of 26% in click through rate (CTR).
The bottom line is, targeting audiences based on engaged visitors/shoppers to your website improves leads and lead quality. Especially since a majority of visitors to your website are usually in the awareness or consideration stage of their buyer’s journey, it is important to identify shoppers that are highly engaged and target them.