Do you understand re-marketing – Think Again?

Most of you will be aware of re-marketing or re-targeting. Effectively showing ads to potential customers after they leave a website. Its a great approach to brand wash and encourage them to return and convert.

However, the effectiveness of display advertising has been in decline. Customers are now wise to re-marketing. With the decline, perhaps its time to consider a new form of re-marketing – RLSA. Re-marketing List for Search Ads is a program that takes the best practice from traditional display ads of targeting ads to customers who previously visited your site, and makes it available for search ads via text ads and shopping ads.

Everybody gets excited about response rates of 2% to 5% and we all think we have created our own gold mine. But we have to face the reality that at 5% CTR advertisers are not appealing to 95% of potential customers! Virtually everyone you spend vast sums of money on advertising to does not want your product or service!

With Mobile searches exceeding 50% of all search now, the unpleasant truth may be that your ad is not being actually seen, it may be too far down the mobile screen never mind the desktop with the removal of the side ads. We all know products and services do not sell themselves but your ad needs to be seen. There appears to be too much competition and noise out there for many advertisers.

Virtually every e-commerce client we have worked for has built their business on a direct response model. We advertise to shoppers once they start evaluating their options after become aware of a product or need. The issue we all face is the cost of advertising to shoppers whilst they evaluate suppliers. We have all used display re-marketing to re engage with clients once they have visited your site but RLSA may present new opportunities for you.

What happens if you could optimise the purchasing process?

Google are forever telling us that people do not make decisions quickly. Shoppers visit websites on average 6 times in the process of making a purchase. It is reported that 75% of abandoned cart shoppers say they will return to the site to make a purchase. The long click buying process is built around the Awareness – Evaluation – Conversion model.
I have talked about the Pareto principle previously – 80% of your results will come from 20% of your activity. Effectively remove 80% of your activity costs and you would still have 80% of your revenue.

My new approach is to analyse your customers behaviour – how many clicks does it take to convert, how long is it from first ad click to conversion.

In the below example we can see the number of days before conversion. 76% of shoppers convert on the same day as the first click. Within 2 days shoppers have made 83% of all conversions!

Data indicates that shoppers make evaluation clicks visiting several websites. They often find it difficult to make a decision as there does not appear to be any major difference in suppliers – the deciding factor is heavily influenced by price but often by familiarity with a site. Effectively the more often they encounter your site the more likely they are to purchase from you. They have become brand washed.

The subsequent searches after visiting your site are highly important. If you keep appearing in the top positions you increase your chances of winning the sale improve dramatic.

I admit that it seems odd that you would want to pay even more to appear in a higher position the search and shopping listings. I would seem that you are going to increase costs for no benefit, but the opposite occurs. Often costs decline and your ROI increases – weird.

As you can see I increased the bid by a massive 40% for searches after a site visit. The CTR increased from 6.67% to 10.43%, but this is not the killer metric. Examine cost £149 to generate a £2422 revenue. The non RLSA traffic generated £8 in sales for each £1 spent, but the RLSA traffic created £16 in sales for every £1 spent on AdWords.

RLSA needs to be a key part of all advertisers tool kits going forward and if you haven’t considered it then get moving now! If you’ve got questions regarding this or want help getting it implemented then the number to call is 01244 470067.