Digital marketing is experiencing a surge in popularity, but how can you be sure your exceptional content is reaching its full potential after you hit publish? While readers may enjoy your work, will they return for more?

Marketers need to implement strategies to recapture the interest of their audience and convert passive viewers into active leads. Enter content remarketing, an incredibly effective yet surprisingly underutilized marketing technique. Neglecting this strategy is not just a missed opportunity – it’s like throwing money away. Don’t make that mistake! I recently gave this session at the epic Inbound 2014 conference and thought it would be valuable to share here as well. Prepare for an in-depth exploration, featuring unconventional insights (a huge thank you to our data expert, Mark Irvine, for his invaluable assistance in analyzing the data).

Demystifying Content Remarketing

At its core, remarketing involves tagging your website visitors and then presenting them with targeted banner ads after they exit your site. This technique aims to entice them back and hopefully guide them towards further engagement.

Remarketing allows you to stay on the radar of individuals who have already shown interest in your website. Imagine them browsing their emails, catching up on news, or watching YouTube videos – and there you are, ready to capture their attention with fresh and compelling content! This could be a gentle nudge to complete a previous action or a strategic presentation of new content designed to influence their purchasing decision. Remarketing offers the following benefits:

• Converting website visitors who leave without taking action into valuable leads
• Boosting brand recall, which translates into increased brand-related searches
• Driving higher rates of repeat visits and engagement
• Amplifying the impact of your SEO and content strategy for the web According to Forrester Research, a staggering 96% of website visitors leave without fulfilling the desired action intended by the marketer. Remarketing empowers you with a second chance to create a lasting first impression (and even a third, fourth, or more). In the past, nexus-security excelled at SEO but struggled to attract organic traffic back to our site. We had to break free from being just another forgettable name in the digital space. Our content needed to become more engaging and memorable.

Harnessing the Power of Content Remarketing on the Google Display Network

Now that we’ve established the challenge and the potential, let’s delve into the solution. This section will guide you on how to leverage display remarketing strategies within the Google Display Network to significantly enhance your inbound marketing endeavors.

Why the Google Display Network is a Game-Changer

Firstly, its sheer size and reach are unparalleled.

The Google Display Network (GDN) stands as one of the most extensive remarketing networks globally, encompassing over two million websites. This network includes a vast majority of websites worldwide (with the notable exception of Facebook), along with prominent Google platforms like YouTube and Gmail. The integration of AdMob for mobile targeting further expands its reach, allowing your ads to appear within mobile apps like Angry Birds and countless others.

Embarking on Your Remarketing Journey

Utilizing the GDN for remarketing provides you with an expansive reach. You can often connect with your tagged website visitors multiple times a day, throughout the week, and across a diverse array of websites.

On average, you’ll have the opportunity to reconnect with 84% of the individuals you tag, with an average frequency of 10-18 times per month.

Mastering Audience Definition

Remarketing begins with defining the specific group of users you want to target. For instance, you might create a segment for users who visited your blog or those who explored particular pages on your site, such as your pricing page. This enables you to tailor your outreach to these specific groups, delivering messages and offers that align with their interests. Defining an audience involves creating what’s known as a remarketing list. Google handles the technicalities of setting cookies – your role is to determine which website visitors to include or exclude from your target audience.

Segmenting your audience into distinct lists empowers you to display different ads based on the specific areas of your site they visited. An additional advantage is the ability to bid more competitively for visitors who have shown interest in the high-value sections of your website. This could result in increased impressions and higher ad placements. For example, your data might reveal that visitors to your pricing or product pages are more valuable than those who solely engage with your blog (as blog posts often have limited direct relevance to the products or services you’re promoting). Another effective remarketing strategy for content creators involves categorizing their audience based on the different post categories within their blog. If you already have a wealth of blog content organized by topic, leverage these existing classifications when defining your remarketing audience segments.

Determining the Optimal Audience Membership Duration

In remarketing, audience membership duration refers to the timeframe during which you’ll continue to display ads to a particular user. For instance, an audience membership duration of 60 days means users who visit your site will encounter your ads for a period of 60 days. But how do you determine the ideal duration for your campaigns?

Addressing Ad Fatigue Concerns

Some marketing experts caution against overly aggressive remarketing, suggesting that it might make potential customers feel uncomfortable, potentially harming both your campaign’s ROI and your brand image. They typically recommend limiting ad exposure through shorter audience membership durations and impression caps. Let’s examine the evidence to understand the true impact of ad fatigue in remarketing.

Comparing Ad Fatigue in Remarketing and Generic Display Ads

Ad fatigue is a genuine concern across all forms of advertising, including TV, radio, print, and digital display ads. However, is the rate of ad fatigue higher for remarketing ads compared to other display ad types?

Our research reveals that the click-through rates of remarketing ads are significantly higher from the outset. This advantage persists even as ad fatigue gradually sets in. In essence, a user is more inclined to interact with a remarketing ad, even after encountering it six times, compared to a completely new and generic display ad!

Measuring the Fatigue Factor

Let’s visualize the same data by normalizing the decay of click-through rates over time:

While remarketing ads do exhibit some level of fatigue over time, the rate of fatigue is less than half that of generic display ads.

Analyzing Conversion Rate in Relation to Ad Impressions

What about conversion rates? How does the number of times a user has seen your ad before clicking on it influence the likelihood of conversion? We explored this aspect as well:

Interestingly, while the likelihood of a user clicking on a remarketing ad might slightly decrease with repeated exposure, those who do click are more than twice as likely to convert!

Dispelling Remarketing Myths

Contrary to popular belief, the data doesn’t support the notion that remarketing is inherently intrusive and should be avoided or excessively restricted. Let’s recap the key takeaways:

• Users are significantly more likely to engage with a remarketing ad, even after seeing it multiple times, than they are with a new generic display ad.
• Although remarketing ads do experience fatigue, the rate is less than half that of their generic counterparts.
• While click-through rates might slightly decrease over time, users who click on remarketing ads are more than twice as likely to convert! This leads us to our first significant remarketing lesson:

Embrace Boldness and Aim for High Ad Impressions

People visit your website for a reason, and their past browsing behavior is a strong indicator of their future purchasing decisions. Don’t shy away from experimenting with relatively higher impression caps and membership durations. Don’t let the fear of appearing intrusive hold you back. As long as your offers and messaging are relevant and provide value, remarketing is far from intrusive.

• Consider setting your audience membership duration to three times the length of your average sales cycle.
• If it typically takes around one week for a lead to convert into a sale, set your audience membership duration to three weeks.
• Don’t be overly concerned about impression caps (remember, higher impressions often lead to higher conversion rates) and explore rotating multiple ads within a single campaign to mitigate ad fatigue.

Mastering the Art of Content Remarketing Ads

Now that we’ve covered audience definition, let’s shift our focus to crafting compelling remarketing ads.

Exploring Ad Formats on the Google Display Network

The Google Display Network offers a variety of 14 different display ad formats:

Ad formats are crucial for marketers due to the dynamics of ad auctions. Different ad formats don’t directly compete with each other for placement.

The takeaway? Diversify your ad formats! This table illustrates the distribution of impressions across various ad formats on the internet:

By diversifying your ad formats, you maximize your chances of securing favorable ad placements.

Leveraging Emotionally Resonant Content

The same emotions that draw people to your content can be harnessed to encourage clicks on your ads.

The key is to craft ads that evoke emotions and connect with users on a deeper level. Avoid dull, generic, and purely informational ads that blend in with the overwhelming noise online. Creating impactful content remarketing ads boils down to these simple principles:

• Embrace a variety of ad formats.
• Design ads that appeal to your audience’s emotions.

The Pursuit of High Click-Through Rates

Remember, increasing click-through rates is the key to lowering your cost per click. While you might end up paying for a larger volume of clicks, the cost per click will significantly decrease – potentially by as much as 400%. Let’s break down how this works.

Understanding the Relationship Between Cost Per Click and Click-Through Rate

The Google Display Network employs an algorithm known as Quality Score to determine which ads to display, their respective positions, and the cost advertisers pay for each click. Google’s revenue model relies on ad clicks, so it makes perfect sense to prioritize ads that are more likely to be clicked. To incentivize advertisers to create engaging ads, Google offers significant discounts for ads with high click-through rates while imposing penalties on those with low click-through rates. Therefore, for every 0.1% increase or decrease in your ad’s CTR, your click costs will fluctuate by 21%.

A Closer Look at Display Text Ads While this sounds promising in theory, the challenge lies in creating ads that consistently achieve high click-through rates. It’s important to highlight that a significant portion (67.5%) of image ads encountered while browsing the internet aren’t actually images at all. They are simply text ads disguised as images, as illustrated below:

Understandably, the average CTR for text ads is notably lower compared to image ads, as depicted here:

Consequently, the cost per click (CPC) for text ads is considerably higher than that of image ads:

Using text ads is like paying a staggering 381% premium! The key takeaway? Invest the effort to design visually appealing and customized image ads instead of simply repurposing your text-based search ads.

Proven Strategies for Boosting Your Remarketing CTRs

Higher click-through rates translate into reduced costs per click. Let’s explore how you can elevate your CTR: 1. Utilize Ads that Feature Your Most Compelling Offers. When it comes to your image ads, it’s best to showcase your most valuable offerings, such as a free trial of your product or a demo request. Here’s an example of one of my top-performing ads:

This ad cleverly plays on the relatable experience of a dog disrupting productivity, offering a solution in the form of nexus-security’s PPC Grader – complete with an adorable puppy. When executed effectively, your ads will be welcomed by your audience rather than perceived as intrusive. 2. Conduct a Conversion Path Analysis. The goal here is to identify the specific pages on your website that, when visited during a user’s session, significantly increase the likelihood of conversion into a lead or sale. These could be pages like product overview pages.

Once you’ve identified these crucial pages, target them strategically in your remarketing campaigns. 3. Experiment with Content-Focused Ads. Take inspiration from this ad by my colleague Marty Weintraub from AimClear. Instead of directly promoting a product or service, it directs users to a valuable piece of content titled “10 Kevlar PPC Analyses and Processes for a Bulletproof PPC Account.”

But how do you determine which content pieces to feature in your ads? 4. Analyze Social Shares for Your Blog Content. A closer look at your blog content will often reveal that a small percentage of your pages (around 5%) drive a significant portion of social media shares.

For instance, after analyzing articles on the HubSpot blog, we discovered that while the average article receives a few hundred social shares, the top 5% garner tens of thousands of shares. Unsurprisingly, the same content that resonates well on social media tends to perform exceptionally well when featured in ads. Leverage free tools like BuzzSumo to pinpoint the most shared content on your blog.

Why Content Marketers Excel at PPC

Content marketers are exceptionally well-equipped to excel in the realm of PPC marketing. Why? Because the success of PPC campaigns heavily relies on the creativity of your ads. While I don’t intend to undermine my PPC colleagues, creativity isn’t always their strongest suit. Just look at these ads for “Big Data Solutions” – they all look strikingly similar:

Talk about boring! It’s safe to assume that a vast majority of ads for any given search term tend to lack originality. This presents a golden opportunity for marketers who can think outside the box. This lack of creativity is what I call an AdWords Jackpot, reminiscent of hitting the lucky 7s in Vegas. When you manage to create an emotionally charged, unique, and attention-grabbing ad – what I call a Unicorn Ad – you have the potential to outshine your competition effortlessly. Essentially, the scarcity of creativity in this space translates into a massive advantage for those who dare to be different.

Navigating the World of Remarketing Bid Strategies

Now that you’re familiar with remarketing audiences and ad creation, let’s turn our attention to effective bid management strategies.

It’s important to remember that in PPC marketing, every click comes at a cost. You specify the maximum amount you’re willing to pay per click, but the key lies in being highly selective and only bidding on clicks that hold the most value for your business. This is where strategic bid management comes into play!

Targeting Your Buyer Persona – The Cornerstone of Effective Bid Management

AdWords allows you to layer demographic information on top of your remarketing audiences, enabling you to pinpoint your ideal customers within a larger pool. It’s not always efficient to remarket to every single person in your audience. Why? Because not every visitor to your website fits the profile of a qualified buyer. For instance, someone from Zimbabwe might stumble upon your website. If your shipping capabilities don’t extend to their location, they are not a viable lead.

This is where having a deep understanding of your target customer persona becomes invaluable. What are their age ranges, parental statuses, locations, genders, preferred shopping times, income levels, and other relevant demographic characteristics? You can leverage this information to be highly selective with your bidding, focusing only on individuals within your audience who align with your desired demographic criteria.

Exploring Advanced Ad Formats

We’ve discussed standard image ad formats, but it’s worth exploring some innovative and highly effective advanced formats.

YouTube Ads

YouTube commands billions of hours of watch time every month. You might have your own YouTube content, but perhaps your viewership isn’t where you’d like it to be, or maybe your audience is unaware of the engaging marketing videos you have to offer. YouTube TrueView ads empower you to target your audience while they’re engaged with other videos on the platform. Let’s look at an example:

This screenshot showcases an ad for a tourism company in Italy, even though I was attempting to watch a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle video. The reason behind this targeted ad is that I was planning a trip to Florence at the time, and this company was actively remarketing to me based on my previous online activity. The beauty of TrueView videos lies in their cost-effective structure – you only pay when someone chooses to watch your video content. Clicking the “skip ad” button incurs no cost. Seriously, if you’re investing in video content creation, why not allocate a small budget to promote it effectively?

+Post Ads

+Post ads on Google+ present another relatively new and innovative ad format. While Google’s social network might not be as widely used as Twitter or Facebook, they’ve introduced an ingenious way to promote your Google+ content to a wider audience – even those who aren’t active on Google+. Recently, I experimented with +post ads to target individuals who had visited my blog. Google offers a convenient ad creation feature that automatically generates ads in various formats to promote your latest Google+ post (Facebook provides a similar feature). I set a daily budget of $25 and a maximum cost per click of 25 cents.

The results were astounding! My Google+ visibility and engagement skyrocketed, experiencing a 10-20 fold increase – all for a mere $25 per day! How is this possible? The answer lies in the potent flywheel effect of paid social promotion. The sheer volume of social media updates every day creates a highly competitive and noisy environment. Investing in paid social promotion to gain those initial likes, +1s, or retweets can significantly amplify the reach and visibility of your updates. This, in turn, can trigger a surge in organic social engagement. Sometimes, all you need is a little push to ignite the fire!

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)

Here’s another advanced technique worth exploring – Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA). It might seem a bit complex at first, but the results can be remarkable. RLSA empowers you to display customized ads to individuals within your remarketing audiences when they search for specific keywords on Google.

Let’s imagine someone visits your website. You tag them, and they become part of one of your remarketing audiences. Later, this same person searches for one of your competitors on Google, potentially indicating comparison shopping. RLSA allows you to target this potential customer with a highly specific ad, such as a discount code or a compelling offer. By understanding their past interactions with your site and their current search intent, you can craft persuasive and highly relevant ad copy.

Going Beyond Great Content

In today’s digital landscape, crafting exceptional content is no longer enough. Individuals and brands have evolved into publishers, intensifying competition to unprecedented levels. Remarketing picks up where content creation ends, ensuring that your hard work reaches the audience most likely to engage, convert, and ultimately contribute to your business objectives. Similar to content repurposing, remarketing enables you to extract maximum value from your existing content. By aligning commercial intent with targeted audience demographics, you unlock a powerful formula for success! Since implementing remarketing, we’ve witnessed a 50% increase in repeat visitors, tripled our average time on site, and experienced a substantial surge in direct traffic. In essence, content remarketing has empowered us to amplify the impact of every piece of content we produce. We’ve gained the ability to connect with the most receptive audience segments at the optimal time and through the most effective channels. And you can achieve the same! Embrace content remarketing to make your content more engaging and drive higher conversions by targeting a highly qualified audience. For further insights, tips, and strategies to maximize your content remarketing efforts, explore nexus-security’s Complete Guide to AdWords Remarketing Best Practices.