The PPC Remarketing Reportmedia.dmnews.com/documents/30/ppc-remarketing-report...The PPC Remarketing...

The PPC Remarketing ReportHow online advertisers can improve profitability with pay-per-click remarketing strategies on Google, Facebook, and other advertising networks.

Simple, Sophisticated and Profitable™

April 2011

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The PPC Remarketing ReportHow online advertisers can improve profitability with pay-per-click remarketing

strategies on Google, Facebook, and other advertising networks.

Clickable is an all-in-one solution for online advertisers. Clickable removes the complexity

and time required to successfully advertise across Google, Bing and Facebook. For a free PPC

campaign analysis, visit go.clickable.com/ppcaudit.

Authored by

Hanny HindiClickable Search Marketing Guru

Christopher YachouhSenior SolutionsManager

Andrew BerneroDirector,Search Intelligence

Max KalehoffClickable Vice President of Marketing

This Clickable White Paper addresses:• Getting the most out of Display and Content Network advertising• Building remarketing campaigns, ads, and landing pages• Privacy Concerns and Restrictions• Retargeting with Facebook Ads• Remarketing with Clickable Solutions



Table of Contents

Introduction: The Power of RemarketingThe Remarketing OpportunityHow Remarketing WorksRemarketing and Direct ResponseThe Variety of Remarketing Channels

Defining Your Audience SegmentsDefining Visitor Segment by User BehaviorDefining Visitor Segments for Google Remarketing Campaigns

Building Remarketing Campaigns and Ad GroupsRemarketing Bids and BudgetsMore Tools for Building Remarketing Campaigns

Creating Remarketing Ads and Landing PagesOptimizing Display and Remarketing AdsRemarketing Ad Best PracticesDisplay and Remarketing Ad ImageryFrequency CapsBest Practices for Remarketing Landing Pages

Restrictions and Privacy ConcernsUser Cookies“Membership Duration”Using Personal InformationVertical-Specific RestrictionsAmending Your Privacy Policy

Remarketing with Facebook AdsConnection-Based TargetingFriends of ConnectionsNegative Connection TargetsBuilding Marketing Lists with Facebook Demographics



Table of Contents (continued)

Measuring the Success of Your Remarketing Campaigns

Improving Your Remarketing Campaigns withClickable Solutions



Introduction: The Power of Remarketing“Remarketing” is a powerful online advertising channel that combines the reach and

flexibility of display advertising with the precision and specificity of search.

In this report, we’ll explain how remarketing works, and how you can use it to grow your

business. We’ll focus heavily on Google’s remarketing technology, one of the most familiar

experiences for online advertisers. We’ll describe techniques and best practices for defining your

remarketing audiences, as well as considerations unique to remarketing accounts, ad creatives,

and landing pages.

Because remarketing campaigns target users based on their online behavior, it introduces

some privacy concerns and restrictions. We’ll review ways you can maximize your advertising

investment while respecting your users’ privacy. Finally, we’ll cover remarketing opportunities in

social media advertising, and introduce Facebook’s “Connection-Based” Advertising.

The Remarketing OpportunityRemarketing allows you to target your display ads to users who have previously visited your

site. It doesn’t matter how users got to your site. They could have entered your URL directly;

clicked on an organic or sponsored search results, or been redirected from another site. In every

case, remarketing allows you to track what that user does on your site, and display ads to them

accordingly.

This results in more relevant ads for users, and greater revenues for advertisers. While direct

response campaigns have not always performed well on display networks, this has not been the

case with remarketing campaigns. Many advertisers have achieved double-digit click-through and

conversion rates—numbers that would be enviable in search.

Let’s consider a few examples:

#1: Abandoned Shopping Carts

BuyJeans.com BuyJeans.com

Shopping Cart

BuyJeans.com

Shopping Cart

Blog.comTop 10 Vacation Books 10% Off!

Many customers abandon the conversion process without making a purchase. With remarketing,

you can target these customers directly, and encourage them to come back and complete the

conversion process.

For instance, a user might add a pair of jeans to a shopping cart, then close the window before

clicking “Submit.” When he navigates to a site within the content network you advertise on,

he will see an ad reminding him to complete the purchase. To make it particularly effective, it

should be a special offer—free shipping, or a discount.



#2: Repeat Customers

Groceries.com

Shopping Cart

Groceries.com

Order Complete

Thank You!

Blog.comEat Healthier Today Time to

restock?

Repeat customers are particularly valuable: they already know the value of your offer, and they’ve

converted in the past. If you run a grocery site, for instance, you may expect customers to

convert as often as once a week. With remarketing, you can place ads reminding them to restock

across the display network.

#3: “View-Through” Conversions

Music.comSearch

Music.com Music.com

W

Blog.comTop Album Sales Music.com

Not every benefit of remarketing campaigns can be directly attributed. In some cases, customers

who don’t click on your ads might still search for your offer, or interact with your business in

some other way. This is much more similar to traditional “branding” campaigns on display

networks, and should be tracked and attributed similarly.

#4: Saving Impressions

NEWS–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–——

–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–——–—–—–—–

Newspaper.com

Subscribe Today

Newspaper.com

Order Complete

Thank You!

Content.com2012 Election Outlook

NEWS–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–——

–—–—–—–—–—–—–—–——–—–—–—–

Some business are not looking for repeat customers: once somebody has subscribed to a

newspaper, for instance, there may not be another offer to make. In that case, advertisers can

reduce their costs by not showing ads to these customers. Save your impressions for people who

haven’t subscribed yet.

How Remarketing WorksIn order to use remarketing, you need to implement simple Javascript tags on your site, very

similar to performance tracking tags. When users reach pages that include those tags, a cookie

is placed on their browser. The simplest remarketing campaign would involve a single tag that

generated one kind of cookie: every time a user came to your site, they would be tagged as a

“visitor,” and you can target them on the display networks where you place ads.



For more complex remarketing campaigns, you will need to place different kinds of tags on

different kinds of pages. For instance, you might have a different tag for each product or kind of

product you offer, so you can market that specific offer to users who’ve previously considered

it. Or, if you want to target customers who’ve either abandoned or completed your conversion

process, as we’ve described above, you can tag your shopping cart and conversion/confirmation

pages separately.

Remarketing and Direct ResponseTraditionally, display advertising has been an effective branding tool, but less effective as a direct

response channel. Remarketing is different. Because your audience is defined so precisely, you

can gauge intent with the accuracy of keyword-based search marketing. Remarketing is not only

an effective direct response channel—it often results in double-digit click-through rates, and

conversion rates comparable to Exact Match keyword campaigns.

The Variety of Remarketing ChannelsOver the past decade, the search advertising market has become concentrated, with only a

handful of major advertising networks. Google has maintained a dominant market share for

years, nearly two-thirds at last count. And with the Yahoo!-Microsoft (Bing) SearchAlliance, the

two major competitors have consolidated into a single platform. Though it is much newer, social

media advertising is similar: Facebook dominates, with other social networks just beginning to

make inroads.

Display advertising, on the other hand, is spread over thousands of sites. Some of these, such

as CNN Interactive, ESPN, or The New York Times, have millions of unique visitors every day.

Others, such as specialized blogs and forums, may only see a small percentage of that traffic.

In either case, advertising networks need to create partnerships with individual publishers and

content providers. As a result, the display advertising market is much more diffuse and varied

than the search or social media advertising markets.

Many of the names in display advertising are familiar from search advertising: The Google

Display Network, Yahoo RMX, Microsoft AdExchange. Other players include Burst Media,

Rubicon Project and AdBrite. AdBrite’s network, to take just one example, reaches nearly 400

million users.

Because most online advertisers are familiar with the Google Adwords dashboard, this report

will focus on The Google Display Network. Even if you’re new to remarketing, you can launch a

campaign using an existing Google AdWords account. Nonetheless, it’s important to remember

that Google’s market share in display is nowhere near as high as its share of search. To achieve

success in remarketing, you may need to cast a wider net.

Display Advertising Networks



Defining Your Audience SegmentsEffective marketing relies on clearly-defined target audiences. This is especially true of remarket-

ing campaigns: without precise targeting, remarketing wouldn’t have its exceptionally high click-

through and conversion rates.

“Remarketing audiences” are defined by the pages, and combinations of pages, that they visit

on your site. In this section, we’ll consider a few different remarketing user types, explain how

to define them by the pages they visit, and how to implement these “audiences” on the Google

Display Network.

Remarketing allows you to make different offers to users depending on what

they did when they were last on your site. Did they arrive at a landing page

and bounce right off? Convert on your highest-priced offer? Or was it some-

thing in between?

To illustrate, let’s define four segments you might target in a

remarketing campaign:

• All visitors to your site.

• Visitors who reviewed a particular offer.

• Visitors who started, but later abandoned, the conversion process.

• Visitors who converted.

All Visitors

The simplest remarketing campaigns treat all users who once visited your

site in the same way. You won’t be taking full advantage of remarketing’s

possibilities, but, by targeting users who have interacted with your site in

the past, you’re still likely to drive significantly higher-quality traffic than you

would get from a generic display campaign.

(Even if you do plan on targeting users more precisely, it’s useful to include a generic

“All Visitors” audience as a default.)

Visitors Who Reviewed Particular Offers

The next level of specificity is to target users who have reviewed a particular offer on your site.

An “offer” can be defined as broadly as an entire category (“apparel,” “software,” “meat and

poultry”) or as narrowly as a specific item (“Size 30, Stonewashed Men’s Jeans,” “Word Proces-

sor, Professional Edition, v1.4.2,” “2 lb. Dry-Aged New York Strip Steak”). The greater the specific-

ity, the more involved the management—and the more likely you are to drive revenues.

Visitors Who Abandoned the Conversion Process

In the early days of online retail, marketers could depend on users to largely focus on one thing

at a time: whether it be writing an email, reading an article, or making a purchase. Today,

users often have multiple tabs open, various web clients (from email and calendars to task

management tools) popping up alerts, and even streaming video clients playing in the corner.

A single site doesn’t command the attention it once did.

All Visitors

Remarketing Visitor Segments

Visitors Who Received a Particular Offer

Visitors Who Began Shopping

Cart Process

Visitors Who Converted



One consequence of dispersed behavior is that many users abandon the conversion process

before they complete it. There are many reasons why this might be the case, ranging from the

decision to research competitive offers to simple distraction. With remarketing campaigns, you

can entice those users to come back and finish what they started. You can even remind them of

the exact offer they were reviewing before leaving your site.


Repeat customers are the most reliable customers. If someone has converted in the past, they

already know – and were sold on – the value of your offer. Invite them back to convert again.

Note: Another use for a “Visitors Who Converted” segment is to prevent those users from seeing

your ads. While some businesses may be looking for repeat customers, others may only have a

single conversion event per customer. If that applies to you, use “Visitors Who Converted” as a

negative target. (This is especially valuable in CPM campaigns, where you want to wasting ad

spend on irrelevant impressions.)

Defining Visitor Segment by User BehaviorOnce you have defined the visitor segments you would like to target, you’ll have to translate

those segments into specific behaviors: what page – or combination of pages – did the user visit

when they were last on your site?

All Visitors

The most general remarketing subset is easy to define: it includes every user who has visited

your site. However, if you will also be targeting users more specifically, this subset should be

defined as users who visited all pages except those included in your other subsets.

Visitors Who Reviewed Particular Offers

These subsets will either be defined by particular categories of pages (such as the “Jeans”

section), or particular offer detail pages (such as the “Size 30, Stonewashed Men’s Jeans” we

mentioned above).

Visitors Who Abandoned the Conversion Process

Most eCommerce sites include both shopping cart pages and a confirmation or “thank you”

page. If you want to target users who abandoned the conversion process, you need to define an

audience that includes users who reached the shopping cart, but did not reach the confirmation

page.


Confirmation or “thank you” pages are only accessible if users have completed the conversion

process. Therefore, if you want to remarket to existing customers, define this subset as users

who reached those pages.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. As you develop your remarketing campaigns, you will find

dozens of ways to target specific subsets, many of which will be unique to your site and your

business. These are simply a few common subsets to help you get started.



Defining Visitor Segments for Google Remarketing CampaignsAs we discussed earlier, there is an extremely wide variety of remarketing platforms. In this

section, we’ll review the process for implementing the four user types described above on one

of the most popular: the Google Display Network.

The first thing you’ll need to do is add the “Audiences” tab to your dashboard. Click on the

arrow to the right of “Dimensions” and selecting the checkbox for “Audiences.” (You can skip this

step if the “Audiences” tab already appears on your Dashboard.)

Now it’s time to add your first audience. After selecting the “Audiences” tab, click the “+ Add

Audiences” button at the bottom-right.

Next, select a campaign and ad group for your audience. (We discuss best practices for

campaigns and ad groups in the next section.)

To define your first audience, click “Create and Manage Lists.”



Then, select “Remarketing list” from the “New Audience” drop down. (We’ll build “Custom

combinations” in the next step.)

This is where you’ll build audience segments that can be defined by a single page, or a single

set of pages. Keep the “membership duration” at the default of 30 days for now; we’ll discuss it

in more detail in the section on Privacy Concerns.

These initial subsets will be limited to user behaviors that can be defined by visits to a single

page or category of pages. These can include:

• Every page on your site.

• Your shopping cart page.

• Your conversion/confirmation page.

• The “detail” page for a particular offer.



As you may have noticed, we cannot yet define “Users who abandoned the conversion process

at this stage. That particular subset is defined by two separate things: visiting the shopping

cart page, and not visiting the conversion page. For that subset, we’ll need to define a “Custom

combination.”

To create a custom combination, begin by selecting that option from the “New Audience” drop

down. Then, name your combination and select the “Retargeting Lists” that compose it. These

can include both “positive” and “negative” entries. For the “Abandoned Conversion Process”

example, we’ll add “Visitors who reached the shopping cart page” as a “positive” target. Howev-

er, this list includes both users who did and did not complete the conversion process. To narrow

it down to the latter, add the “Visitors who reached the conversion confirmation page” as a

“negative” list.

You’ve now defined a “custom combination” of users who reached the shopping cart page, but

did not reach the conversion/confirmation page—that is, users who abandoned the conversion

process.

You can repeat this process as often as needed to build your entire series of simple remarketing

lists and custom combinations. Just using the four simple lists we created earlier, these combina-

tions might include:

• All visitors to the site who do not start the shopping process.

• All visitors who reviewed the “Jeans” section but did not start the shopping process.

• All visitors who reviewed the “Jeans” section, started the shopping process, but did

not convert.

And so on.



Generating Remarketing Code Snippets on Google

To implement your remarketing lists, you will need to generate Javascript code within Google

AdWords and add it to the appropriate pages of your site.

To generate the code, go to the main page of the Audiences tab. You will see a complete list of

the audiences you created, along with details about those audiences.

One thing you’ll notice is that some of the “Tags / Rules” are links, with the word “[Tag]”

appended at the end. These are the entries that have associated Javascript tags. These are

the simple remarketing lists that include a single page or category of pages in the definition.

(“Custom combinations,” on the other hand, are defined as combinations of tagged pages, so

you won’t have to implement new Javascript tags every time you add a combination.)

To view the Javascript, click on the appropriate link and a lightbox window will appear that

includes the code.



Copy the code snippet, and then place it on the appropriate pages of your site. (According to

Google, all code snippets should be placed between the “<body>” tags of your pages, closer to

the closing “</body>” tag.)

For example, if you are generating the code for the “Jeans” section, you will want to place

the code on the main “Jeans” page, as well as the detail pages for all your specific offerings

in “Jeans.” If, on the other hand, you want to target users with greater specificity, you’ll want

to define different audiences in Google for the main “Jeans” page and for the individual offer

pages, and place the appropriate code snippet on each. (As we mentioned above, this approach

requires significantly more setup and maintenance, but it will allow you to target users with

absolute specificity.)

Similarly, your “Visitors Who Started the Conversion Process” tag should be placed on all shop-

ping cart pages, and your “Visitors Who Converted” tag should be placed on the conversion/con-

firmation page. (That is, the page that also includes your conversion tracking tag.)

Note: If you are using an “All Visitors” tag alongside more specific targets, only include that tag

on pages that do not include other remarketing tags.



Building Remarketing Campaigns and Ad GroupsEffective search engine marketing accounts usually include a very large number of campaigns

and ad groups: as a rule of thumb, you should have a different ad group for every one of your

landing pages. If you are maintaining a tight alignment between your keywords, ad copy, and

landing pages, that could grow into a very large number. Remarketing is different, and – in this

respect – simpler.

When you select keywords and placements in SEM, you are essentially creating a target audi-

ence. With keywords, the correspondence is simple: when you bid on “jeans,” you are looking

for the audience comprised of people interested in buying jeans. Placements are more complex.

Sometimes you place ads on a site because that site’s content is directly related to what you’re

selling (e.g., jeans ads on a fashion blog). More often, you select placements for demographic

reasons: you suspect that users of a particular site are largely the types of people who would be

interested in your offer.

With remarketing, you don’t have to define your targets indirectly.

As we saw when building audiences, remarketing targets are extremely precise and literal.

“Visitors who came to my site” or “Visitors who browsed through jeans before starting the

conversion process and eventually abandoning it.” By and large, demographic guessing doesn’t

enter into it.

In most cases, you don’t need to add an additional filter by selecting specific site placements.

Moreover, targets like these already limit the total volume of your ads: you’ll only show ads to

users who meet your criteria, and happen to be on a site in the content network you’re advertis-

ing on. Relative to a typical online marketing campaign, this is a small target.

In order to optimize most display advertising campaigns, you need to maintain separate cam-

paigns for each of the sites or placements you are advertising on. This will allow you to manage

bids and budgets depending on the performance of those sites and placements. In remarketing,

you don’t optimize at the site or placement level; you optimize at the audience level. Therefore,

you should have separate campaigns for each of your audiences. This may still be a significant

number, but nowhere near as large as the number of sites where you will be placing your ads.

Technically, remarketing campaigns and ad groups are identical to their search marketing counter-

parts. Simply login into Google AdWords (or whatever remarketing platform or tool you advertise

with) and create campaigns and ad groups as you would for a search engine marketing account.



Remarketing Bids and BudgetsWhenever you begin advertising on a new channel, you should begin conservatively. Our experi-

ence with remarketing has been overwhelmingly positive: targeted messaging, high volumes of

clicks, and impressive conversion rates. But, every business is different, and remarketing might

not work for the product you have to offer. You won’t know if remarketing is right for you until

you’ve brought your campaigns live.

For starters, set a maximum daily budget for your remarketing campaigns that’s similar to the

daily budget for your other content or display network campaigns. (This should total about 10-

15% of your SEM ad spend.) While we’re confident that your remarketing campaigns will drive

greater revenues, this will allow you to test that claim against actual market data, without break-

ing the bank.

Next, match your initial remarketing bids to the average CPCs of your related keyword terms.

(Most likely, this will be higher than you need to bid, and you can make adjustments later.) Your

goal is to appear in the top three positions on the sites where you place your ads. If your ads

appear lower on display network pages, you won’t produce usable data: your low click-through



and conversion rates will more likely be the result of uncompetitive ads than a problem with

remarketing as such. To give remarketing a fair shake, adjust your bids until your ads appear

near the top of the list.

More Tools for Building Remarketing CampaignsMost online advertisers are familiar with Google AdWords. However, it is far from the only

remarketing network or tool on the market. As we discussed above, the display market is far

more diffuse and varied than SEM. Major players include familiar names like Microsoft

AdExchange and Yahoo RMX (display networks were not affected by the Microsoft-Yahoo

Search Alliance), as well as less well-known but still important networks like AdShuffle, Lift

DNA and Harren Media. Because remarketing targets may be narrow, placing ads on a single

network could result in limited traffic. In such cases, try expanding to multiple networks.

However, this does not mean that you need to manage remarketing on every network indi-

vidually. There are tools that aggregate traffic across display networks in a single dashboard.

Chango recently launched a self-serve remarketing dashboard alongside its agency offering.

And AdRoll, a cross-network retargeting system, has offered a self-serve solution since 2007

which allows advertisers to manage remarketing across over 30 networks in its dashboard,

and manage all tagging with a single “smart pixel.”

If you’d like additional

support, a Clickable

Solutions Expert can

help you launch your

remarketing strategy, or

build and manage complete

campaigns for you. And if you

spend $5,000 per month or

more across Google or Bing,

we’d be delighted to perform

a free PPC campaign analysis.

Visit go.clickable.com/ppcaudit

to sign up.

FREEPPCCAMPAIGNANALYSIS



Creating Remarketing Ads and Landing PagesNow that you’ve defined your remarketing audiences, it’s time to lure them back to your site.

Your primary tool for doing so is your ad. And to help ensure a conversion, you need to build a

highly-targeted and specific landing page with a simple conversion process.

In this section, we’ll discuss general best practices for display and content network ads and

landing pages, as well as best practices specific to remarketing campaigns.

Optimizing Display and Remarketing AdsThe primary function of an ad is to drive traffic to your site. This doesn’t mean that you should

neglect conversion rates—the most important metric in your entire online advertising effort. This

is particularly true of ads with very high click through rates (CTRs), but very low conversion rates.

Misalignment between clicks and conversions often means that you are driving irrelevant clicks

to your site: everybody wants to know what’s on the other side, but they lose interest when they

arrive. As important as CTRs are, you don’t want to maximize clicks in this way. Remember: clicks

only generate costs. Conversions generate revenues.

With remarketing ads, you aren’t as likely to drive irrelevant traffic to your site: a user might

visit a page once only to discover that it isn’t relevant to them, but they’re not likely to respond

to re-marketing if you’re not offering something that they’re interested in. Therefore, you should

optimize your remarketing ads for click-through rate. And you should do so at the audience level,

by structuring your campaigns and ad groups as we’ve described above.

How exactly do you optimize ads? By showing a variety of ads to the same visitor subset, and

seeing which ones perform best. Doing this effectively means constantly creating and testing

new variations, and it is much easier to test variations of text ads than it is to test variations

of image ads. Building a new text ad is as simple as logging into a dashboard and typing a few

hundred characters. Building a new image ad is much more complex.

Remarketing – and display advertising in general – gives you the option to include rich graphical

elements in your ad creatives, alongside text. This creates a wide variety of opportunities absent

in standard search engine marketing, but it also adds complexity and expense. If you don’t have

the time or budget to build graphics for your ads, you can still build extremely effective text-only

remarketing ads. In fact, we suggest that all advertisers begin their display efforts with text-only

creatives. Doing so will make it much easier to optimize your ad copy. Hone your message with

text-only ads. Once you’ve found the right one, consider an investment in graphic design.

Remarketing Ad Best PracticesA typical search marketing or display ad contains three components: a headline to grab a user’s

attention, a description of your offer and its unique value, and a call to action. However, because

remarketing ads are targeted to users who already know something about your offer, they differ

slightly from SEM ads. The three general components are the same, however:



• Grab Attention: In SEM, you have to compete for a user’s attention while introducing

something completely new. In remarketing, the attention-grabbing headline is primarily

a reminder. Highlight something memorable about your site or your company in general.

Better yet, remind users of the specific pages they visited previously.

• Describe Your Offer: Because the audience for these ads has already reviewed your offer,

you need to do two things in this section: remind them about it, and improve on it.

Except in the case of customers who converted previously, these are people who reviewed

your offer an passed on it. Give them a new reason to convert.

• Make the Call to Action: The call to action for a remarketing ad should be much more

specific than that of a typical SEM ad, especially when targeted at users who’ve already

seen your conversion process. Emphasize how simple it is to finish, and reiterate the

“special offer” from your description.

These tips will serve you well for every kind of remarketing ad, but there are specific consider-

ations to keep in mind for different audience types.

Generic: “Come Back!”Only use generic ads if you don’t have additional data about the specific pages your target

users visited. But even if you do run a comprehensive remarketing campaign, there will be

certain types of visitors who fall outside the subsets you’ve defined. These ads are for them.

Even with these broader ads, take the opportunity to make a unique offer—that is, an offer that

doesn’t appear elsewhere on your site, or in your other advertisements. These are users who’ve

already seen what you have to offer on your site, and have most likely been directed there by

ads on other channels, such as search or Facebook. Give them a reason to come back that they

haven’t seen elsewhere.

Specific: “Take Another Look At…”Once you move away from targeting every visitor to your site and toward specific subsets of

users, you can begin making much more targeted offers. Best of all, you don’t have to guess

about what that offer should be: direct users back to something they’ve already demonstrated

interest in.

In the past, display and Content Network ads may not have converted well if they were too

specific, because only a small subset of the users who saw those ads were likely to be inter-

ested in a particular offer. By contrast, very specific search ads convert better than vague ones,

because they’re directly related to a user’s query. Remarketing gives you the best of both worlds:

your visitor subsets provide data about user interests with precision comparable to Exact Match

keywords, and you can target those users across thousands of sites, rather than being limited to

a handful of search engine results pages. Don’t squander this opportunity with an uncompelling

offer.

Recapture: “Complete Your Conversion!”When targeting users who nearly completed a conversion, one consideration should trump all

others: sweeten the deal! These are users who found your offer so compelling that they reviewed



it, added it to their shopping carts, and very nearly hit “go.” But, whatever the specific reason,

your offer just wasn’t compelling enough. This is the place to make a new offer – like a modest

discount or free shipping – that might tip the balance.

Note: Beyond generating revenues for your business, this particular audience set of ads can pro-

vide invaluable data about your business as a whole. If you split test a variety of special offers,

you’re likely to find that one or two convert particularly well. This is good information to apply

to your remarketing campaign, but you may want to apply it more broadly. For instance, if ads

offering free shipping to customers who abandoned the conversion process perform extremely

well, then your shipping costs might be putting a significant damper on your overall business.

Try offering free shipping further up the sales funnel. It could make a dramatic impact.

Up-sell: “Come Back For More!”These ads are targeted at your most reliable customers: those who converted in the past. What

you offer should be closely related to what they bought previously. Is there a related item or

accessory they might be interested in? Renewals for subscription-based items? Or do you sell a

perishable product that users may want to stock back up on? You know your business and your

customers. Offer them everything that makes sense. And, as always, optimize based on

the results.

Display and Remarketing Ad ImageryIf you’ve already performed the optimization described above and found a message that performs

well, an investment in graphic-rich ads is often worthwhile. On a search engine results page, your

ads are only competing against other forms of text—competing ads along the right side of the

page, “Featured Results” at the top, and the organic results. On a content network page, you

have much more to contend with, including graphical elements in other ads and on the pages

themselves. A relevant image will give your ad some much-needed prominence.

Graphic design for marketing is a vast topic. However, a key feature of remarketing makes

designing remarketing ads a simpler proposition: remarketing depends on repetition for its

effectiveness. You are showing users something they are familiar with: a site they’ve visited, an

offer they’ve reviewed, an item they’ve almost purchased. In your ad copy, you want to make a

slight tweak—something that improves upon what they saw the last time, and compels them to

convert. With your images, a simple reminder may be more effective. Repeat imagery from your

site—especially imagery related to the specific offer your users were interested in. They may not

notice your text ad on a content network page, but they’re likely to pay attention to a picture

that they’ve seen before, especially if it’s a picture of something they’ve already expressed inter-

est in. Don’t just tell them to buy that pair of jeans they were eyeing: remind them how great

they look.



Example Display Ads

Medium Rectangle:

300 x 250 pixels

Leaderboard:

728 x 90 pixels

Banner:

468 x 60 pixels

Frequency CapsIn some cases, you may want to limit the number of times that users see your ads in a single

day. This assures that potential customers do not get oversaturated with – and fatigued by –

your messages. (In Google, you can set a “Frequency Cap” in the Advanced Settings.)

Best Practices for Remarketing Landing PagesRemarketing landing pages are very similar to search marketing pages. Many of the same best

practices apply:

• Lead users directly to the offers your ads speak to.

• Clearly state your offer and unique value proposition.

• Provide trustworthy support in the form of customer testimonials or industry accolades.

• Facilitate a frictionless conversion.

Of course, there are considerations unique to remarketing campaigns.

Minimize Steps from Click to BuyWith the exception of campaigns targeted to existing customers, your remarketing ads will only

appear to users who have visited your site in the past—and decided not to convert. To prevent

the same thing happening again, don’t give users any way to get distracted. Take them to a page

directly related to the offer they expressed interest in previously, and put the call to action front

and center.

Reiterate Special OffersSpecial offers in your ads should be clearly and prominently repeated on your landing pages. If

users click on an add offering “Free Shipping” or “10% Off” but fail to see that offer on the land-

ing page, they’re liable to suspect a bait and switch. Repeat the offer on your page, and you’ll

put them at ease.



Repeat ImageryAs we said above, repetition is a powerful tool in remarketing campaigns. This is especially true

of images: show users the product they were looking at previously, and they’re more likely to

remember why they were interested in the first place. This is the one place where you don’t need

to avoid repeating yourself. As often as possible, the image in your ad, the image on your land-

ing page, and the image in your customer’s memory should be the exactly same.

Example Landing Pages

Clickable Facebook Ads Landing Page Clickable Solutions Landing Page



Restrictions and Privacy ConcernsInevitably, the development of an online advertising tool that targets users based on their

specific behavior has led to significant privacy concerns. At best, advertisers aren’t the only ones

to reap the benefits of remarketing. It should also lead to a better browsing experience for end

users: relevant ads in place of random banners, an opportunity to complete transactions that,

after all, they started in the first place. Nonetheless, users may still have valid concerns about

their privacy.

The phrase “Remarketing List” is misleading: when you specify an Audience in Google, you are

not doing so by creating a list of individuals. You are specifying behaviors, and targeting ac-

cordingly. However, there are some online behaviors that should be treated more carefully than

others.

Showing users ads about simple retail products that they once looked at is fairly innocuous. A

display ad for shoes, hotel reservations or software is unlikely to compromise a user’s privacy.

However, there are some offers users might research that are more sensitive. For this reason,

Google and other networks have implemented vertical-specific restrictions on their remarketing

programs. We’ll review these below.

Moreover, a very important way to address privacy concerns is to be honest and transparent

about what you’re doing: a clear and accessible privacy policy should do exactly that. At the end

of this section, we’ll briefly touch on how you should amend your privacy policy to reflect your

remarketing effort.

User CookiesRemarketing works by placing cookies in a user’s browser. Ads in the Content Network will

be triggered depending on the cookie – or combination of cookies – that a user has in their

browser.

For instance, if you implemented “Visitors who started the conversion process” as a “Remarket-

ing List” in AdWords, you would have received Javascript code from Google to place on each of

your shopping cart pages. When users visit those pages, they receive a cookie associated with

that list, or “Audience.” The same holds true for every one of your Remarketing Lists. In order to

determine which ads to show users, Google determines which cookie a user has in their browser

– or cookies, in the case of “Custom combinations” – and display ads accordingly.

As a result, your remarketing campaigns will be directly impacted by the way users manage cook-

ies in their browsers. If users delete their cookies or refuse to accept them from your site, you

will not be able to remarket to them, because Google (or whichever network you are advertis-

ing on) will have no way of knowing what they did on their site. Google, DoubleClick and other

networks also give users the option to opt-out of cookie-based advertising. Users who choose to

opt-out will not see your remarketing ads.

If, on the other, users accept cookies and leave them undisturbed, you remarketing ads will

appear to them for the life of the cookie.



“Membership Duration”You can specify the duration of your remarketing cookies for every audience you create. This

is the “Membership Duration” you may have noticed when creating your remarketing lists. By

default on Google and most networks, the membership duration is 30 days. That means that the

cookie users receive when they visit a page with your remarketing tags will expire after 30 days,

after which point they will no longer see your ads.

Note: You can use “Membership Duration” to display different ads depending on the length of

time since a user last visited your site. A user who browsed one of your offers a week ago may

need fewer details than one who hasn’t visited your site for 60 days. By creating multiple Audi-

ences with cookies ranging in duration – 10, 30 and 60 days, for instance – you can tailor your

message to each of these Audiences accordingly.

Using Personal InformationRemarketing based on user behavior is a valid and effective form of advertising. Placing ads that

compromise sensitive information is not.

Technically, it is possible to build remarketing campaigns that collect demographic data and use

it in ad copy. For instance, you may direct users to different parts of a financial services page

depending on their income level or credit score. In other words, there is no technical difference

between displaying a targeted ad that says “Come back to buy those jeans!” and one that says

“Need help with those credit card payments you’ve missed?” But there is a clear ethical differ-

ence. Refrain from making public use of their personal information. You’ll be respecting your

users’ privacy, as well as the guidelines set by most advertising networks.

Vertical-Specific RestrictionsIn addition to demographic information, most remarketing networks prohibit the use of remarket-

ing by specific verticals. These include gambling and adult content – which are often prohibited

outright – as well as healthcare and pharmaceutical sites. If you advertise in this last category,



you may be able to use remarketing, but only in very limited cases. Simply put, you cannot

display ads that reveal a particular condition or health concern that your users might have. On

Google, for instance, you cannot remarket to individuals researching specific medications for

medical conditions for personal use. You can, however, remarket to health professionals research-

ing those products.

Vertical-specific restrictions vary by network. For specific details about restrictions that might

apply to your business, refer to the networks’ policies.

Amending Your Privacy PolicyThe most important thing you can do to address your customers’ privacy concerns is clearly state

how and where you will be using their information. Your privacy policy should be accessible from

every page on your site that includes remarketing tags. It should include information on how you

collect user cookies, which vendors will display your ads, and what users need to do if they want

to opt out.

With honest business practices and transparent communications, you can address the majority of

your customers’ privacy concerns, and build an advertising campaign that benefits them as much

as it benefits you.



Remarketing with Facebook AdsToday, no online marketing effort is complete without a social advertising component. While

there are many social networks on the Web, Facebook is clearly the front runner with over half a

billion users and counting.

Facebook Ads is among the most important new online advertising tools since the emergence of

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft as search marketing platforms. As Facebook’s COO Sherly Sanberg

put it, “We enable effective word-of-mouth advertising at scale for the first time.” There is no

other platform that combines such a large user base with such a wide variety of demographic

and “social context” targeting options.

Facebook does not offer a cookie-based remarketing program exactly similar to Google’s Dis-

play Network. However, marketers can achieve similar results with Facebook’s Connection-Based

Targeting.

Connection-Based Targeting“Connections” are just one of the many targeting options available to advertisers on Facebook,

along with gender, age, alma mater, “interests”—and many more. Because it is simply included

on the list alongside these more straightforward options, many advertisers tend to overlook it.

But “Connection-Based Targeting” is unique: it’s the only option that allows you to target

Facebook users directly based on the way in which they interact with you.

With “Connection-Based Targeting,” you can show ads to users who have interacted with your

Pages, Groups, Events or Apps—as well as their friends.

• Pages: Target users who have “Liked” your pages (i.e., Pages you administer).

• Groups: Target users who have joined your Groups.

• Events: Target users who have RSVP’d for your Events.

• Apps: Target users who have used your Apps in the past 30 days.

Note: In all of these cases, you can only target users who have interacted with Pages, Groups,

Events or Apps that you administer. You cannot simply choose another user or business’ Face-

book Page and target its fans.

If you are unsure whether you can use an entity as a target, there is a very simple way to check.

As you enter Page, Group, Event or App names in the “Connections” field, it will auto-complete

with valid targets. If you do not see the entity you are looking for in the auto-complete, you

cannot use it as a target.



Friends of ConnectionsIn addition to being able to target the types of users described above, “Connection Based

Targeting” allows you to harness Facebook’s “social graph” and target their friends as well. One

advantage particular of these types of Connection-based ads is the fact that they appear with

“Social Context.”

Any Facebook ad can have social context. If a user “Likes” your ad, then people in their network

will see a message to that effect – such as “Jill Smith like this” – directly below it. When you

target the friends of your connections, this social context will always appear. (Facebook’s native

performance tracking tool includes details about “social context metrics” – such as “Social

impressions” and “Social CTR” – so you can compare the performance of ads with social context

to the performance of ads without it.)

Negative Connection TargetsEvery target described above can either be implemented as a positive or a negative target. For

example, you can either target all users who did RSVP for a particular Event, or all users who

did not. If you’re trying to drive membership in a Facebook Group, only target users who are not

members of that Group. If you want to build fans for your Pages, only target users who haven’t

“Liked” it already. This allows you to maintain constant contact with your user base, without

inundating them with spam.

Building Marketing Lists with Facebook DemographicsIf you need to target a very specific demographic with your online advertising, you can combine

your Facebook and Google Remarketing efforts to build a traditional re-marketing list. (You won’t

be collecting actual names or personal details, so your customers’ privacy will be protected.)

Start by defining your targets in Facebook Ads.* These can include details from any of Facebook’s

demographic targeting options: 18-22 year-old males enrolled at Boston University; 30-40 year-

old married females who work in marketing and publicity. And so on.

In order for your campaigns to work in conjunction with Google, you will need to direct users to

an external landing page rather than your Facebook page. And while you can build multiple ads

for each target, only create a single, unique landing page for each demographic target.

Next, build a Google Display Network remarketing campaign, as described above. In this cam-

paign, you will not be defining audience segments by user behavior. Instead, your Audiences will

correspond to the demographic targets you defined on Facebook. Generate Javascript code for

each target, and place it on the landing page for that target’s Facebook Ads. As Facebook users

click on your ads, your marketing list will grow.

* If you’re new to Facebook Ads, or if you’re looking for new ways to drive revenues and grow your business

with social media ads, please consider our recent white paper, Growing Your Business with Facebook Ads.

We discuss ways that online advertisers can maximize their investment with Facebook Ads, including

Facebook Ads basics, and best practices for fan pages and paid advertising. You can download the paper

on our website or contact your Clickable Solutions Expert for a hard copy.



This is how it works: when a “25-30 year-old male from Baltimore interested in ‘Football’” (for

example) clicks on your Facebook ad, they will arrive at a landing page that includes your Google

remarketing tag. As a result, ads displayed to users who once visited that page are, essentially,

ads displayed to “25-30 year-old males from Baltimore who are interested in ‘Football.’” Your

audience may be quite small, but the specificity means that it will be extremely valuable.



Measuring the Success of Your Remarketing CampaignsThroughout this paper, we’ve emphasized the unique effectiveness of remarketing ads. If you

want proof, you’ll need to implement conversion tracking.

It’s crucial to be absolutely clear on this point: conversion tracking is essential to an effective

online marketing campaign. Without conversion tracking, you’ll only have data about the cost

side of the equation: impressions, clicks, CPCs. To attribute these costs to specific revenues, you

need to know what happens when users arrive on your site. For that, you’ll need to implement

performance tracking tools on your site.

There are many tools that you can use to track online performance, including Clickable Per-

formance Tracking. With Clickable’s tools, you can track performance across Google, Bing and

Facebook with ease and sophistication—including your remarketing campaigns. All you need is

a single tag on your website. And with Clickable Call Tracking, you can track offline conversions

directly alongside online performance.

If you want more information about conversion tracking or Clickable’s Performance Tracking Solu-

tion, please read our recent white paper, Tracking & Optimizing for Online Advertising Perfor-

mance, where we discuss the fundamentals of setting up and maintaining a scientific

approach for more profitable online advertising campaigns. You can download the paper on our

website or contact your Clickable representative for a copy.

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Improving Your Remarketing Campaigns with Clickable SolutionsIf you want additional support with your remarketing campaigns, Clickable Solutions can

help. Clickable is an all-in-one solution for online advertisers. We remove the complexity

and time required to successfully advertise across Google, Bing and Facebook.

Clickable Solutions is powered by an Expert Team and an award-winning Pro Tool that

empowers advertisers and agencies to maximize their return on investment with complete

transparency. The Pro Tool includes Clickable Conversion Tracking, which allows you to track

and report performance across all major advertising networks – including Google, Bing and

Facebook – with ease and sophistication. All you need is a single tag on your website.

And with Clickable Call Tracking, you can track offline conversions directly alongside

online performance.

Clickable Solutions experts will create and manage remarketing campaigns tailored for your

business. We’ll work with you to define audiences, build ads and landing pages, implement

remarketing code, and manage your bids and budgets. You can choose to manage your

remarketing alongside us in the tool of your choice, or we can do it for you.

Clickable Solutions is a complete solution to advertise online. Call us at 877-775-6699 to

speak with a Solutions Expert right away. And when you link accounts to Clickable with ad

spend totaling $5,000 or more, and our expert team will identify problem areas and surface

untapped revenue opportunities—for free.

Visit go.clickable.com/ppcaudit to sign up.

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