What is Remarketing?

Remarketing is a new weapon in the Google Adwords advertiser’s arsenal and one that you really should consider using.

The premise is that if a visitor comes to your site, but doesn’t purchase, sign up or perform whatever is considered a conversion, then Google will start to re-show them your ads, wherever they are on the Google network, until they convert.

How does it work?

First of all, you need to create set of Javascript remarketing tags in your AdWords account. One tag goes on every page, for example, and the other goes on your conversion pages. Every time a customer visits one of your pages they will be tagged, whether they came through Adwords or not.

In this example, you’ll now have two audiences; ‘visitors’ and ‘converters’. You can now show ads across the Content Network to a specific audience or create a custom combination – a group of visitors that includes everyone who visited the site, but excludes those that contacted you or bought something, for example.

This group becomes your market for an audience targeted content campaign. Upload a mixture of text and display ads to keep your brand front-of-mind, positioning you firmly when the buying decision is made.

Important point though – ads in your campaign will target the audience, not the content they are reading. This also means that you can understand where your audience lives on the web and use that data in a separate Content campaign to raise the profile of your brand and drive new visitors to your site.

What’s the thinking behind it?

The reasoning here is that, especially if you are selling items or services with a longer buying cycle, you’ll benefit from reminding them of your brand, product or service. For instance, if you are selling a high ticket product or service or a long term commitment, they may take a while to actually decide. Remarketing ads help to positively influence the choice between you and your competitors.

Does It Work?

Yes. We’ve been running remarketing campaigns for a number of our clients’ campaigns with some great display ads. Early stats show the cost per conversion to be 35% less than the account average and conversion rates 100% higher.

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Unlike Search, the Google Content Network gives you the ability to target an audience before they search for your product or service. Depending on your offer, you’ll get some direct sales of course, but that isn’t the main objective behind such a campaign.

Put it this way. If I’m reading about golf, I’m probably a golfer. I might be interested in improving my swing, buying a set of clubs, or a golfing holiday. I might be interested right now, at this minute, and I might click.

That’s a whole lot of might.

However, most importantly, I’ve seen your ads on a number of different sites that I’ve visited and I’m beginning to associate your brand with my passion for golf. To me, you must be a big company with a big presence in the golfing market. That makes you trustworthy and reliable.

Supporting Your Search Campaign

When I do search and click on a bunch of different sites, who do I choose: The cheapest? The best looking site? Both of those things influence me and more, of course – but I also buy on trust. Trust is worth EVERYTHING in a sales transaction.

The basis of the strategy is that you can show your ads to a wider target audience at a low cost to increase awareness of both your brand and your products and services. In marketing speak, referred to as “brand recall”, an important measurement of a marketing campaign’s success.

The first area then, as well as generating some direct sales, is to support the conversion rates on your Search Campaign.

For example, if you are advertising holiday cottages, you might target content such as hiking, water sports, fishing, bird-watching, etc. Your site and brand will then be exposed to an audience that might soon search for a holiday cottage. If and when they do, you can expect greater conversion rates from your search campaign.

Innovation = No Search Traffic

The second area this works well is the introduction of a new product or innovation. There is no search traffic, so how do you sell it on paid search? It’s tough, except perhaps bidding on a problem that it solves, but that’s a whole other article. What you can do though, is stimulate a relevant audience by introducing the idea.

Let’s pick something random. You’ve created a 30-something golfing holiday product where like minded individuals can meet and find love and play a bit of golf (Ahem. I did say random!). There’s no directly relevant search traffic for this at all – you could bid on “golf holidays”, but there’s a big chunk of that spend that isn’t your target audience. It won’t convert too well and you’ll burn your budget pretty quick.

On the Content Network, we can target golfers based on what they’re reading about: GOLF.

In some instances, we can even target the demographic; male, female, age range. The ads introduce the idea and those that are curious or interested will click and might enquire, request a brochure or sign up for your newsletter. Hell, you might even get some bookings. But the real value here is reaching your target audience to generate interest in something they didn’t even know existed. Over time, this will generate search traffic for your brand and what you do.

Having generated a good chunk of profit for our clients this way, we’d strongly recommend considering a Content Network campaign.

8 tips for creating a sound Content Network Campaign

1. Always create separate campaigns for Search and for Content. The structure, strategies and ads are very different and you’ll want to measure performance and ROI separately too.
2. In each ad group, pick 6-10 relevant, tightly-themed keywords to target content pages your audience would be reading.
3. Create attention-grabbing ads that will stand out from the page and help your audience remember your brand, even if they don’t click.
4. Image ads work far better than text ads – use the Ad Builder for the first pass and invest in professionally designed ads as performance warrants it.
5. We wouldn’t recommend the Content Network without Conversion Tracking. Although we won’t necessarily expect many direct conversions from Content ads, measuring View Through Conversions is critical.
6. Expect a much lower CTR from Content, but monitor which sites are generating traffic carefully. Increase your bids on sites that work well and add poor sites as negatives to stop your ads showing there.
7. Be patient. Search data can be analysed for yesterday, but data from 30 days ago is more relevant for Content, depending on how long your buying cycle is.
8. Create a small Search Campaign, perhaps even just bidding on your site name, brand or the name of your product. You’ll pick up the cheap clicks as the search volume increases.

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The headlines:

• 43% of iPhone owners earn salaries in excess of £65,000
• 200 million Internet enabled phones shipped in 2009 with 22% growth projected for 2010.
• 38% of mobile phones worldwide will be smartphones by 2013
• UK mobile searches increased by 260% for commercial keywords from 2008 to 2009

Whether your business is suited to mobile browsing or not, mobile should be on your agenda.

Mobile Advertising

As a method for reaching your audience at the right time, mobile is growing faster that any other existing marketing medium. The latest advances in mobile technology have developed significantly and mobile advertising has come a long way.

No longer limited to SMS messaging, the mobile opportunity has evolved into a highly-targeted platform for advertising to an audience ready to buy, find or engage. Mobile advertising is mainly aimed at users on iPhones and other similar mobile devices with full internet access.

How Mobile Works

6 things to consider

1. Is your site usable on a mobile?
2. Is your target audience likely to search for or browse your product or service on a mobile device?
3. How quickly does your content load on a mobile device?
4. Can you engage a visitor on a mobile device and generate an action quickly (more quickly that a desktop device, for example)?
5. Examples of what works well; find your nearest location, opt-in for some information, find your phone number; browse your products or even buy.
6. Examples of what doesn’t necessarily work well; lengthy, technical content. Lengthy data capture forms. Large image files.

The Benefits

Right now, the mobile market is less competitive than desktop, with reported conversion costs being lower than desktop devices – the time to position your site as a market leader is now.

Creating separate campaigns with different targeting, you can segment and measure the response and ROI independently for mobile, or even for specific types of devices.

Mobile Marketing Plan

1. If your target audience never (ever) searches for what you do using a mobile, or you’re not ready to exploit it, turn it off – but remember to come back to it later.
2. Check your site’s statistics to see how many visitors use mobile browsers.
3. Segment your campaign(s), creating a dedicated mobile campaign with it’s own budget and performance data so that you can measure the response and ROI.
4. Targeting is the same as desktop devices and the same best practice applies; segment Google Search and Search Partner networks and the Content Network.
5. Depending on traffic volume and performance, consider a dedicated mobile version of your site. You can detect the browser type and size when a visitor lands on your site and redirect to the right version automatically – a desktop visitor gets the desktop site, a mobile visitor gets the mobile site.

Ask a Google AdWords Professional about this

AdWords Analyst, Antony Potts explains how this helps you.

A “View Through Conversion” occurs on the Content Network when your ad is shown, but not clicked, and that person then returns to your site through a Google Search/Search Partner campaign and converts within a 30-day period.

Think of it this way. There’s an old adage, “we waste 50% of our marketing budget. If only we knew which 50%”. This arises because there is a lack of ability to measure how some advertising media influence your customer’s decision to buy. Let’s say you place an ad on the side of a bus, sponsor Coronation Street or your local football team – very difficult to accurately measure the impact this has on your sales and enquiries.

View Through Conversion Tracking delivers more accurate measurement of the customer’s journey across the web (only for Google ads, remember!) to demonstrate where your ads have displayed and perhaps should be credited with ‘an assist’ in generating that order or enquiry.

View Through Conversion Tracking

This measurement may help to indicate that your Content Network account is performing well, but it unfortunately can not be as accurate an indicator as we’d all hope. Remember that although your ad may have been rendered on a web page that person is viewing, it may be in a position off-screen and they may not have physically seen it.

However, the trends it illustrates are more important than the numbers – even if it accurately measures only 50% of the traffic, improvement trends would still prove valuable data. You can now measure the benefit of Google Display Ads on the Content Network with more confidence, knowing that you’ll have some method of calculating the return on effort and the budget you spend.

This is a valuable metric to analyse and understand, but like View Through Conversions, use it to influence your decisions rather than build your entire business strategy around it.

Much better than not knowing which 50% you’re wasting, but won’t get that waste to 0% just yet.

Want more from your campaign?

Call our AdWords team free on 08000 474714.

We’ve had a few clients just recently whose ads stopped showing on Google pretty much overnight, costing hundreds of pounds on lost revenue every single day. Why?

Quality Score has reared its head again. Google is seeking the very best experience for its customer – not only now will Google place your ads in higher positions and charge you less per click for being relevant, but is now also aggressively excluding ads for which landing pages and sites are not relevant enough.

This won’t happen to everyone at once though. You’re waiting for the Google bot to come along to your site, make the analysis and then you’ll discover if you’re a victor, or a victim.

To overcome this, your site must satisfy Google’s quality score criteria. Easier said than done, as Google doesn’t publish the precise method it uses to calculate the quality score. However, there are a few clear areas that you can address to improve this;

• Relevance, relevance, relevance.
• Wherever possible, make sure that the keyword that you’re bidding on is included in the ad(s) in your ad group.
• The quality score includes an element of your historic Click Through Rate (CTR) for each individual keyword, each ad group and each campaign throughout your account.
• More importantly, Google is now even more focused on landing page quality, it’s relevance to the subject matter, how many times the keyword is mentioned, the quantity of text on the page, the quantity of pages and text on the site itself which are relevant to the keywords.
• Another element to consider is that Google really wants UNIQUE content, so there’s not so much value in just copying text from other sites – you need to create your own. It’s an opportunity for you to demonstrate your expertise to the customer.

To address this easily, consider increasing the amount of content on your landing pages, adding a blog, FAQ section(s) or a forum to your site.

This won’t be an overnight fix – you’ll still need the Google bot to re-evaluate your site when it finally arrives. And again, unfortunately, there’s no fixed frequency as to when this will happen.

Google is a content monster. And it’s hungry!

Learn more about AdWords Quality Score

Learn More about Content

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But there’s a little-known element that’s really beginning to annoy me and a lot of the other search community: the Search Network.

You’ll be familiar with the two primary networks; Google Search – essentially, the Google you know and love, and then there’s the content network where your ads are showing alongside some forum or blog that contains the keywords on which you’re bidding.

The Search Network is somewhere in the middle of these two and relates to sites that technically are search engines like Google, and merely send the visitor’s search query off to Google, and then get Google’s data back. And your paid for ads too. And yes, you’re still paying per click the same way you do on Google Search.

It’s good idea in principle, at least for sites like www.sky.com and www.orange.com. These are search engines where the audience will behave in a very similar way to the audience on Google.

However, this is where it starts to get a little concerning. Google doesn’t publish a list of its “Search Partners”, so there’s no way of knowing in advance which sites will be carrying your ads, and where your money is being spent.

Depending on your market and your product, for example, you might not really want your ads to show on www.ebay.co.uk, or Amazon.co.uk. Or perhaps you do? Either way, you really want to be able to measure the effectiveness of each of these sites carrying your ads and the clicks that come from them – how many Amazon clicks does it take for you to achieve a sale?

Right now, the only way of knowing this is to use Google Analytics or similar software to check the source of visitors to your site, how they behave, and if they convert to a sale or not.

It isn’t currently possible to run a campaign only on the Search Network, or to see where your ads are showing, or which site individual clicks are originating from. You can’t currently calculate your Cost Per Aquisition, the average ad positions or the average cost per click. All of these stats are rolled up in the stats for Google Search in your campaign.

So what happens if you don’t want your ads showing on a particular property like www.FreeIndex.co.uk or www.DoorOne.co.uk? A nice simple site exclusion tool like the one provided on the Content Network? No, I’m afraid not – you have to actually call Google and request that they manually exclude your ads from showing on those sites.

Maybe some of these sites perform really well and have a great CTR and awesome CPA figures. And maybe they don’t. But without the ability to individually target ads for the audience, without the ability to measure it’s effectiveness, it’s difficult to make a case one way or the other.

You could always opt out of the Search Network, of course, but there’s definitely some good quality traffic in there you’d be missing out on.

If only we could tell which traffic it was.

1. I’m selfish, only interested in me. Right now, I don’t care about your business, I care about me and whether you can deliver the product, service or solution I need. I’m not interested in the 400 other things you sell or do, just the one thing I need.
2. I’m impatient. Get to the point quickly, demonstrate to me that you know what I need and that you can deliver it. I don’t want to go trawling your site for more information until I know I’m in the right place.
3. I don’t trust you. I landed on your site because you matched my search on Google, and it looks like you have what I need. But I still don’t trust you – now I’m going to browse around your site and find reasons to confirm my doubts; ah, jack of all trades, huh? Not for me! Ooh, only started up three months ago? No credibility. Spelling mistakes or broken links? Do they represent the shoddy way in which you’ll deal with me, too? Maybe.
4. I’m confused: What do I do now? How do I contact you? How do I order? Why is it so difficult to find this information on your site? There are so many options, I don’t know which to click.
5. I’m suspicious. Is your payment gateway secure? Can I trust you not to spam my email address or sell it to someone else who will? Will my order ever arrive? Who have you worked with before? Did you do a good job?
6. I’m looking for a reason to leave. I’ll need lots of reasons to stay, but just one will make me leave.
7. I really need to be told what I need and how I can get it. Please make it easy for me.

In the last few days alone, business owners have told me that sole objective of their site is to get someone to pick up the phone, and have then been shocked by the revelation that their telephone number isn’t on every page – it’s buried somewhere on a contact page. It’s a simple thing, but easily (and frequently) overlooked when you’re viewing your site from your perspective, not that of your visitor.

Achieve a greater perspective. Call free on 08000 47 47 14 or email:

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the content network is a bad strategy, far from it. But remember that to be successful you need to test, measure and refine what works and what doesn’t, and mixed together in one campaign, you’ll find it tough to understand where keywords are generating clicks and turning in to sales.

Google search is simple; it’s Google. You type something in to it, you get results, and sponsored links across the top and down the side. The audience here is specifically searching for a solution to a problem or to fulfil a need. If it’s a product or service, they probably have a budget and are ready to part with it.

The Google Search Network is a little different. The same principal applies; someone has a need and they are actively searching for a product or solution and have already identified their budget. But search network partners include Amazon and e-bay, Sky.com, Orange and many others, no doubt. A different audience, right? Firstly, you’ll appreciate that ads are shown in a different way on these sites, in different positions on the page. Secondly, this is a different audience: yes, they are searching, but a searcher on e-bay isn’t compelled by the same messages in your ads as a searcher on Google. Ditto for Amazon.

Let’s put it this way: identical products are sold in some swanky boutique in London and in your local car boot sale or market. They will be sold for a vastly different price. I appreciate the argument about overheads, but that isn’t the driver here – if your market trader could sell for the same price, he surely would! The audience’s perspective and expectations are different, and so is the surrounding competition.

Thirdly, there’s the Content Network, also known as AdSense. AdSense is an easy program to sign up to for any blog publisher or site owner to monetise their web site through displaying and generating clicks on Google ads. You’ve seen them all over the place, and probably ignored them, mostly.

The main principal is the same though, you bid on keywords (much broader ones) and Google matches your ads to pages that feature those keywords. So the mere fact that Suzie reads Helen’s blog about Helen’s friend who bought a Prada bag at the weekend means that Google might just match your keyword bid on ‘Prada bag’ and show your ad.

That’s OK? Sure, it’s OK. Will Suzie click on your ad? Well, perhaps, but unlikely. That doesn’t really matter, Google doesn’t measure your CTR here or judge your overall campaign performance on it either. What does matter though, is that what compels Suzie to click your ad will be a different message to that which compels someone to click it on Google Search, or its Search Network. It will achieve a different CTR, and more importantly, a different number of sales, or conversions for the cost of the clicks.

Even if Suzie were to click your ad when it appeared on Helen’s blog, do you think she’d be more, or less likely to buy than our friend who searched on Google?

The best way to tackle this is to split your campaigns. You’ll then be able to test, measure and refine what works for each audience, what you’re spending and what’s converting to sales. Depending on your product, service or market, you might want to split it three ways for each media network, or perhaps just Search and Content.

Learn more stuff like this.

Or turbo charge your AdWords campaign.

Even if you don’t want to target specific demographics, there could be an incredible amount of value in the new reports you’ll get to measure and compare your success across a demographic spread.

Inside AdWords: Demographic bidding beta test

Google says:

Demographic bidding and reports are available to advertisers who run contextually targeted or placement-targeted campaigns (with CPC or CPM bidding) on certain sites in the Google content network. Here’s how it works: Some publishers in our network, such as social networking sites, know the gender and age of their users because their users sign in with that information when they create a profile or fill out registration or subscription forms. Participating publishers anonymize this user reported demographic data and then send it to Google in aggregate form, allowing us to adjust which ads are shown to members of specific demographic groups. (To protect user privacy, AdWords receives this data only from publishers that have permission from users to share their data according to the site’s terms and conditions. Users are never identified personally, but only as anonymous aggregated data in the demographic reports. And to protect the privacy of minors, users under 18 can’t be targeted demographically.)

Bear in mind that this only applies to the Content Network, not Google Search or the Search Network.