What is Google Remarketing? Maximizing the Effect of Your Website Visitors

If you're like most marketers, you're constantly looking for the next great digital tactics. Online behaviors continue to change rapidly, and finding ways to engage potential customers online is crucial to long-term success in raising brand awareness and growing your business. A variety of marketing channels can get you there. But among them, especially if you already have a strong strategy in place to attract website users, remarketing may be among the most effective.

What is Google Remarketing?

Here's how Google defines the remarketing concept:

Remarketing helps you reach people who have visited your website or used your app. Previous visitors or users can see your ads as they browse websites that are part of the Google Display Network, or as they search for terms related to your products or services on Google.

In other words, this type of targeting (also known as retargeting) allows you to focus ads specifically toward past web visitors who haven't yet taken the action (such as becoming a lead or customer) that you want them to take. By placing a few lines of code within the page code from which you want to remarket, you can design and run ads that will appear on one of the 2 million websites that comprise Google's Display Network.

The Advantages of Remarketing Website Visitors

Naturally, the concept of remarketing only works if you have a steady stream of visitors on your website. But if you do, its advantages can be significant:

• Stay engaged with past visitors. On average, less than 5% of your web visitors convert to leads. What happens with the others? Through remarketing, you can make sure they keep your brand in mind until it's time to become leads or customers.
• Increase your chances of sales-qualified leads. Research has shown that it takes between 6 and 8 marketing touches to create a sales lead. Your website, as powerful as it can be, counts only for one of them. Remarketing can increase the number of marketing touches, improving your chances of brand recall and maximizing your lead generation.
• Combine with other marketing opportunities. On its own, remarketing provides only modest click-through and conversion rates. But combined with other efforts, those conversion rates explode. Now, you can truly take advantage of the multiple touches explained above that help you both drive visitors to your site and keep them engaged after they leave.

Because of these benefits, a core application for Google remarketing has been in the e-commerce sector. Here, cart abandonment (the process of leaving a full shopping cart without checking out) is a real problem. Through remarketing, you can re-engage users who were so close to the sale and encourage them to close the deal.

But of course, e-commerce is far from the only application. If you place a remarketing pixel on your pricing page, you can send targeted messages about discounts and other calls to action directly to audience members who are already interested enough to care about the cost. A remarketing pixel from a blog post, meanwhile, could advertise a long-form whitepaper or webinar that is accessible as part of your lead generation efforts.

Understanding the Costs of Google Remarketing

As with most other digital marketing tactics, the costs of Google remarketing depend entirely on your intended reach and capabilities. The more visitors you're targeting, the higher the cost will be. Generally speaking, the cost per user is low; one estimate places the cost per click between $0.25 and $0.60, compared to $3 and up for 'other digital marketing initiatives.

To cap costs, WordStream suggests combining remarketing tags with contextual targeting, conversion filtering, and frequency capping. Ultimately, the customizability of the tool allows you to adjust this tactic to your budget possibilities, another advantage of remarketing.

Are you looking to integrate remarketing into your digital strategy? If so, we'd love to help.

Contact us today to tell us about your situation, and allow us to help you build a powerful remarketing strategy designed to re-engage past website users and push them further toward becoming leads and customers.