Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Faris Biogradlić, CEO, digital agency Paradox
Remarketing is not a tool. It’s not a tech platform or some software. Remarketing is a concept and a technique. It refers to the act of displaying ads to people who have already interacted with your brand. In the digital world, this represents all the people who have previously visited your website.
World without remarketing
This world is actually a very sad place. Why? For years now we’ve been sending visitors to our website, wanting them to make a specific action (purchase, email signup, contact, etc.). In a perfect world, 100% of visitors to our web site would make the required action. Unfortunately, the reality looks completely different from the perfect world – only 2-3% of them will really make the required action on their first visit.
So, out of a 100 visitors, on average only 2 or 3 of them will buy the product, contact you or do whatever your desired action was. These people have already shown interest in visiting your website, and they probably didn’t make the action for a thousand and one reasons. Maybe they are at work and can’t spend too much time on the internet, maybe they wanted to see a few more offers from the competition, and have already forgotten about you, maybe their child entered the room at that very moment so they closed the browser? Or whatever other reason there may be.
Before the existence of remarketing, there was no way to follow these people somehow unless they left us their email, subscribed to our YouTube channel or became fans on the Facebook page. To put it mildly, in most cases you would never see that visitor again. This is quite a big problem, especially if we plan bringing of visitors with the help of paid advertisements, and they leave a website without leaving any trace.
Door to a completely new world
Let’s imagine that we have an online shoe store and advertise a pair of beautiful men’s leather shoes. We send a visitors to the landing page, but they don’t complete the purchase because they were at work and their boss just came into the office. They had to close the window in the browser, telling themselves “those were some beautiful shoes, I’ll buy them first thing when I get home.” Of course, when they do get home they are greeted by family obligations and they completely forget about the shoes, which is sad because they really wanted to have them. What we can do now? The solution is remarketing.
How does remarketing work?
Remarketing is actually a cookie based technology that uses a simple JavaScript code to track your audience and visitors across the internet. Its operation is very simple. You place a small portion of JavaScipt code to your website (that is not visible to your visitors) and this code automatically integrates a “search cookie” to anyone who visits your website, which allows us as marketers to target people who have previously visited the website or its certain parts.
In translation, whenever a new visitor comes to our website, the code runs, and we are left with the IP address of a person using a specific device. This process of “labeling” users allows us to show certain ads only to them. Let’s go back to the example where the visitor wanted to buy shoes that they liked, but due to various circumstances they have forgotten about them, and our website. Let’s say that at one point they put the shoes in the “cart”, but did not finish the purchase. In this case, our code is running (we set it to mark all the visitors who put a particular product in the cart but did not complete the purchase). In this case we are able to make a special ad (for example an ad that provides a 10% discount for the same product), and we target this ad to display it only to the group of people who put the product in the cart but did not complete the purchase. In this way, the targeted consumer sees our ad on another website or a mobile app, and with a click on the ad they are returned to the landing page where they can complete the purchase of shoes.
You follow people across the internet
The two largest and most powerful platforms for remarketing are, of course, Google and Facebook. With the help of Google, we are able to use remarketing literally across the internet (on all the websites and mobile apps which display ads). Facebook allows us to use remarketing primarily on their own platform, on Instagram, as well as on various mobile apps that are in partnership with Facebook.
How to use remarketing?
Let’s say that on your website you have a “News” section. You have created a very interesting article that gives a lot of value to the target group (something like this article J). You have set the code for remarketing and after 7 days gathered an audience of 5,000 people who have read your article. You make a Facebook ad to increase the number of likes, but you don’t target blindly, you target the people who are already familiar with your brand (who have read the article), and who will probably want to like your Facebook page and become part of the community. Another option would be more focused on the sale. For example, three days after reading this educational article you see a banner ad that conveys the message “40% discount for service of remarketing system implementation”.
Example of dealing with services
It’s the same with services.
On your website you have 5 different services and on each individual link for a service you have set up a remarketing code. So you start marking visitors on 5 different segments (5 target groups who are interested in different services). After a month, in each of the five segments you have collected 500 target persons. Now you are able to create unique ads (for example on Facebook), which will be shown only to the group you choose.
We can take the example of a dentist who has a 5 services (prosthetics, repair, implants, polishing and surgical intervention). The dentist wants to launch a campaign of -20% on implants. We make a Facebook post with a picture that conveys the message on -20% discount, and target to advertise only to people who have previously visited the service landing page – implants. In this way, we don’t aim blindly, but precisely show our message to a very qualified targeted group.
Implementation of remarketing in your business
To harness the power of remarketing, initially you need to connect your website with Google Analytics, as well as create an account on Google AdWords. You can find more information on Google’s support, or you can contact the author of this article for free consultations in the field of remarketing and opportunities in digital marketing through www.paradox.ba.