This is Jacob Erdei and we are back again for another live hangout session where you can attend live and ask any marketing question you have. Be sure to join us Next Wednesday at 2PM CST for 30 minutes of jam packed actionable marketing advice slanted towards small businesses and those digital marketing experts who serve them.
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What is remarketing?
remarketing also known as retargeting is simply marketing to a set audience group of people that performed a desired action.
The might be people who have landed on your website, people who added an item to a checkout cart but never checked out, people who visit only a certain page on your website or a combination of factors.
On this hangout we will be talking mostly about AdWords and Facebook as those are the two bigger players in the field. There are plenty of other traffic sources out there such as BingAds and Yahoo Gemini that allow for remarketing as well.
Here is the live video recording for today’s show on remarketing
Remarketing on AdWords
There are a dozen different ways to use remarketing and in this episode we will talk most with setting up custom audiences and the different options we have for targeting those audiences inside AdWords.
AdWords display covers 90%+ of the worlds internet users. AdWords has the widest remarketing reach in the world for advertising.
You have the ability to remarket both on search as well as on the display network. Both kinds of traffic have their own pros and cons.
Defining Your Custom Audience
The first thing you need to do before you can start remarketing is to define your custom audience. These are the people you want to re-market too. You can have for all intent and purposes an unlimited amount of custom audiences inside AdWords.
To keep things simple we let’s look at AdWords
Click Shared Library at the bottom Left inside AdWords 
You will see several options. We want to Select View > under Audiences
Now you want to create a New Remarketing List by selecting the red button that says + REMARKETING LIST
You will see 4 options for creating a remarketing list. Most people will select Website visitors and that is what we will be looking at today.
From here you can name your list and start to define your custom audience.
Here are just a few ideas of custom audiences you can create
All website visitors: You can include your dog supplies website and all people who visit your dog supplies website will now be on your remarketing list. To do this you can simply place you domain name in the in the box marked “enter a value”.
Specific Pages: You can create a remarketing list for just people who visited your Dog toy page or category by defining what page or section of your site that person visited. Same for those who visit the checkout page. Simply enter in the part of the URL that you want to create your audience around.
Multiple Pages: You can create a custom remarketing list for people who visit both the dog toy page and also add an item to their cart.
Dynamic Remarketing: With Dynamic remarketing you are having AdWords or Facebook automatically remarket to visitors on your behalf. Generally if someone visits a specific product page then AdWords and Facebook will remarket that exact product page to the user.
You have probably visited Amazon before and left the site without making a purchase and then you see the exact product you were looking at being marketed to you from Amazon. This is dynamic remarketing.
Membership Duration: By default Facebook and AdWords both default to 30 days. From some people this is excellent and for other this is bad. You need to understand what kind of remarketing you want to do with that specific custom audience and then tailor your ads to that audience.
Keep in mind that you can have many different custom audience lists so I can create 5 custom audiences that remarket to the exact same audience. I can then set one group for just 7 days where I heavily market to the person, 1 group for 30 days where I might deliver a slightly different message and so on for my other groups.
I would not go overboard with this kind of marketing but it’s important to define your audiences and just because you create a list does not mean you have to actually use it.
After you save your audience you will be given your remarketing code that will be placed on your website.
Now when a visitor performs the action you defined you will be able to capture that user as a custom audience and then remarket to that custom audience you created.
Google Tag Manger
It’s worth mentioning that Google tag Manager is a great tool. With a Google tag you can place one javascript code on your site and perform many different kinds of actions. It’s a different subject matter then remarketing but worth mentioning as I believe this tool will play a greater roll going forward for most marketers and business owners.
See https://www.google.com/analytics/tag-manager/ for more information
RLSA – Remarketing List For Search Ads
For a more detailed look at RLSA see https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6167113
This is a great way to remarket to people based upon them actively searching and in buy mode on Google.
Example: A person visits your website and goes to your home page, a dog toy page, and checkout page.
I can create a custom remarketing list for all those actions if I wanted or a combination of actions.
In this case I have created a custom audience for those who visited my dog toy page. With this custom audience I can now create a new campaign in AdWords to target just those people who have visited my dog toy page.
Why do this you might ask?
Normally you would not want to bid on something very generic like the broad keyword of “dog”. Someone using this kind of keyword could be searching for millions of different things that you will never get a sale for.
However you have your custom list of known people who have already visited your website. They even already went to your dog toy page. You know they are most likely interested in dog toys so even if they do some weird off the wall search like “how come my dog has bad gas” you still have a decent shot of making a sale because this person knows who your site is as they visited it recently and they may still be actively looking for dog toys.
Down the pipe Line
Soon you will be able to create lists of people performing search actions on Google without them needing to even land on your website. Essentially you could have Google build a custom list of people who are searching for dog toys and remarket to that list of people on search without them ever having to land on your website. This option should be available late 2016 to early 2017
AdWords on Display
BEST WAY TO GET STARTED ON DISPLAY
AdWords display reaches 90% of the people connected to the internet. It’s big. Really big.
With display ads you have the ability to not only remarket to people who visited your website but also brand yourself to your clients.
If you have an eCommerce store then you want to setup Dynamic remarketing ads so people who visit specific product pages are remarketed those same products.
With dynamic remarketing Ads Google will create most of the images for you but you still have control over the main message.
One thing I really love about AdWords display is I can use my custom audience for people who visited my dog toy page and say just market to Females or combine another kind of layering to really zero in on what is working well for me.
When starting of with remarketing I don’t recommend you exclude any of your audience till you see what is converting and what is costing you money.
Let’s not forget to talk about Facebook. Facebook can be a great way to stay relevant and in front of your existing and potential customers.
I do recommend companies perform dynamic remarketing on Facebook for their products but I also strongly recommend you use a content strategy to engage with your existing and potential customers.
This article is already getting really long so I’ll cover Facebook remarketing in more detail in the future. I do want to mention them as it’s a great way to establish yourself as an authority and expert to your existing and potential customers. Don’t just think of Facebook as selling your products.
Capitalizing on Your List
To get the most out of remarketing you can take your existing custom audiences that you create and create break off lists from those custom audiences. Facebook calls it LookALike Audiences and AdWords calls it Similar-Too-Audiences.
They both mean the same thing. AdWords and Facebook have millions of data points on users. They cross match those on your list and create a new list for you based on data points they think are relevant and important. Essentially it’s a really kick as way of finding a lot more potential people that are most likely interested in your product or services.
If you have not created a Similar Too Audience I suggest you give it a go.
Tools and services out there for remarketing
You have a lot of choices when it comes to tools and services for remarketing. If you are pushing serious sales numbers then these tools can really come in handy. They can also help if you have zero tech skills or little to no time. However you do not need to use any paid tool to make remarketing work for you. Using the default tools provided by your traffic sources is often more then enough to get started. AdWords and Facebook both provide this kind of ability. With AdWords you can get a ton of free help online as well to ensure you are setting things up correctly.
My point is, if you have a small advertising budget, I’d rather you spend that budget not on tools but on marketing. With that said here are two of the leading remarketing platforms out there.
Both of the above tools work great to combine your custom audiences and to advertise in a very easy way across the web.
Another great resource on Adwords Remarketing is https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2476691?hl=en
Be sure and join us next Wednesday at 2PM CST for out Next Live Video hangout. If you have any questions just ask. If you would like to connect with us then checkout our connect page at http://marketingplaybook.co/connect/ . This page lists our social accounts where you can interact with us.
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Till next Wednesday.
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