Remarketing should be a part of any Adwords campaign, as the results and conversions it can bring over time can be much more rewarding than many other forms of online marketing and advertising. And yet, so many people still fail to make use of this product, mainly through not knowing about it but also through some of the negative comments that can often fly around the Internet, which are not always speaking the truth.
As we have covered remarketing and what it is many times before on this blog, we are now going to look at the five settings that you need to make sure you get right before your campaign goes live. This is mainly due to remarketing campaigns needing a bit more control and management than some of the other options, but also due to allowing your campaign to be more effective long term, which is really how you should be viewing the use of remarketing campaigns.
Your Budget
Knowing how much you can afford to or want to spend is pretty critical when it comes to Adwords, as if you have a very low budget, you might not get much of an impact, but yet if you do not cap your spend then you can quickly find the system will eat your money and come begging for more. Setting a budget needs you to be realistic, as if you have a £1 a day to spend then this is not really going to work across the majority of industries that Adwords works well to serve. In my experience, setting a minimum £5 a day budget and having small campaigns can at least allow you to see if Adwords will work for you short term, but if the budget is low, make sure your campaign is reflective of this and can work with what you do have to send.
Whilst I would never tell anyone not to use Adwords if their budget was tiny, I would be honest and upfront and explain that you have to be realistic in terms of spend, as you have to understand that that the potential returns, if done correctly, are massive, because Adwords can send you targeted traffic that is ready to convert, so you have to spend enough to get in front of these people. Your bids and budget will normally depend on the industry you work in, as the variation of click prices are huge depending on the type of customer you are looking to attract.
Bid Strategy
Your bid strategy is important because you can either decide to have full control and set the bid prices yourself, or you can let Google Adwords do this for you via Auto Bidding. Before we cover this, make sure you have Conversion Tracking installed and then tick use Enhanced CPC, which will in the long run use your conversion tracking data and bids to optimise the campaign, as once it works out what is working for you, the system is intelligent enough to try and make this work even better, so is something that you should always be using across all of your campaigns.
I would always recommend choosing “I’ll Manually Set My Bids For Clicks” and then start low and increase over time. By starting low and then working your way up, in my experience, tends to save you a bit of money long term, as although Auto Bidding can and does work for many people, I believe that by being in more control can just help you to save bits of the budget here and there, which especially when running on a small pot, can be really helpful. Although you are not bidding on keywords for Remarketing, you are still setting a base click rate, so start low but be realistic, see what happens and look at incremental increases over the next few weeks if necessary.
Location Settings
I often get asked, “why would I need location settings, as these are my site visitors?”. Generally, this is a fair point and if you skipped this setting you might be ok, but if and when you look at your Google Analytics and then view visitors by country, I will guarantee you now that you will not have 100% of those people from your targeted or key country. Therefore, if you only serve the UK for example, what is the point in wasting your Adwords budget getting your remarketing campaign back in front of the wrong people in terms of location?
Remembering that a remarketing campaign will serve your adverts to your site visitors, there is a chance that 20 – 30% of these people are just never going to be in the right location for your business, so by removing them from your location settings, or just targeting the areas you do want to hit increases the correct reach for your campaign and therefore, in theory, reduces wasted spend. If you are running a small budget then every penny and pound you save from a wasted click is going to enable better results long term, so it really is important to still carry on with your location targeting when setting up a remarketing campaign.
Frequency Capping
This is the one setting that I often see Adwords advertisers so often overlook, but is one of the most important settings when it comes to making your remarketing campaign work even better for you and your audience. Frequency capping, as it suggests, allows you to only show your advert a set number of times over a day, week or month, and this is important because no one likes to have the same advert shoved in front of them every hour and it also means that you can start getting back in front of your visitors over a number of weeks without annoying them. Most web users really do not understand how remarketing works, so you need to try and be a little bit subtle and not go hell for leather and serve thousands of adverts on every site they go to.
I generally set my Frequency Capping to – 1 Impression Per Day, Per Campaign, as I find this is quite a suitable setting and will mean that my adverts are not really everywhere my visitors dare to tread online, but yet it still gets my message across to these people. If you find this is a bit too much or is strangling the campaign then you can decrease or increase this setting to try to improve the results, but just always make sure you have frequency capping in play to allow your campaign to work more effectively.
Device Targeting
By now, you have probably heard that if your website is not mobile friendly then you are doomed to fail and your business is over. Whilst this is not strictly the case, having a mobile friendly site is really very important and something you do have to do, but if your site is still struggling to work on mobile devices and smart phones, then it is worth excluding it from your settings. Once again, Adwords is all about working your budget effectively, so by saving money by not getting the wrong type of clicks is also a way of pushing more money into the areas that do work, like the traditional desktop (and laptop) visitor clicks.
If you are unsure about how well your site works on a mobile, then you can either test it yourself, or look in your Google Analytics – Audience – Mobile and check out various things like time on site, bounce rate and of course conversion or goal settings if you have these turned on. This will then allow you to see how well your visitors interact with your website on these devices. Of course, if they website is not great on a smart device, you can use the Call Only advert in Adwords as long as you take phone calls for your business and are not just running an online sales operation, but either way, it can make sense to reduce mobile budgets if you do not get much from this type of traffic.