If done correctly, remarketing (or retargeting) can be one of the most effective, rewarding and intelligent forms of online marketing, but the key to making it work is, as we say, getting it right, else you are going to end up with a wasted spend and a few unhappy customers to say the least.

Remarketing was once and maybe still is for some consumers a mystical art of magic, that seemed to know everything they were doing and then served amazingly accurate adverts as they wandered around the Internet that were exactly the same as something they looked at just few days before. On Monday they would get a car insurance quote and by Tuesday they had car insurance adverts appearing on their Facebook page and on various websites as they wandered around the World Wide Web.

There are often two opinions on remarketing, depending on which side of the fence you are looking from:

An Effective Form Of Marketing – Those of us that work in the industry and actually implement remarketing for their customers know that given time, remarketing not only forms a big part of an online marketing campaign, but it can become a very cost effective and highly rewarding part of any campaign. But, this is only if it is done correctly.

An Intrusive, Scary And Unethical Form Of Marketing – There are others, and I had this discussion quite publicly a few weeks ago where some people think this form of advertising is not right, and consumers should not be followed around the Internet with adverts relating to something that they have looked at a few weeks ago. But, in my opinion, this is only the case if it is done incorrectly.

As you can probably tell from this article and indeed my website, I am a huge advocate of Remarketing, but I also understand why it annoys so many people, as if you use it aggressively and in a non-targeted way then you are just opening yourself up to a world of unhappy problems. Remarketing works best when you serve the RIGHT advert to the RIGHT person, else you are just serving things that they have no interest in and will just end up harming your overall brand, which is something that obviously needs to be avoided.

A really good article from PPC Hero goes into the statistics of why remarketing is a must, and they found that the average click was 22% cheaper than normal Adwords Search campaigns and offered a slightly higher conversion rate, making the CPA for the customer 25% cheaper than normal paid search, which is something that any business should be sitting up and taking notice of. If your business was presented with a marketing method that was on the whole 25% cheaper than anything else you might consider, would you take an interest and start to find out how to implement it, or would you still dismiss it, saying it is just not for you?

Remarketing often has a bad name because it is done incorrectly. It really is as simple as that. Sadly, good remarketing, targeted remarketing, effective remarketing often get tarnished with this same brush, and that is just not fair, as you wouldn’t say all plumbers are bad just because one of them damaged your boiler, and nor should you say one form of advertising is bad just because one advertiser has made a mess up of implementing it.

So, what do you need to do to make sure your remarketing is a success, not a failure?

Target Efficiently

As we mentioned previously, one of the biggest mistakes with remarketing is serving incorrect adverts. For example, say you had an estate agency. You offered both sales and rentals, but you did not split your remarketing lists into sales and lettings. You would then be showing adverts for homes for sale to people interested in renting and flats to rent in front of people looking to buy, and the point of this is, it will not work. People looking to rent often don’t want to buy and people looking to buy often don’t want to rent, so you are just wasting your money and their laptop screen space by not splitting your lists correctly and then serving the right type of advert to that customer or consumer.

Think About Frequency

This is a really important thing to think about. Imagine if you are watching TV and on every ad break you had the same set of adverts, all evening, every evening for a week. You would not only be pretty miffed to see the same thing again and again, but you would feel this is aggressive and intrusive, as you were not getting to see different things from different people. So when it comes to remarketing, think about the frequency that you will set when serving adverts to customer, as I often find once a day is adequate to make sure you get effective results long term.

Your Landing Page

You can have the best adverts going to the perfect audience, but if your final destination or landing page is awful, your campaign will not work. You simply have to think of the customer journey, making sure the path from advert to sale is consistent, effective and well thought out, else all you are doing is just sending traffic to a website that has not really thought about the end point. Make sure your landing page has been really thought about and that the customer is seeing what they expect to see and that it is easy to go forward and to make that purchase or enquiry.