What’s the hottest topic in PPC?
Well, aside from enhanced changes across the Google platform, one hot topic is retargeting. Google’s version of retargeting, aka remarketing has been evolving quite rapidly over the last year and the latest addition to the tool kit provides incredible flexibility and targeting power.
Google Analytics Remarketing allow advertisers to use the immense power of Google Analytics segmentation to build creative and rich targeting options for remarketing to users who have already completed an action indicating interest.
If you’re completely new to Google Analytics remarketing and need a great walkthrough on how to get it set up, check out Justin Cutroni’s walkthrough post.
Here are a few of my favorite rich remarketing lists built inside Google Analytics.
Loyalists
Google Analytics tracks the difference between new and return visitors, so why not get back in front of users who have been to your site more than once? Create a list of return visitors for more exclusive offers to continue building relationships with loyalists.
Ecommerce shops can offer exclusive discounts to visitors who have already visited multiple times and who have already purchased. Lead gen shops can offer exclusive whitepapers or webinar seats to return visitors who have viewed a set number of pages or key pages.
You can also use this list to exclude remarketing to users who have already been back to your site and focus on remarketing only to new visitors who have only been to your site once.
Brand Advocates
Content marketing is often a bread and butter marketing tactic and in the age of social media, social shares are valuable micro-conversions. Use Google Analytics remarketing to remarket to users who have shared your content to their social networks.
This strategy will require tracking social media sharing buttons on your site. You can do this by setting up event tracking and you can even create goals for each event that you’re tracking. Once these actions are tracking and your goals are set up, you can create lists of users who have shared your content via your social media buttons. Serve up an eye catching image ad that reflects that social share and leverage the power of that micro-conversion to filter users through to your macro-conversion.
Social Users
One of the coolest list ideas using this feature is to target visitors based on their source. If you’ve been toiling over an organic social media campaign, why not leverage the fruits of your labor even further by getting back in front of that audience with a tailored message based on their social source?
Create lists of visitors who have visited your site from social media sites. Traffic from social media can be a fruitful target. Users on Facebook or Twitter are often clicking through to your site from content shared from their social networks. That means someone they trust may have already vouched for your product, service, or brand.
Loyalty Program Members
The most creative use of Google Analytics remarketing may be using it in conjunction with custom variables. Custom variables allow us to segment our users based on a specific action. Often a custom variable is used to differentiate between customers who are logged in vs. those who are not. So if your website has any kind of login you can track logged in users separately from those who are not logged in and either remarket or exclude this segment.
This allows for focused advertising to members of loyalty programs, forums, users who participate in blog comments, and more. This can be an extremely profitable target, users who have already gone to the trouble of signing up to participate on your site are very interested in what you have to offer. Get back in front of them each time you have new content available or are offering a discount or special offer.
Google Analytics remarketing can be an extremely powerful way to get back in front of your audience. The flexibility available with this tool goes above and beyond the standard shopping cart abandonment targets and allows advertisers to really dig in and provide value in their remarketing campaigns.
Happy remarketing and remember with power, becomes responsibility…be sure to take care and avoid creeping out your customers!
