At Pubcon 2014 in Las Vegas, the SEJ team had the opportunity to catch up Erin Sagin of Wordstream to talk about remarketing with PPC ads.
One thing you may notice about remarketing is that you tend to be followed around be the brands you visit online, especially with companies Amazon. That can sometimes be interesting, and at other times it can be downright creepy.
On the other hand, sometimes you can get remarketed to by a company you haven’t visited in months, and that may not be the greatest way to spend advertising dollars.
But I’m not an expert on this topic, Erin is, which is why I took the time to interview her to learn more. In terms of remarketing, are companies going overboard compared to what they intended to do? Are they blowing too much of their budget on remarketing?
Erin answers these questions in the video below:
Here are some key takeaways from the video:
- The amount of time lapsed between visiting a site and being remarketed to by that site is called “membership duration.” When it comes to membership duration you have to think about the average buy in cycle for the products you sell.
- For some products that require a lot of time to think about before making a purchase, a long membership duration makes sense. A long membership duration does not make sense for products that have a shorter buying cycle.
- Remarketing has been around for longer than people realize, but it seems to have just opened up with the paid search crowd within the past few years. Now everyone is doing it, even small businesses are running remarketing campaigns.
- It’s great that more businesses are investing in remarketing, but at the same time there needs to be more education involved so companies are not wasting their money or coming off as too creepy.
- Erin recommends tweaking your copy and creative based on where your customers are in the buying cycle. If you’re running a campaign with a long membership duration, ads that appear after a few weeks should not be the same as the ads a user sees after only a few days.
- A mistake Erin sees a lot of businesses make is when they only want to use one or two specific ad units. This totally kills their campaign because if you only use a couple different ad units you’re competing for a very small amount of real estate, which means your ads may not get shown.
- If you only have the resources to create one or two ads, find a way to expand them for use in different ad formats so you have a better chance of your ads appearing in more places.
Please visit SEJ’s YouTube page for more video interviews.
