Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
What is remarketing?
Remarketing, also known as retargeting, allows you to show ads to people who have previously visited your website, or used your mobile app, watched your YouTube videos, or engaged with your brand on a social platform etc. Email addresses from the company’s CRM or email databases can also be used to retarget past customers using first-party data. For example, you can use customer email addresses to show display and video ads to people who have made online or offline purchases, depending on data availability and data protection consent.
When people leave your website without buying anything, for example, remarketing helps you reconnect with them by showing relevant ads across various platforms, channels, and devices to put your brand front of mind and hopefully drive them to take action and convert.
Optimized targeting and audience expansion
Remarketing functionality is available on all display networks, including Google, Meta, Twitter, LinkedIn, and premium retargeting options like AdRoll and Criteo. Suppose you want a platform to target an audience that has similar characteristics to a company’s existing customers, but this new audience haven’t actually bought from the company before. You can use first party data like your existing customers’ email addresses and website visit-based remarketing lists and submit this data to the ad platform. By using the audience expansion functionality in Google Ads, the platform’s algorithm will then try to identify people who share similar characteristics and demographics to the submitted customer list, as long as they have not previously visited your website.
It is an effective and easy approach to acquiring new customers who never visited the website before, but have similar traits to your existing customers or website visitors depending on the original data you are using to target the audience. The newly found pool of people via audience expansion may have a higher likelihood to buy when created from a small specific remarketing list like recent customers.
Dynamic remarketing
Dynamic retargeting is another important form of remarketing. It is a simple yet innovative practice where visitors of an ecommerce website are shown ads for specific products or services they viewed on their previous visits. It is an effective form of targeting because it is so precise. Basically, your past site visitors will see the exact product they recently looked at, its price and other details in a banner ad. When they click the ad, they are taken directly to that product.
This makes dynamic remarketing a key tactic for ecommerce websites. It can be done using dynamic remarketing campaigns and Performance Max campaigns on the GDN as well as catalogue ads in Meta properties like Instagram and Facebook. Furthermore, there are premium network buys like Criteo and Ad Roll that offer sophisticated dynamic retargeting options for eCommerce businesses, just be mindful that these premium ad platforms tend to be much more expensive than Google or Meta Ads.
Commonly use remarketing data options
You have several data options when creating remarketing lists on the Google Display Network. These include:
- Standard Remarketing: where you show ads to your past website visitors as they browse Google Display Network websites and use Display Network apps.
- Mobile apps: With this option, you show ads to people who have used your mobile app. They’ll see your ad when they use other mobile apps or browse other mobile websites.
- Video: You can show ads to people who have interacted with your videos or YouTube channel. They’ll see your ads when they use YouTube and browse Google Display Network videos, websites, and mobile apps.
- Email list: Known as Customer Match in Google Ads. Using first party data, you can upload a list of email addresses that you have collected from customers and email subscribers who have consented to their details being used for marketing purposes. When those people are signed into Google, YouTube, or Gmail, you can show them ads.
Cathal Melinn
Cathal Melinn is a well-known Digital Marketing Director, commercial analyst, and eommerce specialist with over 15 years’ experience.
Cathal is a respected international conference speaker, course lecturer, and digital trainer. He specializes in driving complete understanding from students across a number of digital marketing disciplines including: paid and organic search (PPC and SEO), analytics, strategy and planning, social media, reporting, and optimization. Cathal works with digital professionals in over 80 countries and teaches at all levels of experience from beginner to advanced.
Alongside his training and course work, Cathal runs his own digital marketing agency and is considered an analytics and revenue-generating guru - at enterprise level. He has extensive local and international experience working with top B2B and B2C brands across multiple industries.
Over his career, Cathal has worked client-side too, with digital marketing agencies and media owners, for brands including HSBC, Amazon, Apple, Red Bull, Dell, Vodafone, Compare the Market, Aer Lingus, and Expedia.
He can be reached on LinkedIn here.
By the end of this topic, you should be able to:
- Critically assess the digital channel mix
- Systematically analyse tactics and techniques used for demand generation
- Critically evaluate the impact of outbound and inbound marketing on demand generation
