PPCRemarketing tips with Bing Ads

Remarketing tips with Bing Ads

Remarketing allows you to re-engage with the audiences that have previously visited your site. Here's three valuable audience segments and some insider tips that will get you off to a flying start with remarketing.

I’ll be sharing three valuable audience segments and some insider tips that will get you off to a flying start with remarketing.

When people look for products and services, they rarely convert on their first visit. As you may know, 96 percent of first time visitors leave websites without converting.

Remarketing allows you to re-engage with the audiences that have previously visited your site.

What is Bing Ads remarketing?

Bing Ads remarketing works similarly to Google AdWords’s Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) product offering, wherein ads will only show within the SERPs should your defined audience be actively searching for keywords you’re bidding on.

bing-remarketing-1

Unlike standard search campaigns where bids, ads and keywords are the same for every searcher, remarketing enables you to bid higher, show on a broader set of keywords, and/or target different ads to different audiences based on a user’s past actions on your website.

Since users who have visited your site are more familiar with your brand and products, they are more likely to engage with related ads and convert in a future visit, thereby increasing the ROI of your campaigns.

Early users of remarketing in Bing Ads have seen significant improvements in CTR and Conversion rates.

Slicing audiences: the greatest thing since sliced bread

The reality in today’s multi-device, information-overload world is that human attention is now one of the scarcest resources. All of us marketers have to raise our game in order to have any hope of competing.

As far-fetched as it may sound, we need to be having engaging and relevant conversations with our customers that feel personal, but can be done at scale. That’s where audience segmentation comes in.

Breaking up your audiences into smaller sub-sets based on demographics, behavior or propensity to purchase means we can personalize our marketing efforts to better appeal to each. This is especially relevant for remarketing.

Careful segmentation will not only enable you to personalize creative messaging, but it also helps you adjust your bidding and targeting settings to improve conversion rates.

Let’s say for example you created a remarketing list for all shopping cart abandoners in the last week.

  • For this group, you could apply bid boost to make sure the ads have a higher chance of showing up when the user is back and searching for relevant keywords/products on the Yahoo Bing network.
  • You could also choose to show a completely different ad such as one with free shipping, discounts or different ad titles or landing pages in order to earn the click and conversion.

Three remarketing lists to test asap

While remarketing lists such as shopping cart abandoners and general site visitors are a no-brainer for marketers, here are some ideas for lists every marketer should test out.

1. The ‘close but no cigar’ list

Imagine you go on this magical, perfect date. You both have a wonderful time, there’s clearly chemistry, conversation just flows, sparks are in the air. You’re excited. This could be the start of something wonderful! However, weeks go by and you never hear back from your date. Heartbreak. That’s pretty much the gist of this list.

These are visitors who’ve really engaged with your site and had above average interactions with it such as watching videos, engaging with live chat, visiting key pages or just spent a lot of time on the site. They seemed very keen, but somehow they never took that final step to add to cart or convert.

Perhaps they got distracted by the latest cat video or a sudden urge to take a selfie and left. They’re clearly interested and have a higher likelihood of converting than general visitors who just skimmed the site quickly. Let’s segment this group out.

The recipe

Bing Ads allows you to create segments based on Custom events, which would be ideal for tracking interactions with page elements such as a chat button or a video view.

bing-remarketing-2

Alternatively, you could track visits to key pages via this selection:

People who visited a page with:

URL contains: “mysite.com/keypage”

But didn’t visit another page with:

URL contains: “mysite.com/thankyou”

If you’re a fan of regex, you can absolutely go to town with them here.

How do we engage this list?

Our goal is to guide them to the next stage of the purchase funnel and get them to add to the cart. It’s likely they just needed a little more information or a reminder to take the next step.

Let’s fill in the blanks for them:

  • Product reviews- Consider adding review extensions.
  • More info or case studies- Consider linking to these via Sitelink extensions.
  • Increase incentives- Test special offers such as free or rush shipping.

Additionally, targeting and bidding tests to consider are:

  • Test Click to Call- Phones have on average 3x higher conversion rates than landing pages.
  • Bid modifications- Increase bids by 150 percent+ to increase visibility.

2. The ‘anywhere and everywhere’ list

Less stalker-ish than it sounds, this list refers to cross-channel remarketing. Spending money on TV or radio advertising? Have a social media audience you’d love to engage with? Want to retarget people who’ve seen a specific email or direct mail offer?

Remarketing is a great way to create engagement lists around your various channel campaigns. Let’s take a TV advertising campaign as an example here.

The recipe

The premise is simple. Simply ensure the UET tag is added to the custom URL for each campaign. For example, it could be people who visited a page with any of the following:

URL contains: “mysite.com/TV_offer”

Advanced level: It’s also possible to drill even deeper by targeting people from certain geos only around certain times only, so as to capture the folks who might have seen the commercial at the time it aired.

How do we engage this list?

Our goal here is to reinforce the message of the TV or print ad within their search ads, to increase the chances of getting the conversion.

Promote the same offers and add a time limit or remind them the offer is for a short time only to add a sense of urgency and encourage the sale. Alternatively, you could run localized mobile ad campaigns that share the same offers and encourage people to visit the brick and mortar location.

3. The ‘no limit’ list

This is bound to appeal to the inner rebel in all of us. Why do we need to let the boundaries of our site restrict us? Remarketing is very affordable and can significantly higher conversion rates.

We need the power of OPA. Not the Greek exclamatory word, but rather Other People’s Audiences can help us scale things up.

The sites should be complementary, for example a pet food vendor can partner with a pet clothing vendor to tag each other’s sites, so that each advertiser can increase their share of voice amongst a relevant audience.

Thinking beyond your own site can drastically expand your remarketing pool.

The recipe

Make friends, form partnerships, find mutually beneficial business relationships- find a way to test this out since it can make a big difference to your efforts.

All you’ll need to do is add your tag to their site (and if you wish, add their tag to your site) and the tag will function as it’s meant to do and build your lists.

How do we engage this list?

Our goal here is to really woo people who may not have visited our site before and as a result are likely less familiar with us.

Tactics to consider include:

  • Go much broader with the keywords you choose to target so as to show up often for this segment.
  • Be bold with your bids, raising them by anywhere between +50 percent to 150 percent.
  • Be sure to offer specially customized purchase incentives and offers to help close the deal.

Key points to keep in mind:

  • UET tags will need to have been implemented across the website in order to enable remarketing.
  • It’s not always about bidding up—you can strategically bid down for certain lists such as recent purchasers so as not to waste ad spend on folks unlikely to purchase again.
  • Prevent the creepiness factor all-too-common with remarketing by not being too specific in your ad copy. Subtlety works best, so aim to be helpful instead.
  • Each remarketing list will need at least 1,000 cookies to be active

What are some remarketing lists that have worked well for you? Please do share in the comments below.

Resources

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