Here’s a sobering fact: The vast majority of prospects who visit your website each day will NOT fill out a contact form or call or chat or enter an email address to access your free report or do anything else that you want your prospects to do.

One minute your ideal prospect is reading about your products or services and the next minute she’s gone.  Maybe to a competitor or maybe to go update her status on Facebook :)

And the worst part is if your prospect didn’t fill out a webform, then there’s no way for you to follow up to eventually close the sale.  So she’s gone forever…

Unless of course you use retargeting technology like Google Remarketing.

 

What is Google Remarketing?

Google Remarketing is a form of interest-based advertising, which allows you to show your ads to people who previously visited your website, and tailor your message to their specific interest.

So that means you can now target anyone who visits your website regardless of whether or not the prospect fills out a webform.

The technology is fairly simple if you’re familiar with browser cookies.  Essentially, every website visitor gets a cookie on her browser and then when she leaves your site and surfs around the internet you can serve targeted ads to bring her back to your website.

As an example, I could set up a remarketing campaign to target everyone who visits this particular article.  Then when you leave, I can serve ads related to this article topic on other websites you visit to bring you back to my site where you’re more likely to buy my products and services :)

 

Why Use Google Remarketing?

There are 5 key benefits of Remarketing:

  1. Targeting: your ads will only be displayed to prospects who have already expressed interest by visiting your website.
  2. Messaging: your ads can refer to something your prospects have already seen on your website so it’s more likely to resonate and compel them to click on the ad.
  3. Repetition: your prospects will repeatedly see your ads on multiple websites.  Therefore, your business appears to be the most popular and you stay top of mind so you’re less likely to be forgotten as your prospect surfs around to other websites.
  4. Expansion: if you’re only advertising in Google Search, then Remarketing is a great place to start to expand your ad reach.  The Google Display Network can often provide more traffic than Google Search and Remarketing allows you to tap into this large network to test it out.
  5. Market Research: your ads will display on other websites your prospects visit.  That means over time you’ll collect market research about exactly where your prospects go online so you can target them directly in the Google Display Network.  This information is priceless and will give you a huge competitive advantage.

 

Even if you’re not yet ready to launch a Remarketing campaign, I recommend you go through the steps to set up the required Target Audiences as soon as possible.  This way you’ll start to cookie your website visitors now and when you’re ready to start a campaign you’ll already have a pool of prospects to target.

The one big negative to Remarketing is you can’t launch a campaign right away. Google recommends a pool of at least 500 prospects to target before you start the campaign.

That means at least 500 prospects have to first visit your website and depending on your monthly traffic volume it could take several weeks to months before you can launch your campaign.

 

Google Remarketing Examples

By now I hope you can see the benefits of remarketing and how you could use this to expand your ad reach.  Now let’s look at some examples you could use in your business.

Here are three Remarketing campaigns you could use in just about any business:

  1. Service Segmentation
  2. Client vs. Prospect
  3. Fan Promotions

 

Service Segmentation

The first example is for businesses with multiple services.  For example, if you’re an attorney with multiple practice areas, then you could set up Remarketing campaigns for each service (i.e. family law vs. criminal law).

Then when prospects are reading the criminal law service webpage, you’ll know they are interested in this particular service and you can deliver ads highlighting your criminal law practice. Alternatively, you can serve your family law ads to every prospect who visits the family law service page.

Therefore, your ads are speaking directly to the prospects needs and you no longer need to use generic ads that list ALL of your services.

 

Client vs. Prospect

In the “Client vs. Prospect” campaign example you can target your clients and your prospects separately. For example, if you offer special products or services only available to existing clients, then you could reinforce your message with a remarketing campaign to target clients as they visit other websites.

Or a more common example is to simply block existing clients from campaigns targeting prospects.

 

Fan Promotions

The third example is for any business that has an email list, Facebook fans, or online groups (i.e. LinkedIn or Facebook groups) with people who actively like your business.

The idea is simple.  Use a remarketing campaign to enhance a special promotion to your list of “fans.”  This will allow you to promote an exclusive offer on other websites and only display the offer to your select list.

 

I hope you now have a clear idea for how you can start using Google remarketing to expand your advertising reach.  If you’re not sure how to implement a campaign in your particular business, then post your questions below and I’d be happy to help.