Many Google AdWords features come with fabulous treats that help improve account performance or ease campaign management. Some of these same features, however, have a few nasty tricks up their sleeve that can throw PPC managers off course.
Scared? Don’t be. Learn how you can avoid these tricks, get ahead, and make sure you have the biggest pile of goodies at the end of the night…
Learn more in my article Trick or Treat? 5 Fabulous and Frightening AdWords PPC Features on Search Engine Watch!
Originally posted on ClickZ.
Aww, back-to-school already? Yes, it’s that time of year again when retailers’ minds turn to reaching parents and students of all ages purchasing supplies, clothing, and electronics. According to the National Retail Federation, combined K-12 and college spending will reach over $68 billion this year, serving as the second biggest consumer spending event for retailers behind the winter holidays.
The flexibility and real-time nature of paid search and PPC campaigns make them ideal tactics for the back-to-school marketing mix. In recent surveys, more people say they will shop online and will comparison-shop online than last year. With this audience more available online, it will be critical to be visible and offer unique messaging to entice shoppers.
Retargeted advertising is not new, but kicking off a program now for this online holiday shopping season can help to boost sales. Retargeting reaches people who have visited your site by serving an ad to them post-visit on other content sites across the web. Advertisers do this by putting a small piece of code on their site which sets a “cookie” in the user’s browser. As the user surfs the web and visits other sites that serve retargeted advertising, those sites will check for the cookie and use it to determine which ads to display.
This tactic is usually very effective because the user is receiving multiple marketing touches and keeps your brand top of mind. They also tend to be more qualified because they have already expressed interest in your products by having previously visited your website.
Ready for some killer tips?
1- Abandoned shopping cart: One approach ecommerce retailers can use this holiday season is the “abandoned shopping cart” tactic. This is accomplished by putting the retargeting cookie code on the shopping cart pages only. Anyone who has seen the cart pages, must have added an item to the cart at some point, right? As they surf the web, you can serve them with an ad that acts a gentle reminder to revisit your store. You don’t want to acknowledge you know they left the shopping cart, because, well, that’s just creepy.
You can, however, reinforce your current special offers like “free shipping” or promote your holiday gift products in hopes they will return to complete the purchase.
2- Loyalty: Another popular approach is the “loyalty” tactic. This reaches customers who have completed a transaction on your site (code added to the confirmation page code). You can use this to cross-sell or up-sell to recent buyers. None of the data collected is personally identifiable, so you’ll need to understand your customer behavior and their repeat purchase patterns to design the most effective “loyalty” campaign.
3- Reach: Each network serves ads on different networks, so you can market on multiple networks to reach your prospects wherever they are. Fetchback, serves display ads only across their partner ad network. Google and Yahoo also have retargeting programs. Google’s program targets prospects on the Google content network, while Yahoo’s targets on Yahoo properties. By combining the display retargeting network with Google retargeting and Yahoo’s retargeting product, you will have have a great deal of saturation and reach!
These three tips are a strong complement to your current PPC search engine text ads and provide a power-packed holiday strategy you can start today.
Resources:
Yahoo Retargeting (display banners)
http://advertising.yahoo.com/media-kit/retargeting.html
Google Remarketing (text + display banners)
www.google.com/ads/innovations/remarketing.html
Fetchback Retargeting (display banners)
http://www.fetchback.com/retargeting.html
