In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget I explained how Google AdWords Remarketing could be used to tag your customers so your ads would follow them around the internet. Here's the link if you missed it: http://ow.ly/diFTj
I'm continuing the discussion of Google AdWords Remarketing today with a little more in depth explanation of how versatile Remarketing can be.
To make Remarketing work on your website you have to add a small piece of JavaScript code to the programming code of your site. This usually requires the help of your programmer since most websites don't have the ability to insert code like this on the fly. When it comes to adding Google JavaScripts most programmers know that you usually just insert the same code globally to the footer of all pages.
The simplest version of Remarketing is implemented with a global code like that, but if you really want to have the best impact on potential sales you need to dig deeper into more advanced methods.
As it turns out you really do not want to tag every person that comes to your website. Only people who visit more than 1 page are potentially good candidates for future sales.
AdWords can create multiple tags for placement on different pages of your website. You can put a generic tag on your home page, a jewelry tag on your Jewelry Catalog page, and then a bracelets tag on the Bracelets section of your catalog.
When someone views each of those pages, they will get secretly tagged by each. They don't have to visit in any particular order, and they also don't have to visit all 3 pages on the same day. As soon as they complete the tagging process they will start to see your bracelet ads all over the internet. On the other hand if you tag your Earrings section instead then you would probably create ads for earrings rather than bracelets.
As I mentioned yesterday, you need a way to turn the ads off once the customer has completed a task. Have them make an online purchase or filling out a form before they can print a special offer page. With 3 way tagging like this you would need a more complex method to deactivate the ads. With an e-commerce system you would want to test for the purchase of a bracelet before deactivating. If you have a simple online form/printout then the printout page can take care of the deactivation.
Every tag has the potential to last 540 days, and if you want to be really sneaky you won't deactivate the tags at all. Instead you could manually manage the tagged groups and show different ads throughout the year for short time periods, then turn the ads off again when the time has passed.
As an example, you can tag people from the months of March through October every year, but hid your ads. In the mean time you can set up a Black Friday campaign and a Holiday Campaign. During Thanksgiving Week you would activate the Black Friday campaign, then right after Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving) you would turn off the Black Friday campaign and turn on the Holiday campaign.
With this strategy you would be placing ads back in front of every person who visited your website from the previous March through October. They would see your Black Friday promotion and then your holiday promotion through December. If you want to take it a step further you could change your holiday ads throughout December.
At the end of December you would turn the ads off manually and your customers won't hear from you again until they are reactivated.
There are a lot more options here, but perhaps these few example are enough to illustrate the flexibility of the system.
There are a few caveats you need to be aware of:
* Remarketing ads are graphical banner ads that need to be designed with specific wording and imagery to get clicked. You should hire an AdWords expert for this task rather than the person who does your print advertising. It's a different type of work.
* These banner ads are tricky to make, so give your AdWords person some leeway if they have to shrink images or change wording. Remarketing ads are 9 different sizes and each version needs to be fully thought out and designed for user interaction.
* Google will need at least 7 days to approve every one of your graphical ads. If you are going to use my suggested holiday idea above then you need to create all your ads by the end of October; pause them all until you want to use them.
* In my experience it takes about 36 hours to create a single set of remarketing ads and program a website with multiple tags. It's more than just generating code and working in PhotoShop, you also have to design the tagging custom combinations, which will probably take some teamwork.
