When it comes to local online marketing, just because you’re options and budgets may be more limited then big national advertisers, it doesn’t mean you can’t THINK like a big national advertiser. Retargeting is HUGE for large eCommerce companies however it is often overlooked on the local level. I’m not really sure why it’s overlooked or ignored but I’d much rather be doing a retargeting campaign then a lot of other things that local companies spend their money on.
I want to show you an effective way to use retargeting on the local level. I’ll use a random example but feel free to apply this to whatever campaign you are currently managing.
Let’s say the client is a sports equipment store and they are driving traffic to a landing page offering a 20% off coupon for your in-store purchase using a multitude of media sources including traditional and various online media sources. Retargeting’s job would be to maximize the effectiveness of all the other media being purchased. In order to do that you have to think out the strategy a bit. For the purposes of an example let’s say that 100,000 people were driven into the landing page with this 20% coupon. 20,000 People claimed the 20% off coupons and 80,000 people didn’t and bounced off the page without doing anything. Let’s refer to the 20,000 people who claimed the coupon as the “Claimed Pool” and the 80,000 people as the “Bounced Pool.”
You need to have different objectives for the people in the “claimed pool” and the people in the “bounced pool” if you want your retargeting to work effectively. The “Claimed Pool” people don’t need to claim the coupon anymore because they already did. The “Bounced Pool” people still need to claim the coupon because they previously went to the page and didn’t do anything.
Ideally you want to serve the “Bounced Pool” people an ad saying to “claim the coupon” because that would maximize the traffic previously sent to the page. You want to send the “Claimed Pool” people messaging saying to come into the store and use the coupon that they already claimed.
The way you would do this is through multiple campaigns and exclusion pools. First you would install your retargeting tags on both the landing page and the thank you page.
#1 – You would setup a campaign targeting everyone but EXCLUDING anyone ending up in the “Claimed Pool” that has “claim your coupon messaging.” This would effectively retarget to everyone who DID NOT claim the coupon. To create a claimed pool you would basically have a pool of anyone ending up on the thank you page.
#2 – You would setup another campaign targeting only people who are in the “Claimed Pool” with “come in and use your coupon messaging”
The benefits of this is that people would see the correct messaging at the correct time in the buying process. Why serve someone an ad saying “claim your coupon” if they already did that? Why send someone a message saying “Use your coupon” if they don’t have one?
If retargeting is not currently a part of your local online marketing mix it should be. If you have any questions leave a comment.
Good post. Another point that’s interesting to mess with is using these to follow up with users on a newsletter or 3rd action.
Then it gets really interesting.
@Rob – Definitely – You can take it a lot further, in fact, we do just that.
Great idea, for Ecommerce I need to exclude people who already bought the product, which is not being done.
I also run a local event where we sell tickets and need to exclude people who already purchased tickets through Eventbrite (you can add tags on their thank you page). We didn’t do for the event that just passed 2 weeks ago but next year we’ll definitely do that.
Do you just tag separately with Google Analytics / AdWords and Facebook tags from their sites? Or do you use an all-in-one solution like AdRoll for FB and Google Content Network?
Thanks for the post!
@James – We do not use adroll – we use separate tags