Google Remarketing: Combine the Reach of Display with the Precision of Search

The Challenge: Display advertising has significant limitations when it comes to high impact branding. However, it’s worth evaluating Google's innovative "Remarketing" Campaigns which can achieve double-digit click-through and conversion rates, if used carefully.

Many marketers feel that display ads are the "brand awareness black hole" of online marketing. They have extremely low click-through and conversion rates, and their effectiveness as a brand awareness tool is questionable. Google Remarketing is different.

Remarketing allows you to track what visitors view on your site, and display ads to them accordingly. Rather than seeing generic banners about your product, visitors will see ads based on the specific pages they were viewing. This results in more relevant ads for users, and greater revenue for advertisers.

Important caution: what some will regard as highly relevant ads, others will see as invasions of their privacy. Therefore, it is crucial to be proactive about explaining how people can opt-out of Google Remarketing Ads. (Unfortunately, Google has not gone so far as to make remarketing opt-in.) Customers can disable ad targeting in their settings, and Google “removes all of your historical ad targeting information if you opt-out and then opt-in again.”

4 KEY REMARKETING SCENARIOS

» Abandoned Shopping Carts

Many customers abandon the conversion process without making a purchase. With remarketing, you can target these customers directly and encourage them to come back and complete the conversion process. The results are dramatic: "On average, 8% of customers return to a site to buy if the company does no remarketing. With a remarketing program in place, however, that average jumps to 26%."

» Repeat Customers

Repeat customers already know the value of your offer, and they’ve converted in the past. If you run a home goods site, for instance, you may expect customers to make purchases on a monthly basis. With remarketing, you can place ads across the display network reminding your loyal customers to come back.

» Saving Impressions

Some business are not looking for repeat customers: once somebody has subscribed to a magazine, for instance, there may not be another offer to make. In that case, advertisers can reduce their costs by not showing ads to these customers. Save your impressions for people who haven't yet converted.

» Unattributed Benefits
Not every benefit of remarketing campaigns can be directly attributed. In some cases, customers who don’t click on your ads might still search for your offer, or interact with your business in some other way. This is much more similar to traditional “branding” campaigns on display networks, and should be tracked and attributed similarly.

Priceline: Propel "Massive" Growth with Paid Search

The Challenge: As we reported last week, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an extremely effective way to create customer intent. To generate customer demand online, a particularly effective tool is Search Engine Marketing, or SEM.

SEM captures the moment when customers are directly communicating their intent. Of course, when a customer searches for "wireless speakers” on Google or Bing, they may simply want a picture of one, or information about their history. But, there is a very good chance that they are looking to buy one at that moment. The same applies to nearly every kind of product or service, including ones that are very costly and require more involved levels of information. In those cases, SEM can help drive sales leads rather than direct purchases.

Among the most prominent brands when it comes to paid search are travel sites like Orbitz, Expedia, Priceline, and TripAdviser.

Priceline in particular, has made huge investments in SEM, investing nearly $1 billion in paid search in 2011. The result was 2x growth over the same period the year prior. At the time, HotelMarketing.com reported, “Now that the dust has settled, it's clear the spectacular growth of Priceline ... was propelled by a massive boost in online marketing.”

Not all marketers can make 10-figure investments in SEM, but Priceline’s results clearly demonstrate SEM’s continuing growth potential.

4 Best Practices for Effective Search Marketing

» Implement Conversion Tracking

You cannot improve your search marketing campaigns if you don't know exactly how they're performing. To track performance, you need to implement conversion tracking, which tracks everything from impressions to clicks to conversions. For the best results, implement a tool like Google Analytics that allows you to track conversions across all major search networks.

» Optimize for Revenue, Not Position or Clicks

The goal of a search marketing campaign is not to generate clicks or to appear highest in the paid search results. The goal of SEM is to generate conversions. To do so, pause or reduce bids on low-performing keywords, rewrite ads that don't drive high-quality traffic, and adjust landing pages to make converting as simple as possible.

» Don't Over-Rely on "Broad" Terms

The simplest way to select keywords is to choose a handful of "Broad" match terms. By selecting "book" as a "Broad Match" term, for instance, you'd effectively be adding "books," "travel books," "deals on books," "books by Stephen King" – and hundreds of other phrases – to your campaign. To home in on a specific audience, use narrower "Phrase" or "Exact" keywords. For more details on keyword match types, check out this extensive tutorial from Search Engine Land.

» Use Location Targeting to Drive Local Sales
Local businesses cannot succeed with search marketing unless they implement location, or "geo" targeting. By default, search ads appear country or world-wide (depending on the network you're advertising on). If you're offer isn't available nationwide, limit the reach of your ads to specific cities, states, or metropolitan regions. Priceline has done this very effectively: rather than simply displaying “Priceline” ads to the entire world, they target specific regional brands they own – like Agoda – to specified markets. This commitment to regional targeting is a key differentiator: “Priceline global brands such as Agoda and Booking.com are eclipsing their rivals from the Expedia and Orbitz camps around the world when it comes to a presence in paid-search.”

Have You Forgotten About SEO?

The Challenge: Marketers have grown obsessed with building "engagement" on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Are they neglecting old-fashioned SEO in the process?

For years, tech pundits have depicted an "epic battle" between Facebook and Google, one that has only heated up with Facebook's IPO in May. But for marketers, Facebook and Google fulfill very different functions and represent different stages in the conversion funnel.

While Facebook is a platform for driving social engagement, organic Google results are still one of the best ways to create demand for your products and services. SEO captures users who are trying to solve a problem, but don't know that you offer a solution. Appear high in the search results, and they won't remain ignorant for long.

Before discussing ways to do this right, let's review a couple ways to do it wrong.

THE PERILS OF GAMING SEO

In the early days of Google, tech-saavy marketers tried to improve their search ranking by "gaming" the system, regardless of how relevant - or irrelevant - their content was to the terms a user was searching. These tactics included:

» Transparent-Pixel ALT Tags

One early tactic was to hide keywords in an ALT tag. The only problem is that ALT tags require images. The solution? a transparent, single-pixel image with a "keyword rich" ALT tag. The search engine response? Devaluing ALT tags.

» The META-KEYWORDS Tag

Next, optimizers tried filling their META-KEYWORDS tags with ... you probably know where this is going.

In every case above, marketers and developers tried to drive organic traffic to their sites by fooling the search engines. Nobody was fooled: the search engines responded by adjusting their algorithms to better track the single most valuable aspect of SEO: relevance.

3 KEYS TO SEO SUCCESS

» Create Relevant Content

The open secret of SEO is that there are only a limited number of things marketers can do on their sites to affect search rankings. The major factor in search rankings is links from other sites: i.e., other human beings who think your content is relevant. It’s not something you can game, but it’s something you can assure by creating a steady stream of high-quality content—especially on your official blog. Google demonstrates this fact with their own official blog, which often ranks as a top tech blog—not just a high-quality "corporate" blog.

» Maintain a Consistent Voice
While keyword-heavy content might help search engine algorithms, it's likely to decrease organic, human links to your site. Maintain a consistent voice, rather than setting a minimum number of keywords per sentence, as Dropbox does on their corporate blog.

» Practice Tagging Best Practices on Every Page of Your Site
All of that said, don't neglect basic tagging best practices like concise META-DESCRIPTION tags and relevant TITLE and H1 tags. (SEOmoz offers a great tutorial on tagging basics.) There isn't much you can do on your site to affect SEO, but don't neglect the factors that are in your control.