Day 1 of SLC | SEM’s Digital Marketing Conference is off to a great start as we hear from Christi Olson, Internet Marketing and Search Evangelist. Christi currently works with the BingAds team at Microsoft and teaches us some complex retargeting strategies to fuel your marketing initiatives.
Christi begins her awe-inspiring presentation by discussing the differences between basic paid search strategies and advanced advertising strategies. Remarketing is a very powerful tool in complex strategies as it moves the focus from keyword-centric to people-centric advertising. Paid Search has continued to advance year-over-year with sophistication. This evolution changes advertisers focus from keywords and geographic targeting to more advanced strategies such as setting up similar/lookalike audiences to RLSA for shopping.
Developing A Complex Remarketing Strategy
So how does one develop a complex remarketing strategy? Christi explains that it is important to incorporate the scope of a project so that we are able to optimize to an LTV attribution model. LTV stands for lifetime customer value which is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer.
When strategizing, it is important to consider these keys steps:
Segmentation - Segment your data and customer base. Having an optimized account structure is crucial for success, don’t be afraid to get granular with your campaign organization.
- Optimization - Pro-actively and consistently optimize your accounts performance. This means continually watch the campaign to find what is working and find what is not. Move keywords to their own ad groups, improve quality scores.
- Expansion - After segmenting and optimizing the account, expand your reach. This can mean additional geographic locations or additional audiences. Find what’s working and apply this to additional areas.
- Audit - Auditing the account is one of the most crucial aspects of success. Audit your work for errors or for improvements. Have peers audit your campaigns for insights on additional strategies that you may not have thought of or brainstorm with them.
- Automation - Automate your strategy for future use or better efficiency.
- LTV - Assess the value that the customers provide and utilize that to your advantage.
Helpful Tips
Here are a few helpful tips and tricks to remember when optimizing and creating your complex remarketing strategies:
- Implementation: Make sure to enable and use Bing Unified Event Tracking (UET) & Google Analytics.
- Don’t have access to Google Analytics? Use the AdWords Remarketing Tag
- Cookies: Don’t forget, in order to use an audience there is a 1,000 cookie minimum. So make sure to set these up and start collecting data prior to wanting to set up remarketing.
- Membership Duration: These default to 30 days. Remember to set these to your specifications and customer base.
- Layering Audiences:
- Bid Only - Increase bids for this set of users
- Target & Bid - Only reach this overlapping set of audience + keywords
Christi then goes on to explain in her presentation more in depth on how to analyze and segment your audience data. She shares with us an Audience Audit to consider when deciding strategy and how your audiences will be used.
Audience Audit Questions
WHO - Who are they?
- WHAT - What are their pain points?
- WHERE - Where do they go for information?
- WHICH - Which devices do they us?
- WHEN - When do they realize their need?
- HOW - How do they interact with you?
- WHY - Why do they pull the trigger to convert?
Answering these questions can help you determine how to use your audiences, where to put them and how to layer them effectively. Christi shares with us the art and science of defining and identifying your target audience.
Christi’s presentation closes with some powerful tools and helpful action items so that we can implement the tips and tricks that we learned in her presentation.
She tells us to GO DO the following:
- Audit your Audience Lists
- Audit your Strategy
- Don’t forget to document!
- Audit your Remarketing Campaign Settings