Complete Guide to Content Remarketing

COMPLETE GUIDE TO
CONTENT REMARKETING
HOW TO WIN FRIENDS, INFLUENCE
PEOPLE & DOUBLE YOUR LEADS

© 2015, WordStream Inc. All rights reserved. WordStream technologies are protected by pending US patents.
MEET THE AUTHOR

Larry Kim @larrykim
Founder and Chief Technology Officer, WordStream
Larry Kim is the Founder and CTO of WordStream, a leading provider of online advertiser
software and tools designed to make search marketing campaigns more organized and
profitable. Larry founded WordStream in 2007 after a successful career in software
engineering, software product management and internet marketing. He is the author or
four award-winning books on software development and an author for the WordStream
blog, Search Engine Journal, Marketing Profs, Search Engine Watch, Inc.com and a
number of other industry-leading publications.

COMPLETE GUIDE TO CONTENT REMARKETING
HOW TO WIN FRIENDS, INFLUENCE PEOPLE & DOUBLE YOUR LEADS
Content marketing is all the rage, but once you
create that perfect piece and send it out into the
universe, how do you know you’re getting the
maximum benefit from it? People may read it and
love it — but will they ever come back?
Marketers have to take the next step to recapture
audience attention and turn more lookers into leads.
How? With content remarketing. It’s such a crazy
effective marketing tactic I can’t believe everyone
isn’t doing it, but they’re not. If you’re not, you’re
not just leaving money on the table — you’re throwing it out the door. Stop doing that!
This guide is a bit of a deep dive, with a lot of non-obvious advice. Here are the sections
we’re going to cover:
n What the Heck is Content Remarketing?
n Content Remarketing on the Google Display Network
n Getting Started with Remarketing
n Don’t Be Creepy? About That Ad Fatigue Thing
n Creating Killer Content Remarketing Ads
n The High Click-Through Rate Game for Content Remarketing
n Creative & Effective Remarketing Bid Strategies
n Advanced Ad Formats
n Creating Great Content Just Isn’t Enough
WHAT THE HECK IS CONTENT REMARKETING?

At its base level, remarketing is the process of tagging your site visitors and targeting them
with banner ads after they leave your site, in an effort to entice them back to (hopefully)
take the next steps.

Remarketing gives you the opportunity to appear in front of people who have already
expressed an interest in your website. They could be checking their email, reading the
news, watching a YouTube video … and there you are, with something new and awesome
to show them! It could be a reminder to complete an action they had started, or a new
piece of content to further a buying decision, etc.
Remarketing provides the opportunity to:
n Turn abandoners/bouncers into leads
n Increase brand recall (and thus increase branded searches)
n Increase repeat visitor rates and engagement
n Increase the effectiveness of SEO and content marketing
According to Forrester Research, 96% of people
who visit a website leave without completing the
action the marketer would like them to take.
Remarketing gives you a second chance to
make that first impression (and even a third, and
a fourth). Here at WordStream, we used to be really great at SEO, but not so great and
getting organic visitors back to our site. We had to get past being forgettable. We had to
make our content more sticky.
CONTENT REMARKETING ON THE GOOGLE DISPLAY NETWORK
Alright, so we understand both the problem and the opportunity. Now, let’s dive into the
solution.
You’re going to learn how to use remarketing strategies with the Google Display Network
to dramatically increase the effectiveness of your inbound marketing efforts.
WHAT’S SO AWESOME ABOUT THE GOOGLE DISPLAY NETWORK?
For starters, it’s huge and has massive reach.
The Google Display Network (GDN) is one of the
largest remarketing networks in the world and has
over two million sites in the network, including pretty
much every site in the world (with the notable
exception of Facebook). It also includes some pretty
big Google sites, like YouTube and Gmail. The
inclusion of AdMob for mobile targeting means you
can get your ads to show up in Angry Birds and
other mobile apps.
Remarketing gives you a second chance to
make that first impression.
The Google Display Network (GDN) is one of the
largest remarketing networks in the world and
has over two million sites in the network.

GETTING STARTED WITH REMARKETING
Using the GDN for remarketing gives you a great deal of reach. Generally, you can find
your tagged site visitors on the network many times per day, several days per week, and
across many different sites.
On average, you’ll be able to connect with 84% of the people you tag, 10–18 times per
month.

AUDIENCE DEFINITION STRATEGY
In remarketing, you need to first define an audience of users to remarket to.
For example, you could create an audience for people who visited your blog, or for people
who visited specific pages on your website — like your pricing page.
This will enable you to reach out to just those people, with offers and messaging to suit
their interests.
Here’s how you define an audience: create a new remarketing list. Google will take care
of setting all of the cookies — all you need to do is specify which website visitors to
include or exclude from your audience.
Segmenting different lists of users enables you to show different ads, depending on which
section of your site they visited.
A secondary benefit is that you can bid more
aggressively, to get more impressions and higher
ad positions, for visitors to the higher value sections
of your website. For example, your data might show
that visitors to your pricing or product page are more
valuable than your blog visitors (since often blog
posts have little or nothing to do with the products
and services you’re trying to sell).
Your data might show that visitors to your
pricing or product page are more valuable
than your blog visitors.

Another creative remarketing strategy for content marketers is to define audience
categories based on the different post categories in your blog. If you already have a ton
of blog content that is classified by topic, leverage those existing classifications in your
remarketing audience definition strategy.
AUDIENCE MEMBERSHIP DURATION
In remarketing, the audience membership duration is the number of days that you follow
a user around with your ads. For example, if I set my audience membership duration to
60 days, then users who visit my site will see my ads for 60 days. How long should you
set yours for?
DON’T BE CREEPY? ABOUT THAT AD FATIGUE THING…
Some experts believe that you shouldn’t be overly aggressive with remarketing because
it will make your prospective customer feel uncomfortable, which will then somehow
damage the ROI of your campaigns, or even damage your brand. Thus, they typically
advocate for limiting the number of times people see your ads through the use of shorter
audience membership durations, as well as impression caps.
Let’s look at a few facts and see just how “creepy” remarketing really is.
QUANTIFYING AD FATIGUE: REMARKETING VS. GENERIC DISPLAY ADS
Ad fatigue is a real thing in every industry and across every medium: TV, radio, print …
and yes, display ads, too. But do remarketing ads fatigue faster than other display ads?

We did the research and found that the click-through
rate of remarketing ads is so much higher to begin
with, it stays higher even as ad fatigue begins to
set in. What this means is that a user is still far more
likely to engage with a remarketing ad, even after
having seen it 6 times before, than they are with
a brand new generic display ad!
AD FATIGUE IN REMARKETING VS. DISPLAY ADS
Here’s the same data in a normalized view to show decay of click-through rate over time:
We did the research and found that the
click-through rate of remarketing ads is so
much higher to begin with, it stays higher
even as ad fatigue begins to set in.
What we saw is that while remarketing ads certainly did fatigue over time, remarketing
ads fatigued at less than half the rate of generic display ads.
CONVERSION RATE VS. AD IMPRESSIONS
But what about conversion rates? How does conversion rate vary based on the number
of times people have seen your ad before clicking on it? We had a look at that, too:

What we’re seeing is that although a user becomes somewhat less likely to click on
a remarketing ad over time, those who do click are more than twice as likely to
convert!
GO ON AND BE CREEPY — REMARKETING TRUTHS
Sorry naysayers, but the data just doesn’t prove
out the theory that people find remarketing
creepy and therefore marketers shouldn’t use it,
or should limit it to such short lengths it can’t be
optimally effective. To recap, here’s what we know:
n A user is still far more likely to engage
with a remarketing ad, even after having
seen it 6 times before, than they are with
a brand new generic display ad.
n While remarketing ads certainly did fatigue
over time, remarketing ads fatigued at less than half the rate of generic
display ads.
n Although a user becomes somewhat less likely to click on a remarketing ad over
time, those who do click are more than twice as likely to convert!
This brings you to my first crazy remarketing lesson:
BE BOLD! GET TONS OF AD IMPRESSIONS
People visited your site for a reason and past
browsing history is among the strongest predictors
of future purchasing intent. It’s worth testing out
remarketing with relatively higher impression caps
and membership durations and seeing what
happens. Don’t be timid for fear of potentially
creeping people out. If your offers and messaging are on target and you’re providing
value, it’s not creepy.
n Try setting your audience membership duration to an amount equal to 3x your
average sale cycle length.
n If it typically takes an average of one week to go from first touch to sale, set the
audience membership duration to three weeks.
n Don’t worry too much about impression caps (remember, more impressions
means higher conversion rates) and consider rotating though multiple ads
per campaign to combat ad fatigue.
People visited your site for a reason and
past browsing history is among the strongest
predictors of future purchasing intent.

CREATING KILLER CONTENT REMARKETING ADS

Now that we’ve talked about defining an audience to remarket to, let’s focus on how to
create killer remarketing ads.
AD FORMATS ON THE GOOGLE DISPLAY NETWORK
There are 14 different display ad formats on the Google Display Network:
Ad formats matter to marketers because of how the ad auction works. Different ad
formats do not compete against each other for positioning.

The lesson here: Diversify your ad formats!
This table shows the share of impressions accrued by the various different ad formats on
the internet.
Diversifying your ad formats maximizes your chances of ad placement in better positions.
EMOTIONS THAT MAKE PEOPLE CLICK ON CONTENT
The same emotions that draw people to your content will drive people to click on your ads.
The key here is to create ads that resonate with users on an emotional level. Stay away
from boring, plain, informational ads that look the same as every other ad out there.
Creating killer content remarketing ads is really quite simple:
n Diversify your ad formats.
n Create ads that appeal to your audience on an emotional level.

THE HIGH CLICK-THROUGH RATE GAME FOR CONTENT REMARKETING

Hot tip: the way to reduce click prices is to raise your click-through rates. Sure, you’ll end
up paying for a greater volume of clicks, but they’ll end up costing much less — as much
as 400% less, in fact.
So how does it work?
COST PER CLICK VS. CLICK-THROUGH RATE ON THE GOOGLE
DISPLAY NETWORK
The Google Display Network uses an algorithm called Quality Score to determine which
ads to show, what position each will display in, and how much to charge the advertiser
for each ad click.
Google doesn’t make money by showing ads no
one clicks on, so it makes sense for them to show
ads that are more likely to get clicks. To provide an
incentive for advertisers to create great ads, they
give out huge discounts for ads with high click-
through rates … and dish out huge penalties for
ads with low click-through rates.
For this reason, for every 0.1% increase or decrease in the CTRs of your ads, your click
costs will go up or down by 21%.
To provide an incentive for advertisers to
create great ads, they give out huge discounts
for ads with high click-through rates … and
dish out huge penalties for ads with low
click-through rates.
About Those Display Text Ads…
This all sounds good in theory, but how do you create an ad with high click-through rate?
For starters, it’s worth pointing out that 67.5% of the image ads you see when you’re
browsing the internet aren’t even images. They’re just plain text ads that have been
formatted into an image, like these:

For obvious reasons, the average CTR on text ads is much lower than image ads, as you
can see here.
As a result, the CPC on text ads is way more than the CPC on image ads:
It’s like you’re paying a 381% tax on text ads!
The key takeaway here is to take the time to design customized image ads, rather than
simply converting your text-based search ads into image ads.

WINNING TACTICS FOR IMPROVING YOUR REMARKETING CTRs
Higher click-through rates win you lower costs per click, but how do you boost your CTR?
1. Use Ads That Push To Your “Hard” Offers. What should you be featuring in your
image ads? The most common tactic is to simply promote your highest value offers,
e.g., a free trial of your product, a request for a demo, etc. This is my top performing ad:
The dog at my PPC! No more excuses for poor results! Use WordStream’s PPC Grader —
and of course, it has a cute puppy.
If you do it right, people will actually love your ads rather than hate them.
2. Do a Conversion Path Analysis. The goal here is to figure out which pages on
your site, if visited during a user’s session, result in a much higher probability of the user
converting to a lead or a sale (for example, the product overview page).

Come up with that list and target those pages in your remarketing audience.
3. Try Ads That Push to Content. Check out this ad from my colleague Marty Weintraub
at AimClear — It pushes to a content piece, “10 Kevlar PPC Analyses and Processes for
a Bulletproof PPC Account,” rather than a hard offer.
But how do you know what content to feature in your ads?
4. Analyze Social Shares on Your Blog Content. If you analyze your blog content,
what you’ll usually find is that around 5% of your pages generate half of the shares on
social media.
For example, I analyzed all of the articles on the HubSpot blog over the last year and
found that on average, the typical article gets several hundred shares on social media.
However, the top 5% of articles gets tens of thousands of social shares.

Not surprisingly, we found that the same stories that
work well on social media also tend to do very well
as featured content within ads.
Try a free tool like BuzzSumo to see which pieces of
your blog content get the highest shares.
WHY CONTENT MARKETERS ARE FABULOUS PPC MARKETERS
Content marketers are uniquely qualified to become fabulous PPC marketers. Why?
Because so much of the success and failure of PPC marketing relies on the
creativity of your ads.
Not to throw my PPC marketing brethren under the bus, but most are not super-creative
people. I mean, look at these ads for a search of “Big Data Solutions” — the ads are
essentially all the same:
The same stories that work well on social media
also tend to do very well as featured content
within ads.
Booooring. I estimate that 90% of all the ads out there for any given search are pretty
similar.
I call this an AdWords Jackpot, because it reminds me of hitting a row of lucky 7s in
Vegas. I just hit a Big Data Solutions jackpot! If you can come up with an emotionally
charged, totally different and stand-out ad — I called these Unicorn Ads — you can blow
away the competition.
Basically, there’s not a lot of creativity here, which means huge opportunity for the mar-
keter who gets creative.

CREATIVE & EFFECTIVE REMARKETING BID STRATEGIES
Now that you have remarketing audiences and ads down to a science, let’s turn our
attention to bid management strategies.
Remember, in PPC marketing, you have to pay for each click. The advertiser specifies
a maximum cost per click that they’re willing to pay, but the key here is not to buy every
possible click.
Rather, you want to be super picky and just cherry-pick the clicks that are the most
relevant to your business. The way to do this is though bid management!
THE KEY TO EFFECTIVE BID MANAGEMENT: TARGET YOUR BUYER PERSONA
In AdWords, you can overlay user demographic
information on top of your remarketing audiences
to find the needles in the haystack. It doesn’t make
any sense to remarket ads to everyone in your
audience. Why? Because not everyone who visits
your website is a qualified buyer.
It doesn’t make any sense to remarket ads to
everyone in your audience. Why? Because not
everyone who visits your website is a qualified
buyer.

For example, someone from Zimbabwe could visit your site. They can’t convert if you
can’t ship there.
Here’s where it comes in handy to know a thing or two about your target customer
persona. What are the ages? Parental status, where do they live? Gender? What time
do they search for your products? What is their income?
You can be very picky and just bid for the people in your audience who also meet your
demographic filters.
ADVANCED AD FORMATS
We discussed standardized image ad formats, but there are some really cool advanced
ad formats that are worth mentioning.
YOUTUBE ADS
People spend billions of hours every month watching YouTube ads. You may have your
own YouTube content, but perhaps your viewing metrics aren’t quite as high as you’d
like them to be, or perhaps your users have no idea you have interesting video content
to share.
Using YouTube TrueView ads, you can target your audiences as they are watching other
videos on YouTube.
Take this screenshot for example:

I’m trying to watch a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle video and it’s showing me an ad for a
tourism company in Italy. Why? Because I was planning a trip to Florence at the time I
took this screenshot, and they’re remarketing to me.
The cool thing about TrueView videos is that you only pay if people view your video
content. There’s no cost if the person clicks on the “skip ad” button.
Seriously, if you’re creating video content, why wouldn’t you pay a few bucks to
promote it?
+POST ADS
Another relatively new ad format is the +Post ad on Google+. Now, Google’s social
network isn’t as popular as Twitter or Facebook, so what they did was they came up
with an ad format that lets you promote your Google+ content to visitors — even if
they’re not on Google+.
Last month, I tried the new +post ads for my own website to target people who visited
my blog. There’s an ad creation feature that automatically creates ads in all of the different
ad formats to promote your latest Google+ post (Facebook has a similar feature).
I set the budget for $25 per day and a max CPC bid of just 25 cents.

My Google+ visibility and engagement went through the roof, increased by 10–20 times,
for just $25/day! How the heck does that work?
We can thank the flywheel effect of paid social promotion. There are billions of social
updates happening every day on social media — it’s very noisy. Buying the first few Likes
or +1’s or Retweets using paid social promotion then raises the visibility of your updates.
It results in massive organic social engagement. Sometimes you just need a little push to
get things started!
REMARKETING LISTS FOR SEARCH ADS (RLSA)
Here’s another interesting but advanced thing you can do. It’s a little complicated, but
I promise it’s awesome. It’s called Remarking Lists for Search Ads.
RLSA lets you can target people in
your audiences with customized ads
when they do searches for specific
keywords on Google.
Say, for example, someone visits your
site. You tag them and now they’re in
one of your audiences.
That person then searches for a
competitor of yours. This probably
means they’re doing some comparison
shopping.

Using RLSA, you can target that comparison
shopper with a specific ad, like a 10% discount
code or something similar. Knowing that the person
visited specific pages on your site and is now
performing specific searches, it’s possible to come
up with very specific and compelling ad copy.
CREATING GREAT CONTENT JUST ISN’T ENOUGH
You’ve done your research, you know your topic, you have something interesting and
entertaining to say — it just isn’t enough anymore! As individuals and brands have
become publishers, the game has been upped big time. Competition is fierce.
Once you create great content, remarketing helps you get it in front of the audience most
likely to engage and convert, furthering your business goals. Commercial intent +
audience demographics = a huge win for your company!
With remarketing, we increased our repeat visitors by 50%, tripled our average time on
site and saw a huge increase in direct visits to our site.
In short, content remarketing enabled us to maximize the value of every piece of content
we put out. We were able to get each piece in front of the audience with the most intent,
at the right time and via the right channels.
You can, too! Use content remarketing to make your content sticker and increase
conversions with a highly targeted audience. See WordStream’s Complete Guide to
AdWords Remarketing Best Practices for more tips, tricks and tactics to help you
make the most of the content remarketing opportunity.
ABOUT WORDSTREAM
WordStream Inc. provides search marketing software and services to small and
medium-sized businesses that want better results from paid search. WordStream’s
easy-to-use PPC Advisor software facilitates more effective PPC campaigns by
providing a customized workflow, the 20-Minute PPC Work Week, to help advertisers
increase relevance across Google, Bing, and Yahoo and get expert-level results in a
fraction of the time. Whether you’re new to search marketing or are an experienced
PPC manager, WordStream’s PPC management software and services can provide
the boost you need to grow your business and drive better results.
Knowing that the person visited specific pages
on your site and is now performing specific
searches, it’s possible to come up with very
specific and compelling ad copy.

Complete Guide to Content Remarketing

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