Remarketing for a Business With Long Decisions

Months between the first visit and the call

Nobody re-sides a house, replaces a roof or books a wedding venue on the day they first look. They visit in February, compare in March and decide in May, if the money and the season line up.

Most visitors to sites like these leave without getting in touch, and by the time they are ready, they have forgotten which company they liked.

Remarketing is a way to stay in front of those people through the months they spend deciding, with modest ads shown to past visitors of your site.

Done well, it is a polite reminder. Done carelessly, it is the ad that follows people around the internet for a year.

The settings that decide which

• Which pages put a visitor on the list.
• How long they stay on it.
• How often they can see an ad.
• Who is excluded, starting with people who already got in touch.
• Where the ads appear: other sites, search results, or both.
• What the ad says to someone who has already seen the site.

The fourth is the one most often skipped, and it causes most complaints. A customer who signed in March and still sees your ads in June starts to wonder what else the business has overlooked.

How it works in AdWords

A tag on your site adds each visitor's browser to a remarketing list, using a cookie. Lists can be built from all visitors or from people who saw particular pages.

AdWords can then show display ads to people on a list as they browse other sites in Google's display network. It can also change your search ads or bids when someone on the list searches again.

A list can include people in one campaign and exclude them from another.

Build lists from interest, not visits

Not every visitor is a prospect. Someone who read the careers page wants a job, and someone who only saw the home page may have been looking for a different company.

The useful list is people who looked at a service page, the gallery or the pricing, which are the pages someone reads when they are seriously considering the work.

Set how long people stay on the list to match the decision. A few weeks suits a quick purchase; a renovation or a wedding may take most of a year.

Cap how often

Without a limit, one person on your list may be shown your banner over and over in a single day, on every site they read.

Display campaigns allow a frequency cap, which limits how often your ads reach the same person in a day, a week or a month. A few times a week is a reminder. Several times a day is pursuit.

A worked example

A siding contractor with two crews ran search ads through the winter for homeowners planning to re-side in the spring.

Quote requests tended to arrive weeks or months after a first visit, so remarketing made sense. The first attempt put every visitor on one list, kept them for well over a year, set no cap and excluded nobody.

By May, homeowners who had signed in March were seeing the ads several times a day, and so were people who had applied for jobs. One customer asked, politely, whether the company had forgotten she had already hired it.

Three changes fixed it. The list now holds only people who viewed the siding pages or the gallery, and only for nine months.

Anyone who reached the quote form's thank-you page or the careers page is excluded, and the ads are capped at three a week.

The ad itself shows a finished house and a line about booking spring estimates. The same list now raises the search bid when a past visitor searches for siding again.

Exclude people who already got in touch

The simplest exclusion is everyone who reached the page shown after a form is sent. They are customers or prospects now, and more ads only irritate them.

People who phoned instead will not be on that list. A sensible list duration limits how long they keep seeing ads, and they are one more reason to keep the cap low.

Search is often the better place

Remarketing lists for search ads apply your list to Google searches instead of banners on other sites.

When a past visitor searches for the service again, you can bid higher or show a different ad. That meets them at the moment they are deciding, rather than while they read the news.

For long decisions, this is often the most useful form of remarketing, and the least intrusive.

What the ad should say

The ad is a reminder, not a fresh pitch. Show real work, the business name and one reason to get in touch now, such as estimates being booked for the spring.

Avoid lines that announce the tracking, such as asking whether they are still thinking about their roof. Most people can guess how the ad found them, and saying it out loud makes them feel watched.

Privacy and disclosure

Google's rules require your privacy policy to say that you use remarketing, that cookies are involved, and how visitors can opt out. Remarketing is also restricted for sensitive subjects, such as health.

Canadian privacy law expects the same openness: tell people their visits are used for advertising, and give them a simple way to say no.

Expect lists to catch fewer people over time. Apple has announced that the next Safari, due in the fall, will limit the cookies used to track visitors across sites.

The counter-case

Remarketing is not for every business.

An emergency service is chosen within minutes, so there is no deciding period to cover.

A site with few visitors may never fill a list, since Google needs a minimum number of people on it before ads run, and a higher minimum for search.

For a business whose customers take months to decide, keep the lists narrow, the cap low and the exclusions in place from the first day.

Setting it up

1. Add the remarketing tag to every page.
2. Build a list from service and gallery pages.
3. Match the duration to how long customers decide.
4. Exclude thank-you and careers page visitors.
5. Cap display ads at a few a week.
6. Apply the list to your search campaigns.
7. Update the privacy policy before ads run.

Step four is what keeps remarketing polite. Customers and job applicants have no reason to see your ads, and they are the people most likely to notice and mind.

Extending the same campaigns to a second search network is covered in running the same ads on Bing.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.