8 Top Notch PPC Retargeting Tips

Retargeting is a marketing technique that will help you run any PPC campaign more effectively. It is able to boost a return on your investment because it will bring visitors back to your website when they are ready to buy your products or fill out specific forms at a later date. Instead of having visitors just bounce away and forget about you completely, PPC retargeting keeps you at the top of the mind.
In a perfect world, every click would get you a conversion. Unfortunately this isn’t a perfect world. Visitors will leave your site without becoming a conversion for literally millions of different reasons. That doesn’t have to be the end of your PPC campaign. By retargeting them through their normal activities online, you can help them remember that they were once interested in the value that you were offering.

Some PPC retargeting campaigns are much more effective than others. Here are some of the best tips that will help to improve your overall numbers so that you can leave someone with a positive impression instead of an ongoing negative one.

1. Put In Frequency Caps

One visit to your website doesn’t mean that a visitor wants to see your products everywhere they go on the Internet. If you overexpose your branding or your company’s presence, then there’s a good chance that you will drive away that one click visitor for good. The best case scenario is that those 1-Click visitors will simply ignore all of your ads as they go about their business. Advertising blindness caused by oversaturation is the biggest mistake of PPC retargeting and it occurs every day.

By installing a frequency, you will automatically limit the amount of advertising that takes user will see as they go about their normal everyday business on the Internet. This will let your branding still stay at the top of their mind without making them feel like you’re trying to smother them. All it takes is one notice ad every day for you to accomplish your retargeting goals. By putting in caps, there’s also a good chance that you can save a ton of cash on your next PPC retargeting campaign.

2. Install a Burn Code

The last thing someone wants to see from your business is more advertising after they purchased your product. If you are still running a PPC retargeting campaign on someone that has created a conversion, the only thing that you will do is annoy that person to the extent that they won’t become a repetitive customer.

This is why using a burn code is necessary for your campaign. This code will eliminate the tags that have been placed on any users who have started the journey through your sales funnel. It’s also in your best interest to have this code installed – otherwise you’re going to be wasting money on impressions for people that have already become customers.

Now that’s not to say that you can’t target a customer with a retargeting campaign. It just means that you shouldn’t be targeting them with the same campaign that made them a customer in the first place. New targets equal new profits.

3. Segment Your Audience

Were you around for the good old days of business when a handshake and a promise was enough to seal a deal? The reason why this worked was because people had relationships with each other that were personal and meaningful. Business owners would segment their audience based on the relationships that they developed with every customer. Every relationship was individualized, but every relationship was also compartmentalized.

How does this apply to your PPC retargeting campaign? It means that you should be tailoring specific advertising messages to different prospects that are taking a journey through your sales funnel. Each stage of your sales funnel should include a specific advertising message that encourages that prospect to take the next step in their journey.

Think about it like this: if you had a visitor target specific products on your website, then you can tailor advertising that will give them more complete information about those products. On the other hand, if you had a visitor just visit your home page, then an overall general brand awareness through advertising is a better approach to take.

4. Location Matters

Every customer matters, but not every visitor matters. There are going to be some people who visit your PPC campaign that will never become a customer. This is because they are outside of your targeted geographic or demographic areas. If you are trying to sell wood furnaces to the northeastern United States, a visitor from Zimbabwe is not someone that you’ll want to waste impressions on with your retargeting campaign.

Contextual matters also factor into the distribution of the PPC retargeting campaign. If visitors don’t meet your key data metrics, then you could keep tracking them if you wished… but there’s a good chance that you’d just be wasting your money in doing so. By putting advertising in front of the right people at the right time, you’ve got a better chance of experiencing more success.

5. You Might Have More Success Than You Think

Have you heard of the billboard effect? Billboards in large cities convey basic information to drivers as they are traveling. The goal isn’t to create a sale through the use of the billboard. The goal is to create a better overall brand awareness so that a name or an image sticks in that person’s mind and becomes associated with a certain product or service. If that driver sees a pizza billboard and three days later they’re hungry for pizza, what’s the first brand that comes to mind if they happen to be in their vehicle at the time? The branding on the billboard.

PPC retargeting has a unique effect on the average Internet users mind. It automatically creates a higher level of brand recall and awareness that is reflected in searchable keywords that are used. This is why it is important to have view through conversion windows as part of your retargeting campaign. It’s the Internet’s version of the billboard effect. This will let you see what brand awareness features are effective so that you can replicate it along every chain of the sales funnel.

6. Only Use 1 Provider

It can seem tempting to use multiple PPC providers to run retargeting campaigns because it seems like more results would be achieved. The opposite is actually true. PPC providers have to bid for the same spots on the same websites to put your targeted advertising in place. This ultimately drives up your costs because you’ll be competing against yourself.

Multiple providers might also end up hitting a visitor with your branding. This could mean that frequency caps get thrown out completely, even if they are in place, should a visitor encounter two different provider ads that you have sponsored.

Yet testing the effectiveness of a PPC provider is also essential. How do you work around these two issues? By hiring one provider at a time for a limited period of time to gauge their effectiveness. Then you can compare results and go with the best provider available that can meet your needs.

7. Keep Up the Creative Content

Even if you’ve got wonderful advertising content when you first launch, the creatives will begin to lose their flavor like a piece of freezer burned chicken. Over time, everything grows old and stale. You’ll need to keep up with new creatives for your PPC retargeting campaign to make sure that they’re staying effective. If you don’t make changes, you could lose up to 50% of your traffic in just 5 months if you’re using the same advertising.

This doesn’t mean that you need a lot of advertising to be effective. It just means you need to rotate through your creatives about once per quarter at most so that you don’t overexpose certain campaigns and ultimately make them ineffective.

8. Keep It Clean

On paper, it seems like a good idea to pack in as much information into a PPC retargeting campaign as possible. In reality, however, lots of information in a banner is just a distraction. No one really wants to read a ton of information in an ad. Many people, in fact, do not even trust the information that is put into advertising because it is seen as just another way to get them to click onto something.

That’s why keeping it clean and simple is always the best course of action to take. Use colors that are bold, text that is recognizable, and branding that communicates clearly what you’re all about. If you can do that consistently, then you’ll be able to bring more attention to your retargeting efforts instead of less attention.

When PPC retargeting is done correctly, it can be a very useful tool to enhance revenue streams. Use these tips today and you’ll increase your chances of seeing better overall returns and conversions.