Remarketing: 8 Bid Strategy Best Practices

Today, remarketing is one of the most powerful strategies in the modern marketer’s arsenal. The ability to retarget users who previously interacted with your website, ads or social media pages opens up excellent opportunities for lead generation, conversions, and sales.

Studies indicate that prospects who engage remarketing ads are 70% more likely to convert compared to first-time visitors.

Read on to discover some bid strategy best practices to make sure you get the most out of your remarketing efforts.

1. Target Similar Audiences

In Google Ads, you can use the Similar Audiences feature to find people with similar interests and browsing habits as your remarketing audiences. Once you have a remarketing campaign set-up, try targeting Similar Audiences in separate ad groups to enhance campaign performance.

This feature increases the reach of any existing remarketing campaigns by driving new users to your site who have similar browsing history to your previous website visitors.

2. Increase Bids on Broad Match Keywords

Many PPC advertisers make the mistake of ignoring broad match keywords when they are setting up their keyword bids. These terms lack a specific focus, and as such, they attract a lot of irrelevant traffic. However, when you are remarketing, using broad match terms is one of the best bid strategy best practices you can use.

As you have already honed your targeting, broad matches are great for remarketing campaigns, as they only target relevant prospects. Furthermore, these terms are usually quite cheap, which paves the way for cost-effective audience engagement.

3. Use Smart Bidding Strategies

Google Ads is embracing artificial intelligence and machine learning in a big way, which means you don’t have to do everything yourself. With smart bidding strategies like Enhanced CPC (cost-per-click), you can let the platform take the reins. It will automatically adjust your manual bids for clicks, increasing or reducing bids accordingly depending on how likely it is that clicks will lead to a conversion.

It’s best to wait until you have already got a few conversions before using this strategy. Meanwhile, some other methods to try include Target CPA or Target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) bidding.

4. Bid Less On Homepage and Non-Converting Page Visitors

In pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you must keep your marketing funnel in mind. Some prospects may go further down the funnel than others, and therefore, they will be more responsive to remarketing ads.

For instance, let’s say Jane bounced off your website after spending just a few seconds on your homepage, whereas Jack visited your landing page and made it through to the order form.

Bidding more for leads like Jane would only accrue more wasted spend. You should reduce the spend on bounced traffic like this, and turn your attention to those leads in the consideration or awareness stage.

You can still target non-converting traffic in several ways, such as:

• Soft call-to-action (CTA) – For example, download an eBook or sign up for your newsletter
• Direct them to your blog to learn more about your business and why they need your products and services

By spending less on first-time visitors and those in the early stages of the customer journey, you can increase your remarketing return on investment (ROI).

5. Bid More On Shopping Cart and Conversion Abandons

It’s a clear indication of interest when a visitor clicks through to your landing page. Data insights can show you what pages people visit, which products and categories they viewed, and how long they stayed.

For the majority of these visitors, they are in the consideration phase of the customer journey, and may only need a little encouragement to continue to conversion. By adjusting your remarketing bid strategy to spend more on these warm leads, you can optimize your budget.

In the example above, instead of treating them both equally, you should prioritize leads like Jack, because he has gone further down your funnel. By bidding more aggressively for relevant keywords, you can display highly-targeted remarketing ads to Jack. Done right, this tactic can yield higher conversion rates and a lower cost per acquisition (CPA).

6. Bid on Educational Landing Pages to Increase Brand Awareness

You may already have a high-traffic website. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from using some bid strategy best practices for remarketing. Remarketing can help you drive traffic to landing pages that currently don’t generate any leads.

Think about how you can convince bounced traffic to return. How can you educate these users about your business? How can you show them that you have the solutions they need?

The ultimate goal of PPC advertising is to generate leads and close sales. Trust is an essential part of the equation, and you can instill that trust by giving people something for free. By driving leads to a “free” page, that offers valuable advice and actionable takeaways for their problems, you will increase brand awareness. Better yet, you will start to build a relationship with new leads.

7. Optimize Frequency Capping Limit

Frequency Capping allows you to limit the number of times your PPC ads appear to the same person on the Google Display Network. By optimizing this limit for remarketing campaigns, you safeguard against too much wasted spend. After all, it doesn’t make sense to continually retarget people who have no interest in your products or services.

Experiment with the cap to find the optimal limit that allows you to retarget people without annoying them with persistent approaches.

8. Consistent Testing

Anyone who has been in PPC advertising for a while will know the importance of testing. It’s an integral aspect of advertising, and you stand little chance of success without it.

With remarketing, you should continuously by A/B testing something. For example, you may want to adjust one of the following:

• Budget
• CTA
• Images
• Campaign landing pages
• Ad messaging

With every change, leave it for a while to gather some data, then gauge the impact. Monitor your views, clickthrough rates (CTRs), and conversions.

Adopting a proactive attitude to testing and analysis is an effective way of increasing ROI without overspending. Sometimes in PPC, small changes can deliver big wins.

Remarketing Can Reap Rewards

So, as you can see, remarketing is more than another buzzword. It is a popular strategy because it can drive brand awareness, qualified traffic, and warm leads into the latter stages of your funnel. When you apply bid strategy best practices, and consistently test and analyze your campaigns, remarketing is a high-conversion technique.

Now it’s over to you. Get started with a brand awareness campaign and get ready to track the key metrics you need to succeed.