#7 — Make Sure Remarketing Pixels Are Activated
Remarketing is a great way to add value to your paid search campaigns, because you can continue to market to those who clicked on your ad in order to remain top-of-mind while they are completing their purchase journey.
Remarketing uses a variety of online ads to put your company back in front of the people who initially showed interest in it. By having clicked on your ads once before, these visitors have already proved themselves to be more qualified than other potential targets. So, now that you’ve introduced yourself, remarketing helps make sure that you aren’t easily forgotten.
Once the user searches for a particular product or service, let’s say – as illustrated below – a flight from New York to San Francisco. They may not have purchased, but using remarketing ads, you can continue to provide options that may help that searcher come back to you later and buy.
When optimizing for remarketing campaigns, it’s important to understand the remarketing campaign can’t take ALL of the credit for that sale. After all, the original visit had to happen for some other reason. It’s also important to understand that not all sales that happen through remarketing are BECAUSE of the remarketing, some of these visitors would have come back anyway.
But, with the right balance, and the right optimizations – remarketing can become a very valuable part of the overall search marketing program.
The reason that I have it listed among the First 7 optimization projects is because, although I may not tackle all of the ins and outs of the remarketing campaigns during the early phases of optimizing paid search campaigns, at the very least I want to take this time to make sure that the remarketing pixels have been created and placed on the site.
That way, when the time comes to dig into this part of the program, the cookie pool has had time to build into a useful size.
You’ve only JUST begun…
To be fair, the first 7 things to tackle only scratches the surface of a full paid search campaign optimization, but not only does this provide some early wins by improving some core functionality, but it’s a great way to get a feel for an account. There are few better ways to understand the depth and breadth of a paid search account than to completely reorganize the structure.
When it comes time to tackle this project yourself, take your time. Give yourself a moment to think about changes – why you are doing them and what you hope they will accomplish. A rushed job will often lead to mistakes, so take your time and get it right.
