Retargeting is an exciting feature to integrate into your internet marketing campaign, allowing you to display advertisements to previous visitors to your website.

Retargeting Objectives

Some simple aims of retargeting include:

• Increasing sales
• Increasing enquiries
• Increasing awareness of your brand, products or information on your website

There are a few ways to achieve these objectives by using certain messages within your display ads:

• Simply remind previous visitors of your brand using your logo, slogan etc
• Remind previous visitors of specific products, or categories of products they viewed
• Incentivise return visits to the website by offering discounts or offers exclusive to the visitor
• Promote sharing of your website by asking previous visitors to share information they read

Retargeting for visitor feedback

There’s another use for retargeting that could help improve overall performance of your website in giving your visitors what they want —Ask for feedback on previous visitors’ experience of your website.

You’ve no doubt been looking through various pages of a website and had a survey window pop-up asking you to answer some questions about your experience. This request for feedback interrupts the visitor whilst they’re trying to use the website. By asking for feedback when they’ve left you may be able to get a more balanced overall view of visitors’ experiences.

By retargeting visitors in this way you also have the chance to promote your brand overall, and by incentivising feedback, potentially increase sales.

Before you retarget

It’s vital that you have answers to some fundamental questions about your website before you start a retargeting campaign. There’s are a few reasons that people found your website in the first place —and a few more reasons why they left without purchasing/making an enquiry.

Here are a few reasons people come to an ecommerce website and don’t make a purchase:

• products are out of stock
• pricing is not competitive
• products they seek aren’t available at all on the website

There are many other reasons beside those above, but at a fundamental level, some visitors won’t convert not only because of aesthetic reasons, such as poor website design, no visual indicators of trust, or lack of “social proof”. The basic needs of visitors have to be addressed.

So it’s not just a case of adding retargeting code to a website and then promoting to every visitor, or every visitor who doesn’t purchase. That might work to an extent, but the conversion rate would be higher if you were able to qualify visitors on a retargeting list.

You can answer these questions already

Provided you are collecting some information on visitor behaviour already, there’s a good chance you can answer some of these fundamental questions.

Look at paid and organic keywords

Analysing keyword information from Google Analytics, or looking at keyword data from AdWords or other paid search platforms can give you insights into the intent of a visitor.

If they arrived on your website searching for a phrase unrelated to your products, there’s no point in retargeting to them.

If they found your site by using a very general search term then they might be worth retargeting to, but you might want to put them on a separate list to others.

Both short- and long-tail keywords are equally conversion-unlikely if your site doesn’t fundamentally give visitors what they’re looking for.

Internal Site Search

Use of internal site search will help you understand how visitors navigate your website. It’s crucial in this situation for finding out if visitors seek products you simply don’t stock.

For example, a visitor arrives on your website via a general keyword such as “power tools”. Then, they use your search field and enter “spirit level”. Perhaps they browsed the power tools first, and then realised they needed a Spirit Level as well. If you don’t stock this product, they are likely to go elsewhere, and probably aren’t worth retargeting to. They may not ever buy from you.

Consider all of the product attributes you find in your internal site search data and see if you are providing all of the products a potential customer is looking for —various brands, size, version etc.

Pricing too high?

This one is a little more straightforward, especially for ecommerce. If your pricing is too high that may be too much of an obstacle for people to overcome before they buy from you, especially if you’re not adding value in other ways (e.g. lower shipping costs, fast delivery, warranty, guarantees).

If you retarget to this type of visitor, you may be retargeting to someone who has already bought the product from another website.

 Landing pages

This may only get rid of a few people from the overall retargeting list, but it will still save you some budget: if someone lands on your ‘terms and conditions’ page, are they likely to buy at all? The same goes for “404 Page Not Found” pages, depending on how visitors arrived there.

If they’re not interested, why would they click an ad anyway?

If you do add every visitor, or every visitor that hasn’t converted, to your retargeting list, then they won’t all click on your advertisements. You could argue that visitors who didn’t find what they were looking for the first time aren’t likely to click on an ad.

However, your ads will no doubt be designed to be clicked on. They should be visually attractive and may still reflect a subject matter the visitor is vaguely interested in. If you use an incentive or offer, especially one with immediacy, then it’s even more likely to be clicked on.

Plus if you’re bidding with CPM bidding then click through doesn’t matter anyway. You’re either wasting money (because you can’t currently give them what they’re looking for, or won’t ever give them what they’re looking for), or you’re doing some slightly more relevant general display advertising, which probably isn’t your general intention.

Retargeting with any budget is a conversion aid. With a limited budget it’s not about getting in front of eyeballs, not a brand building exercise. It should be given the best possible chance of helping your website perform.

Segmentation for a successful retargeting campaign

By segmenting all of your visitors into categories and putting them into separate retargeting lists you are able to give your campaigns the best chance of performing, whatever retargeting platform you’re using.

Following on from a round up of things to do if you’re using Google AdWords for the first time, this post details how we’d go about conducting a quick audit of an existing AdWords account to discover some key performance indicators and fine tune a few things.

This is a good overview of things to look out for if you’re running your own AdWords campaign and have that nagging feeling you might be spending budget on extraneous things.

Let’s get to it.

1. Are all Destination URLs working?

There are some very basic questions in this quick audit, and here’s the first. Do your advertisement URLs actually work? Without a working URL there is a tiny chance any visitors you have actually land on any of your pages containing the content they’re seeking. If your ads have worked previously and your website hasn’t changed then you may be okay, if you’re unsure it’s best to check.

There are a a few ways to check this, including

• Click on each Ad from within the Ads section of AdWords
• Export Destination URLs from AdWords and use a tool such as Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider to check header statuses for URLs in List mode

2. Is the Display Network turned on?

This is one of the most obvious places AdWords campaigns are found to be lacking in efficiency. Most advertisers use AdWords because of its ability to target keywords with ads in search results. The Display Network is a huge number of websites that feature ads from AdWords campaigns based on a range of other targeting methods.

If you’re not sure what the Display Network is just reading this article, then you probably need to find a way to turn it off.

Unless, of course, it’s performing well. There are two good indicators of whether the Display Network is sending “quality traffic” to your website.

• Is it leading to Conversions?
• Is it sending repeat visitors?

If you’re not sure, or don’t know how to find out, then it’s worth spending some time finding out more about Google Analytics and setting up AdWords Conversion Tracking.

3. Are Broad Match keywords running wild?
This is another campaign inefficiency that could has been know to cause minor panic, where you may think “So I’m actually paying for keywords I don’t want to advertise for?”

We advocate only using Phrase Match with new advertisers to target budget where it’s most likely to perform. Broad Match can result in your ad appearing for an large number of unrelated keywords, especially when your bids are high.

To check this, firstly take a deep breath, then go to the Keywords tab and click on Keyword Details > All.

You can cut back on keyword inefficiencies by adding negative keywords, using new keywords and switching from Broad to Phrase or Exact Match.

4. Ad Extensions: are you using them all?

Ad Extensions offer you the chance to gain additional space on the search results page, which often increases the number of people clicking through to your website or calling your phones.

There are an increasing number of Ad Extensions which address different types of searches people may make — there are extensions for Ecommerce Shopping, Locations, Phone Numbers, Mobile Apps, Google+ as well as ‘Sitelinks’, which allows you to link to different pages on your website in addition to the main link in your ad.

5. Targeting — Desktop, Mobile or all?

The number of searches carried out with mobile devices is rapidly increasing. Displaying your ads on mobile devices may be a great way to have people find out about your services, or it may not. By looking at information on Google Analytics comparing how people using mobile devices use your website you can decide whether or not you should be targeting Mobile, Desktop, or all types of device.

You can also drill-down further into more specific types of device you wish to target.

6. Geographic & Location Targeting

This brief audit list is in no particular order — everything mentioned should be looked at. But in every one of these items lies a potentially headsmacking moment. Check your campaign Geo-targeting to ensure you are at least serving ads to the correct country, in the right language. If radius-targeting is being used, make sure it targets an accurate range surrounding your location.

Half an hour is enough time to get an overall view of a small to medium-sized AdWords account, but to make progressive changes then you need to really delve into the detail and implement a properly thought-out strategy.

Confused about AdWords? Get in touch!

Small businesses and new companies want the best return possible from any advertising or promotion they undertake. When it comes to creating a website and promoting it to potential customers within search results, there are often conflicting opinions from different people on the most effective way to do this.

The (Obviously) ‘Ideal’ Scenario

Use both. Whilst at first this may seem like a poor suggestion as budget is limited, it’s not too expensive to make use of both organic and paid search, at least initially.

Google AdWords and Bing Ads do occasionally offer free credit to new advertisers, which allows you to take advantage from instant exposure as long as your campaigns are setup properly. Both search engines provide free local listings which can rank your website quite high for relevant local searches.

If your website is “SEO friendly” and Google has some of your pages within their index already, then Webmaster Tools can help you make your pages more compliant with SEO best practice.

Which One? Well, Why Any?

Some aspects of SEO aren’t suitable for every website. Some business owners want to retain an air of mystique around their products by not adding any descriptive text. Ranking an image-only website can be a long, hard struggle.

Pay per-click advertising is also not suitable for every website. High bids and low conversion rates can make you think that it’s not the best medium for success.

However, you can gain insight from both, and use information from one to benefit the other.

PPC First, Then SEO

Running a pay per-click campaign can give you

• A fair idea of whether search results are a good place to promote your services
• Detail of level of demand for your goods and services
• Inspiration for website content topics
• Accurate indicators of performance of various keywords
• New keyword ideas

As with any kind of promotion or marketing you need to set some aims, objectives and events to measure in order to see how the campaign performs.

Some key performance indicators could include:

• Sales via website
• Sales via telephone
• Enquiries
• Time a visitor spends on a page
• Time a visitor spends on the website
• How many pages of the website people visit

Using Google Analytics and simply asking callers how they heard about your services, you can record performance easily.

It’s from here that you can apply these findings to an SEO plan.

Data-driven SEO Campaign

Ask yourself:

1. Which keywords performed best in terms of sales?
2. Which keywords led to enquiries?
3. Which keywords didn’t send sales/enquiries but performed well in other areas (time on site, etc)
4. Which keyword combinations could you use for writing new website content?

If your initial PPC campaign led to sales and enquiries then it’s a good idea to continue with it. If it’s not cost-effective but did bring in sales then proper PPC management can help you bring down costs whilst maintaining sales.

Using the best-performing terms in SEO is likely to have a really positive effect on traffic and sales — you’ll rank well in organic results whilst also having a prominent advertisement in the PPC section of results.

If there were no sales or enquiries from PPC you may be thinking it’s not the best platform. Keywords that sent visitors who stayed on the website for a long time or visited a high number of pages would perhaps perform better over a longer period of time, making them ideal candidates for use in Search Engine Optimisation, where traffic is “free”.

Website content ideas can come from visitors questions you find in keyword phrases – e.g. if someone clicked on a PPC advertisement after searching for “what is X”, “How do I use X” and related queries. By writing this content you can help answer visitor’s queries in a direct way whilst gaining exposure for your products and services.

Integrate For Maximum Effect

Conversely, if you have an existing amount of well-performing traffic from organic search results, you already have some keywords that may do well in Paid Search. That additional place on a popular search engine results page can be a valuable asset.

No promotion or marketing strategy should focus solely on a single channel. By making use of two channels that are similar you can use the contribution of one to increase the performance of another.

“Keyword research is hard” is something I heard recently.

It’s also something I said myself for the first time about four years ago, and have had it repeated back to me a lot of times since during the first steps of both SEO and Paid Search campaigns.

It appears hard for the marketer first learning about the detail of a business, and hard for the small business owner who might not quite understand what keyword research is initially.

Many small businesses want the rewards of a well-applied SEO strategy but are limited by one or more of these universal business barriers:

1. Time
2. Money
3. Creativity

Often those limitations open a chasm between what’s achievable in the short term and what the longer-term objective is.

A Short History

Years of Yellow Pages-type advertising have meant many sole traders and small companies have only ever had to write 200 words of copy (list of services, call-to-action, contact details). Now that they’re told that having “good content” on a website is necessary for ranking in search results, some are sent into panic or almost-instant writer’s block.

There are hundreds of thousands of businesses in the UK that face this problem and end up with a “small web presence”, a website with a single-digit number of pages that doesn’t inform their customers about their business any more than their company name alone does.

A Quick Solution

Discovering keywords that are suitable for use on the pages of your website really can help with the lack of time and creativity the small business owner has to put into their website content. Not everyone was born a writer, but having web content isn’t about practicing your literary skills — it’s about telling people how you can help them, which business owners do every day. Finding new “keywords” to use can prompt fuller disclosure of services, more detailed description of products and portray a more engaging side to a business.

Hold on a minute, what are “keywords”?

There are various uses of keywords depending on which part of the conversion funnel you are targeting. For example, many of the more-affordable SEO strategies focus on short-tail, conversion-likely keywords — the kind used by people searching for “Product X” in “Location One”. This is the kind of search that happens when a prospective customer desires to use that service or product. These keywords are relatively easy to discover using tools like the AdWords Keyword Tool or Google Suggest.

However these keywords are likely to make only a small percentage of searches that people will eventually visit a website via.

Other, longer terms and phrases, variations, synonyms, abbreviations and bastardisations of target phrases at both ends of the conversion funnel are going to lead people to your website, and may “perform” better than the more obvious keywords.

Bridging The Gap

Keyword Research exists to solve two problems:

1. Which words should we include on our website?
2. Where should we include them?

Let’s answer those questions.

1. Which words should we include on our website?

Answer: Any words that relate to your business.

Really — that’s the truth. If a word does genuinely relate to your business, find a useful, relevant place to include it within your website content, page titles and linking text.

“Any words that relate to your business” isn’t useful enough, however. If you’re writing the text, it’s imperative that you are able to actually come up with those words and use them appropriately.

Well developed answers to interview-style questions can go a long way to fulfilling the criteria.

If Jeremy Paxman interviewed you about

• What you did
• How you did it
• Where you do it
• When you do it
• What is it really?
• What is it similar to?
• Who gets the most benefit from it?
• Who could benefit from it but doesn’t?

— there’d definitely be sufficient content for your small business website.

• If you recorded every conversation you’ve ever had with a customer or colleague and had it transcribed, it would probably cater for a lot of the Customer Service, Product detail or FAQ page content
• If you took the bullet points of your business plan and fleshed it out into web pages it would contain enough information about the customers you’re targeting that your website would appropriately target them

2. Where should we include these words?

Answer: In the most appropriate places

In order to place keywords appropriately, first categorise them and then designate either individual pages or “types” of pages suitable for their use.

Here are a few examples of types of Pages:

—FAQs/Frequently Asked Questions.
Some websites do this very well, many do it very badly (“No job too small” is neither a question nor an answer).

— Review/Testimonial pages.
These are an excellent way of “out-sourcing” your content writing to your own customers!

— Product/Service Page
This is where a lot of the descriptive detail about products should be published, in addition to much of the “sales” language you would use when pitching your services to a prospective customer.

— Case Studies
Case Studies pages are really useful places to feature detailed information about projects you have worked on other business you have worked with and locations where work took place. You can cover many of the synonymous terms for your products and services within case studies.

The Blog Panacea Myth

There’s a school of thought that promotes the idea that a blog alone can overcome all ranking challenges by earning lots of links and housing a range of long-tail keywords. This can be true, but a blog is not always the best fit for a business pressed for Time, Money and Creativity. There are other types of pages that may suit your company better.

Hopefully that’s some food for thought when you have to research keywords for website content.

Content Marketing is easy to define.

Let’s break it down into its separate components.

Content

Content is the type, and substance, of your property. If your property is a website, the type could be, for example, a simple paragraph of text. The substance of that paragraph of text could be a description of your services.

There is an increasing number of classifications of content, many of which can be seen as having separate status as media of their own. Many aspects of each type are transferrable to other types — for example an interview would suit a blog post, news article, video, podcast and an ebook.

Here’s a short list indicating some types of digital content:

• Text
  • Description of Business
  • Description of Services
  • Product Descriptions
  • Blog Post
  • Article
  • Press Release
  • Interview
  • Ebook
• Video
  • Video Blog (Vlog)
  • Product Review
  • Trailer
  • Introduction
  • Advertisement
  • Educational
  • Instructional (e.g. “How to fit bike gears”)
  • Webinar
• Audio
  • Podcast
  • Music
  • Advertisement
• Image
  • Photograph of Product
  • Animation (e.g. animated GIF file)
  • Infographic/Data Visualisation
  • Meme
• Sales Promotion
  • Discount “Voucher” Code

Marketing

The marketing of this content is crucial to its success.

By setting objectives for each bit of content you can define their purpose, which often helps you to create and design the content in a better way to start with.

A simple marketing objective for a piece of content could follow the SMART Objective model (where an objective is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-bound) for example:

Write a blog post to publish on a popular website that will generate 300 visits over a month and gains one link back to the website. With a conversion rate of 2% this will generate six enquiries.

Achieving this objective can have other, longer-term affects:

• Your website will receive more traffic from the post on the popular site over time
• Visitors to your website are likely to “convert” (buy something, send an enquiry, interact in other ways)
• You can ask these visitors for their email address or retarget your brand to them following their visit to your website
• Your logo or brand will gain more share of voice on the subject of the blog post
• Your website’s rankings may be boosted from the link you earned
• You’re likely to receive traffic from any social media activity associated with the post
• Publishing a post on a popular website will open more publishing opportunities elsewhere

Create, Curate or “User Generate”

Many of the items in the list above be used appropriate as a different content type — e.g. A Video Review can be transcribed to become text content.

The way each piece of content is created can be part of the overall marketing plan. Content can be created by your own design and placed where you choose.

Depending on the objectives of the campaign it may be beneficial to curate content from others. A good way to do this would be to aim to build an authoritative resource on a single subject and reference the work of others within that resource — e.g. a list of “Best Photographs of the 90′s”, or “Top Bicep Workout Videos” featuring videos from YouTube.

Instead of creating or curating, you can encourage others to do the creation for you. User-generated Content can be an on-going benefit for any website. Asking visitors to submit their ideas, posts, reviews and comments can help with social engagement whilst also increasing the substance of your content.

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is an activity of refining web marketing performance.

Once a campaign is in progress and has started to produce sales or leads there are often aspects of the campaign which can be altered to increase the number of leads or sales relatively easily.

Conversion Rate Optimisation simply refers to optimising, or increasing, the number of those who come to a website and convert.

Examples of a conversion include a sale on an ecommerce website, the capture of an email address to be used in an email marketing campaign or having a prospect use the contact form to get in touch with a business.

There are many ways to increase the rate of conversion, including:

• Altering the messages used in advertisements
• Split-Testing ads or landing pages to see which is more successful
• Multivariate testing by altering aspects of the same landing page or media

Conversion Rate Optimisation is often mentioned when analysing web marketing campaigns at scale.

However it is often a subconscious process which takes effect during the production of a first campaign, or  a conscious process for the experienced online marketer.

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Search Engines see links from other websites to your own similar to “votes for” your website. If your website pages have more links, or higher quality links, than other websites then it will out-rank them in search results.

Building the “authority” of a domain by acquiring links is a key aspect of search engine optimisation.

By acquiring links from “high quality” websites, your site can also receive an increased amount of traffic from those other websites.

Links, “backlinks”, “in-links”, “followed links”, “acquired links” are all terms used frequently within search marketing circles.

Link Acquisition is the practice of gaining a link from another website to your own. There are a number of ways to achieve this, including:

• Hosting any kind of linkable asset on a website and promoting it so others are likely to link to it
• Developing relationships with others who may offer you a link for free
• Developing relationships with others who will offer you a link or in exchange for goods, services or assistance
• Manually creating links from a website under your control
• Submitting your site to other sites which will link to you for free or in exchange for a fee or a reciprocal link

Link Acquisition as a general term is often and perhaps more commonly referred to as ‘Link Building’.

Pay per-click Marketing is an advertising tool used by marketers to promote goods and services online using auction-based advertising platforms including Google AdWords and Facebook ads.

An advertiser bids for their advertisement to appear on a website for a given search keyword or to a specified demographic.

The system in use determines whether to show the advertisement by judging criteria including, amongst other things:

1. The highest bidder
2. The suitability of the advertisement to the keyword or demographic
3. Restrictions on advertising behaviour determined by law or the policy of the advertising platform company

If an advertisement is approved and appears online users of that site will be able to see the advert content and click through to the advertiser’s website.

The advertiser will be charged an amount similar to the amount they bid to show their advertisement using the Pay per-click platform if they are using cost per-click bidding.

Some advertising platforms allow for Cost per-impressions bidding where the advertiser will bid an amount to pay once their advertisement has appeared a number of times on a website.