Module 3 - Remarketing

What does a remarketing loop actually look like?

A remarketing loop is a set of follow-up ads aimed at the people who reached your page and took no action. I am not going to go into massive amounts of depth on remarketing yet, because there is quite a lot in the course on how we do that, but I want to talk to you about the basics.

This is a tool I use called Funnelytics. It is just a canvas that is going to show us some of the ways we can remarket to people. I am going to drag a generic web page onto my canvas. Let us say this is your landing page, and this is where your offer lives.

Then we need some traffic sources, so I am going to use YouTube, believe it or not, as my major source of traffic. So there are my YouTube ads, and here is my landing page. We are driving traffic to a page using YouTube ads. That is what you have all come here to do, hopefully.

What happens next? Let us say we have got an opt-in and we have got an order. People might land on this page, they might opt in, and they might order. We could have all sorts here, checkout, phone, lots of different actions. Let us say the end of this is a checkout, so it comes to the order page, and then we have got a thank you page.

Why is a working funnel still not good enough?

Because the vast majority of the people you paid for are still sitting there having done nothing. We have done our ad, we have got a landing page, we have got some people onto the page, and we have got some people who purchased. Is that good enough? Absolutely not, and this is what I see time after time after time.

People are sending traffic from all sorts of sources. They might have traffic from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Twitter. So let us organise that a bit. We have got Twitter, we have got some Facebook ads, we have got LinkedIn, and of course we have got YouTube. All of these are sending some traffic onto the site. Everything on this left hand side is costing us money, or it is costing us time to produce content. Every single activity or spend on that side is costing us to get people onto this page.

Let us say we are really lucky and we get five per cent of people past this point to either the opt-in or the order page. Then of the people on the order page we get 50 per cent to the thank you page. That is two and a half per cent of the people over here. What should we be doing with the other 97 and a half per cent of people we paid for and engaged with, and nothing happened?

The people who came to our landing page or offer and did nothing, there are 97 of them, which means 97 per cent of your effort or budget is wasted if you now do nothing.

Why does remarketing convert better than cold traffic?

Because cold traffic from ads or social media will never convert anywhere near as well as people who have been exposed to your offer before. One of the golden rules of marketing is that you need seven touch points with somebody before they will trust you, before you have warmed them up and got them further down the funnel.

This is the front end of your funnel, this is top of funnel traffic. What we want to do is remarket to the people who do not go through. That is what remarketing is. We need to say, you were interested, you were interested to some extent, so why did you not buy?

How do you chain the follow-up ads together?

You build a second audience out of the people who saw ad one and took no action, and you show them ad two. Somebody comes from a YouTube ad, they land on the landing page, and they disappear straight away. We can build an audience for another ad. So you saw ad one, you came here, you took no action, and now you see ad two.

We could show the person who saw us on YouTube, came here and did nothing, a Facebook ad, because we would exclude the people who converted. Or we could show them another YouTube ad. So this can be YouTube ad one, this one is YouTube ad two, this one is YouTube ad three. You could even have an action where the people who skip this ad see that ad.

All of this time we are trying to get people back to the landing page or the order page. Somebody who has seen this ad and come onto this page and taken no action, we will show them a different piece of content. Maybe a testimonial, some more education around the product, a longer story, and we try to get them to watch. If they take no action there, we could show them a further piece of content. All of this time we are building up trust.

What is wrong with judging a campaign on return on ad spend?

Return on ad spend can look wonderful and still be a loss, because it takes no account of your margin. People talk about return on ad spend all the time. Normally they are saying, I put an ad out, I landed them here, I got them to there, and I got 2x, 3x, 4x my ad spend. I put a thousand pounds in and I got four thousand pounds out.

That sounds great, until you realise that maybe it is a product you only make fifteen per cent margin on, and you actually made a loss in that scenario. You spent a thousand on this side to get the traffic and you got four thousand out. But if you are on fifteen per cent margin, that is fifteen per cent of four thousand, which off the top of my head is 600. So you spent a thousand to get 600 profit, which does not work in anybody's books.

What you should be doing is going after the 97 per cent of your traffic who were interested. It is these loops, these remarketing pieces, where we continually stay in touch with people.

How cheap is remarketing compared with cold traffic?

It is close to free by comparison. Let me drop a Google ad on here and call this Google display remarketing. In this scenario, where you get a thousand people on the left hand side, 97 per cent of them do nothing, because we are only getting two or three per cent through the funnel.

I will hear people cheering out going, no, I get 20 or 30. Most offers do not achieve those sort of numbers to a sale. Very rare. But whatever figure you have got, there is a good percentage of it wasted here.

So if we get a thousand people, 970 of them do not take action, and we remarket to them. We can send that to these people all day long, every day. We can hassle them for the following two, three, four weeks. Forever if we choose, well, not forever, but for 540 days using Google. It obviously depends on your offer how often you would remarket to these people. When we hit them with remarketing ads, maybe with offers, with different collateral, different video, different images, we are trying to get people back.

I have seen ads at the top produce a cost of acquisition of 30, 40, 50 or 100 to get people here. I have seen ads in the remarketing loop go from here to here for pence. So any of you who are not running remarketing loops absolutely must. It is essential. You have to build this onto the back of your campaigns.

Does anyone get a sale on the first click?

No. That is what I call rule 1-1-1: one ad, one click, one purchase. It does not exist. Anyone who has got rule 1-1-1 to work out there, please do show it to me, I will be amazed.

So we are all wasting traffic. Everybody is wasting traffic, because we are all paying for traffic from Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, whatever traffic source you want to imagine at the top of your funnel. It is never as efficient as the remarketing loops you will put on to hit the people who have taken action.

You might have a video embedded on the page, what you would call a VSL, a video sales letter. The people who land there and watch that video for more than a certain amount could get this ad or that ad.

What if you are not spending on ads at all?

You can still build remarketing loops on top of the traffic you already have. For those of you watching who do not necessarily want to get into spending a lot of money on the left hand side, if you have already got traffic to your landing pages from organic search, from Google organic or from your social media channels, set up your remarketing loops. Set up some videos to go out to your clients or to your landers, and it will massively improve the back end.

What kind of remarketing video actually works?

Something that answers a question your customers did not know the answer to, shown only to people who have already been on your site. One of the amazing tactics we are using at the moment for clients is a remarketing loop like this. Imagine a scenario where your clients do not know that you are open from 7am till 7pm. You could make a video that shows your customer service team answering calls: did you know we are open from seven till seven every day of the week? Oh, I did not know that. Wow, that builds trust, I like this company.

Or here is an example of one of our testimonials from somebody who bought our product three weeks ago and has had an amazing experience, but only shown to people who have already been on the site.

Hopefully you can see how incredibly powerful remarketing can be. I think a lot of people do not know how to set this up, and a lot of people are lazy. You can set it up in the basic way I have shown here. If you want to get into really complicated patterns, you can show particular videos to people who have been on particular pages. People who have gone to the cart page of your website and then fallen off could even get a video that said, hey Simon, you were on our cart last night, why did you not order? If you wanted to go down that route, you could.

The opportunities are endless, and the advice is that you absolutely must set up your remarketing loops. As always, if you have got questions, send them into the group and I will gladly help you out and help you build them. Anybody who wants information on Funnelytics, there is a separate section in the course. Hopefully that has been a really useful insight into why you need remarketing loops with your YouTube ads.