dpatel

M Posted 11 years 2 months ago

t 9 min read

In this third and final installment of our series on retargeting campaigns, we go over best practices and the typical pitfalls encountered by marketers that leverage this type of advertising strategy.  

If you haven’t yet read Parts 1 and 2 of our retargeting series, we encourage you to do so. In the first installment, we discussed what retargeting is and how it works. In the second, we explored more advanced techniques for segmenting your audience according to user behavior. Now we’ll get into more specifics on how to refine retargeting campaigns using best practices and avoiding common pitfalls.

Best Practices for Retargeting Campaigns: A 7-Point Checklist

1. Refine your audience segments. Separate your site visitors according to what they did or did not purchase. For those who purchased a specific item, consider re-targeting them with a complementary product. When appropriate, exclude visitors who’ve converted.

2. Set a limit on how often a segment is retargeted. Also closely related to No. 1 is setting a limit on how often a site visitor is retargeted. For instance, Google AdWords allows you to limit the number of times a user is exposed to your brand’s display ad per day, week or month.

3. Promote an offer specific to the site page visited. Did potential customers visit a particular page without converting? Promote a sale or other incentive to this segment from that page’s content.

4. Be sure to include a clear call to action (CTA). Make sure you’ve defined the action you want the person to take depending on where they’re at in the sales funnel. For instance, a CTA for those at the top of the sales funnel may be “learn more,” while a CTA for those at the low end may be “buy now” or “request a demo.”

5. Segment by geographic location. If you have a wide range of products or services, think carefully about what might appeal to your different audiences. For example, what appeals to visitors residing in warmer climates may not be appropriate for those in colder climates at any given time of year.

6. Be mindful of time relevance. Depending on how short your sales cycle is, time-sensitive retargeting campaigns require a sense of urgency. This is true of sales events, certain entertainment events and other periodic or one-time events.

7. Use multiple creative to keep display ads fresh. This serves to keep retargeting campaigns from getting stale by avoiding overexposure to any one or two display ads.

Retargeting Campaigns Pitfalls: 5 Common Errors

A counterpart to the seven best practices is a checklist of five common pitfalls:

1. Poor targeting and segmentation, which leads to wasted time, resources and money.
2. Failing to understand user behavior, especially around intent and the decision-making process throughout the entire buying journey.
3. Featuring offers and/or landing pages of marginal relevance to key business goals.
4. Not pausing or stopping low-performing ads.
5. Relying too much on it and neglecting other marketing initiatives that help bring visitors in at the top of the funnel (like organic search).

Retargeting campaigns help you put the right offer in front of the right visitor at the right time. Start small and run some tests before you go all in. You’ll find there’s quite a bit that goes into making a campaign run smoothly from the set up to ad creative, management, optimization and tracking. With the best practices outlined in our series, you’re armed with a few ideas that can get you on the path to a higher conversion rate and making good use of the traffic you’ve sent to your website through other marketing channels.

Ryan Richards

M Posted 11 years 2 months ago

t 9 min read

The SEO landscape is always changing – algorithm updates, a shifting competitive landscape – but one thing remains consistent: the need for data-informed keyword research. When done properly, keyword research can expand keywords and produce insights into your market, your competitors’ performance and demand for your product or service.

How we start keyword research and expand keywords at BrightEdge

When one of our customers initially joins BrightEdge, they go through a six-week Onboarding Process in order to “learn the BrightEdge platform, identify goals and work through an Ignite project.” On occasion one of our partners will start Onboarding with a small number of keywords that they want to track. While this is a fine way to start, one of the jobs of the Customer Success team is to build out that initial set of keywords and maximize feature usage and value, so they are on the path to SEO success. Enter BrightEdge’s Data Cube and Striking-Distance Project.

Utilizing the industry’s largest data set to expand keywords and drive keyword research

Launched in March of 2014, the Data Cube “consists of billions of pieces of data, including content, rich media, search terms, and social signals - all at Internet scale - to provide companies with the insights they need to make strategic business decisions.” If you don’t know where to start with keyword research, our recommendation is to always start with the Data Cube. You can focus at the macro-domain level, at the keyword-level or even with one of your category pages. Typically, we will start with a Striking-Distance Project, which in effect looks for low-hanging fruit or keywords within “striking distance” of the first 5 rank positions.

Here’s how it works

First, let’s take into consideration your business objectives. For example, let’s say you want to focus on a category of your site that receives a moderate amount of traffic and has seen increased competition lately. In that case, you would simply enter the URL into the Data Cube and click “Search”.

You will then have the option to drill down into BrightEdge’s vast repository of keywords that are driving users to your category page and all of the pages nested underneath it.

However, since the Data Cube contains such a large data set, some filtering is usually in order. The best place to start is usually filtering out branded terms; this allows you to focus on the higher-priority, non-branded terms that your competition is also targeting. The next step is to focus on keywords that fall within a certain a range, for example, between positions 5 and 20 (i.e., below the fold on page 1 and to the end of the second page). Next, ensure that you’re only focusing on keywords with a sufficient amount of Search Volume. So the last filter is “Search Volume Greater than 1000”.

For a detailed walkthrough on determining the breadth and scope of your keyword strategy, check out our How Many SEO Keywords Should I Manage? video tutorial

This should provide you with the beginning of a short (or, rather long) list of keywords to sift through for relevance and immediately start tracking. Thankfully, that’s as easy as clicking the checkbox on the left of the keyword, and adding it to a keyword group.

Summing it up

At BrightEdge, the Striking Distance Project is a staple of our partners’ success. Utilizing the Data Cube and the simple workflow built into the platform, our partners are able to quickly cut down the amount of time it would take to do a similar project without BrightEdge. In fact, if you calculate the time it would take to complete each of the steps to expand keywords: keyword research (on average, 5-10 hours), optimize your site (on average, 5 hours) and report on progress (on average, 10 hours), with BrightEdge this project for marketing efforts can be done in half the time or less!

Our partners have had great success with the Striking Distance Project for a number or reasons. First, it is the perfect way to become familiar with the platform and the easy-to-use workflow our product and engineering teams have built. Second, by optimizing for keywords that your site is already ranking well for, you can see results much faster than you would by focusing on keywords that are ranking on pages 3 and beyond. Finally, it’s common knowledge that the first five results in Google have the highest click-through rate. By optimizing keywords and pages you are already ranking well for, you will increase your ability to rank better in Google, thereby increasing traffic, conversions and revenue.

When this occurs, the Customer Success team at BrightEdge has fulfilled its task of making our partners look like “rock stars” in their organization while at the same time saving them time. From a Customer Success perspective, that’s a win-win and why we come to work every day.