Part VI: “R” is for retargeting.
(In case you missed it: Part I: L Is For List-Building and Part II: I Is For Interns and Part III: M Is For Merchandise and Part IV: B Is For Branding and Part V: E Is For Event Promotion.)
Retargeting? What’s that? Let’s back up here a moment so the uninitiated among you can get your bearings.
FORESHADOWING ALERT: This section contains a catch, and then another catch. Prepare yourself!
Retargeting – also known as “remarketing” – is, in layman’s terms, the act of following people around the Internet with your ads after they’ve visited your site. You’re probably quite familiar with retargeting even if you don’t necessarily know it by name.
Has this ever happened to you? You’re hanging out on Amazon for a while one day, just browsin’, maybe checking out one of those fancy Ninja blenders (Have you seen those things? They’re awesome. I think mine could shred an empty beer can into in a fine powder.). For whatever reason, you are insufficiently impressed by the Ninja (your loss, pal), and you leave Amazon.com without buying one. But a few days later, when you’re back at your computer browsing other websites, you start noticing Amazon ads for that same exact blender popping up all over the Internet, wherever you go.
The Ninja is following you. It’s now a sentient kitchen robot that won’t stop its pursuit of you until you agree to let it into your home.
OK, not really. But it’s not an accident. It’s retargeting.
Retargeting is the toast of the online advertising industry these days, and understandably so. Many studies have shown that most people don’t buy (or donate, or fill out forms, or whatever it is you want them to do) on the first exposure to your website or ad. The more exposures they have to your ad, the more likely they are to act. So who wouldn’t like a second, or third, or eighth or ninth crack at that potential customer once they’ve left the site and decided not to buy something, or do something that you wanted them to do?
Remarketing lets you “hold on” to that website visitor and continue showing them ads longer than you could’ve done before, days, weeks or even months after they’ve visited your website.
It’s a marketer’s dream. And like many marketers’ dreams, it was a little bit creepy for consumers at the outset – a little Big Brother-ish for some people’s tastes. But retargeting has been around for many years, and people are accustomed to it. File it under the same category as when I walk into Walgreens and my phone vibrates in my pocket to show me the current weekly ad. Like most advertising innovations of the digital age, it’s creepy at first, but if it’s ultimately helpful, people accept it.
Another element of remarketing that makes it so attractive is the price tag: It’s extremely cheap. You might be wondering how that’s possible; one would naturally think that such an extremely targeted audience – people who have showed interest in your organization by visiting your website – would command a serious premium. But the opposite is true. Understanding why takes a little explanation, but stay with me. It’s not too complicated, and it’s totally worth understanding!
When you visit a website, that website drops a “cookie” on your computer. Cookies are old news on the Internet; they keep track of your browsing history. So you’re visiting Amazon.com, let’s say, and Amazon “drops” a cookie on your website. (I think they called it that because, well, everyone loves cookies. If they called it a “Brussels sprout,” people might’ve resisted it more.) The cookie knows exactly what pages of Amazon’s website you’ve visited.
At the same time, Amazon is buying ad space on other websites. Lots of them. For the purposes of this explanation, we’re going to use CNN.com. So when you’re visiting CNN.com, the CNN website will look for an Amazon cookie on your computer before it decides what ads it will show alongside the news story you’re about to read. And if the CNN site checks your computer and does indeed find an Amazon cookie, CNN.com will show you an ad for that fine Ninja blender you were checking out at Amazon just a short time ago.
That’s a massively oversimplified explanation of retargeting, but I’m keeping it simple so that you understand the next part. Remember a few sentences ago when I said that remarketing ads target only people who are previous visitors to your site? Well, as you can imagine, the people who have visited your organization’s website are a very, very, VERY small fraction of the vast expanse of the internet-using public that can be targeted with ads.
So let’s think about CNN again for a second. Prior to the advent of retargeting, you could, in theory, try to follow your previous website visitors around with ads, namely the ones who went on to visit CNN.com. But to do so, you’d have to pay the market rate for advertising on CNN’s website, competing with all other advertisers worldwide who also want to advertise on CNN, which makes their ad rates astronomical. And of course, you’d have to cross your fingers and say a little prayer that a lot of your previous website visitors actually happened to be visiting CNN.com after visiting your site.
This, of course, is absurd and would sink you into bankruptcy immediately. You’d have to outbid all other advertisers across the globe for that ad space on CNN.com – and oh, by the way, only a few dozen of your site visitors actually made it over to CNN.com anyhow, so 99.99999% of the people you spent that kajillion dollars advertising to, they didn’t know who the heck you were and thus didn’t click on your ads. But you’re bankrupt nonetheless, because guess what? If you were buying ads directly from CNN, it’s not like Google, where impressions are free and you pay only when people click on your ads. Nope. You pay per impression. No free impressions here. And of course, when those tens of millions of worldwide visitors flow into CNN.com, 99.9999% of whom don’t know who your nonprofit is and have no interest in clicking on your ads, you still rack up the advertising charges.
Booooo.
Lather, rinse and repeat the above paragraph for every other high-dollar website that your site visitors may frequent: The New York Times, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc.
Not feasible, to say the least.
But now, enter retargeting. Retargeting allows you to say, “Yes, I absolutely want to advertise on CNN.com, NYTimes.com, Yahoo.com, LinkedIn.com and Reddit.com. All of ‘em. But I only want my ad to appear on those websites when they’re being looked at by someone who’s recently visited my organization’s website.”
Now, that’s a whole different kettle of fish. A horse of a different color. Or whatever phrase your grandpa taught you about something that’s entirely different from the previous thing being discussed.
So, here’s our situation now: While the Times and CNN and Yahoo and all those other websites put together have tens or hundreds of millions of monthly visitors, we automatically get to eliminate the 99.9999% of them who are unfamiliar with your organization.
Poof. They’re gone. Retargeting waves a giant, ultrapowerful magnet over the top of the Texas-size haystack of internet traffic, sucks up all of your previous site visitors, throws them into a retargeting “list” and lets you advertise only to them, wherever they go – even those big, popular websites.
And that makes it extremely cheap to advertise to them. Why? Simple: Because, relatively speaking, there’s not very many of them. Heck, advertising gets expensive only when you’re showing it to a lot of people. Let’s say you’ve got a retargeting list of 5,000 previous site visitors that you’d like to continue advertising to on other sites. In advertising terms, 5,000 visitors is peanuts. Using retargeting campaigns, you can get in front of 5,000 people for around $5 a day.
OK, I know you’re impatiently waiting to find out what the catches are, and I’m about to tell you the first one. Promise me you won’t be mad. (I trust that you nodded, however cautiously.)
Catch 1: You can’t use retargeting in an Ad Grants account.
I know, I know! You’re thinking, “Then why on earth did you spend the last few pages explaining how to use retargeting if we can’t use it in our Ad Grants account?” And it’s true: Ad Grants accounts can be used only for search advertising, which again means you can target people only by the phrases they search for on Google, not whether they’ve been to your website before or any other way.
But never say die, because …
Catch 2: You can still use retargeting – out of a separate, paid AdWords account.
Google strictly prohibits its advertisers from using multiple AdWords accounts to advertise their products and services, but one group of advertisers enjoys an exemption from that rule: nonprofits with Ad Grants accounts. Nonprofits are allowed (and encouraged!) to open a second, paid account. This makes sense: Google loves revenue, and just because it’s given you a free Ad Grants account doesn’t mean it wouldn’t love for you to spend some of your extra cash there, too.
And you should – even if it’s just for retargeting. Retargeting is an extremely cheap way to get *back* in front of all those free visitors that your Ad Grants account has given you, over and over and over again.
Of all the tips in this book, this is probably the most secret-weapon-ish that we have to offer (which is why I spent all that hot air explaining retargeting before; it’s worth going the extra mile to get the big benefits of doing what the other guy won’t). Almost no one does this, and I’ve never heard or seen the advice given elsewhere. It truly is your clickbait-style “TRANSFORM YOUR NONPROFIT’S ADVERTISING WITH THIS ONE SECRET TRICK!” tactic.
Only a handful of nonprofits that we at StraightForward have ever worked with have operated a second account at all, usually due to budget constraints or the fact that they can’t find a way to spend the $10,000 a month they’ve been given, let alone more. Those that have employed paid accounts have usually been very well-funded organizations whose operations much resemble those of for-profit businesses, and they’ve used those accounts for even more high-dollar search advertising.
But opening a paid account for remarketing is affordable for all nonprofits, regardless of size or budget. This isn’t an exaggeration: If you can spend one dollar per day on a remarketing campaign, it’s money well spent. For one stinking dollar, you can get your ads back in front of about 1,000 previous visitors and re-engage them with your organization.
Let’s do an easy step-by-step here of how you can use a paid retargeting account hand in hand with an Ad Grants account:
- Open a paid AdWords account. (Just open it. You don’t have to spend any money yet.)
- From the paid account, copy the Google-provided “remarketing code” and place it on every page of your website.
- Switch gears for a sec and hop over to your Ad Grants account. Get it firing on all cylinders, spending the full $329 each day, either via learning and implementing all the priceless strategies and tactics you’ll learn in this book or by hiring an agency that knows all this stuff.
- Due to your flawless execution of item 3 above, you’re now sending hundreds of new visitors to your site each day. While that happens – because you dutifully placed your remarketing code, per item 2 – your paid account is automatically tracking and stockpiling each of those new visitors in a remarketing list for you to use for advertising purposes at a later date. By the time you pay your next electric bill, this list should contain thousands of people.
- Start a retargeting campaign from your paid account targeting your fresh new list of recent site visitors and pull them back into your website for additional engagement. Set your campaign to spend no more than $5 a day if you want a small, low-risk test.
It really is that easy!
There you have it: Retargeting lets you leverage all the free traffic you get from your Ad Grants account in order to bring the most interested people back to your website over and over again – for pennies on the dollar.