25 Aug 10 Remarketing with Google Adwords

Ever notice certain ads that seem to follow you around wherever you go? Just recently, I’ve been seeing aweber ads on the Google Display Network (formerly known as the Content Network) Network sites I visit, and it’s been frequent enough that I stopped to pay attention. Good job to whoever manages SEM and media buys at aweber.

How are companies like Aweber doing this?

It’s called remarketing or retargeting and it allows you to tag and cookie people who hit a particular page or site. Later on, you can identify these people as they surf around the web and message them with precision.

Time For A Picture

Use Remarketing To Reach People Who Didn't Convert

In the diagram to the left, the blue+green equals everyone who visited your landing page, let’s call it LP X.

To tag these people you just need to put your tagging script on your landing page and everyone who hits it will get the “Everyone Who Saw LP X” Cookie.

The people in the green made you money or converted for you, they get tagged with the “Thank You Please Come Again” Cookie, and you would put this on your thank-you/conversion page.

Now without remarketing the vast majority of the people who landed on your page would be gone forever, but now you can virtually follow them around the web with reminders and special offer to get them to come back. The messaging is totally up to you. I’ve seen a few aggressive ads that basically say, “Hey we know who you are come back”. It definitely grabbed my attention because it was one of the first times I’d seen remarketing in action. Of course this is not the only way you can use remarketing, there are many other creative ways to tag your visitors.

Here are more ideas for you to consider

Facebook advertising gives you access to traffic based on some pretty precise demographic options. One thing that Facebook banned a while ago was calling out people based on certain aspects of their demographic. This tactic worked very well for conversions and CTR. Now with remarketing and a little scripting you can create ads on facebook and tag these people into very specific demographic buckets. There more you can do with this idea that will basically let you target the masses more precisely but that’s not the kind of conversation I’d like to have on a blog
Easy Up-sells. You know that people who buy X are more likely to buy Y. Just create a “Buyers of X” group and use remarketing to pitch Product Y to them.

How do you get started?

To Start Experimenting with Remarketing on Google Adwords, Just Click The Audiences Tab.

I hope I’ve got you excited enough to think about ways you can use remarketing in your business. There are lots of companies out there that will allow you to run remarketing campaigns, but I recommend you start with Google Adwords and the Google Display Network because most of you reading this already have an adwords account, and can get started right away without having to apply for a new account with 3rd parties etc etc.

I Would Have Made You a Quick Getting Started Video, but Google Already Beat Me To It

Finally, to read more in-depth information on how remarketing works on Adwords check out this resource page on Interest-Based Advertising.

Tags: Adwords, Google Content Network, Google Display Network, Interest-Based Advertising, Media Buying, PPC, Remarketing, Retargeting

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18 Aug 10 Using Clickbank SocialPromote For Market Research

In this video, I talk about Clickbank’s new SocialPromote and how you can use Facebook’s Activity Feed Social Plugin for quick market research.
Here’s a Live Preview Of The SocialPromote Activity Feed

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31 May 07 GDD07: Google Developer Day 2007 Summary

I just spent today attending Google’s Developer Day. I’m a bit worn out due to the fact that I was up late list night reading up on Google Gears. I wanted to have a better understanding of this newly released product before going to GDD07. This was probably a bad idea since it contributed to my being late for the event today. For a start I went to the wrong convention center, I’m new here and thought there was only one convention center in the area. Since I knew where it was, I didn’t plug in the address into Google maps or anything. I managed to get in around lunch time so I missed the keynote and first set of sessions.

The first session I chose to attend was the Google Gears Fireside Chat. I won’t go into details about what was covered because there’s a great write up over here. Most, if not all, the sessions were streamed live on the web. A lot of them are also posted on YouTube. I feel that the ability to take web apps offline is something that’s much needed, and it will be interesting to see how other developers make use of this. There’s already support from Adobe, Firefox, and the Dojo team. This is great news for developers since any of these companies could probably have divided the field by creating their own implementation.

I was also able to spend quite a bit of time talking with on of the members of the Google Adwords API team. Although they were not prominently featured at the even, they did have a demo center setup. I asked if there was a chance Google would hold an adwords developer day, from my understanding there isn’t one in to works.

I missed one of the sessions I had planned on attending because I struck up a conversation with Jeff Ragusa about the Google Search Appliance and Google’s push into on the Enterprise. I feel there a a big opportunity in that space and I was able to confirm that during my conversation. I’ll be keeping a close eye on what’s going on in this area, as I feel there’s a lot of cool stuff on the way.

At the end of the day’s sessions I finally got to the part I had been looking forward to for some weeks. A chance to see and hang out at the famous Googleplex. I took a few pictures on my cell phone and will try post them up tomorrow I’m too tired to write any more.

Filed in Google, Web Development with 1 Comment

21 May 07 Demographic Targeting With AdCenter and AdWords

A while ago I attended a webcast hosted by the team over at adCenter. The main focus of the webcast was to showcase some of the amazing tools marketers now have available for PPC advertising.

I’ve always known that people in different demographic groups respond differently to certain offers, but up till now it seemed like the only way to know would be to collect your own data by surveying your traffic. This can often be expensive and time consuming.

During the webcast, I discovered that adcenter gives you the ability to run a demographics report. This will show you information such as impressions and CTR broken down by age group, gender and even geographic location. With this information you can then create campaigns targeted at the demographic groups that’s converting the best.

Google has a similar feature that only works on the content network, so in order to take advantage of it, you’ll have to set up a site targeted campaign. I imagine that as google collects more and more information from its users especially via iGoogle, it will be able to offer this feature for the search network as long as the searcher is logged in.

The screenshot below show what’s currently available in adwords