Dynamic Retargeting For Ecommerce Websites
Dynamic Retargeting For Ecommerce Websites
A few months ago, we published an article on remarketing, and how it enables businesses to remain at the forefront of visitors’ minds after they have left a website. Dynamic retargeting, also known as ‘dynamic remarketing’, is a similar ad strategy which is particularly effective to support ecommerce sites.
How does it work?
Remarketing is a fantastic feature serving a specific section of a targeted audience with ads relevant to their browsing history. However, those ads are static - i.e. the same content will be displayed to every person in your target group – and this ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach will inevitably be somewhat hit and miss, although it definitely is a useful strategy. BUT there is something even better on offer: dynamic retargeting.
In a bid to keep up with successful retargeting platforms like Adroll, Retargeter and Mediaforge, Google has rolled out dynamic retargeting to Adwords’ clients with Google Merchant feeds.
As the name suggests, dynamic retargeting adapts ads to each visitor, personalising what is displayed to specific products or content they viewed on your site. It does so by creating ads on the fly using product images from businesses’ Google Merchant feed and Google’s prediction algorithm on visitors’ most likely behaviour. Relevant products and messages are shown to users, including the very products they viewed and related products.
This ensures that your ad is absolutely relevant to every person, and studies have shown that it increases conversion rates dramatically: the general result being a 200% to 300% increase in click rates for dynamic retargeting vs static ads.
In its testing phase, Google also reported that an American retailer of outdoor gear and clothing which piloted the scheme saw its click-through rate double and its conversion rate increase five times while a merchandising company saw its conversion rates rise by 230% and its cost of sale fall by 30%. Now, that’s not bad at all!
More specifically
When you set up a dynamic retargeting campaign, Google creates an ‘All visitors’ list, and automatically generates from it four subcategories of site visitors to whom will be served different dynamic ads accordingly:
General visitors are people who visited your website without viewing any specific products. They will see a more general ad displaying your most popular products.
Product viewers are people who visited specific product pages on your site but didn’t add them to the shopping basket. Their dynamic ad will show these products as well as recommended products.
Shopping basket abandoners went as far as adding products to the shopping basket but left your website without completing the purchase. Those customers may be nearing the end of their research phase and shortlisting products for a last comparison before making a decision, and dynamic advertising will make sure that they don’t forget about you. It will also provide a direct hyperlink to take them back directly to the product they were interested in, giving you an edge over competitors who aren’t using dynamic retargeting.
Recurring customers are the most profitable, as they cost four times less than new customers. Past buyers already know your products and customer service so if they have had a positive experience, they are more likely to favour you over another supplier. To them, dynamic ads will show products related to past purchases, popular items and items commonly bought together.
Once visitors are added to one of those categories, the remarketing tag associates them with the product page ID. AdWords creates an ad on the fly by pulling the product image, name, and price associated with the page ID from your Google Merchant Center account and there you go, you have a highly effective ad which will keep influencing visitors after they have left your website.
What you need to get started
First of all, you will need to create a Google Merchant Center account and then, you need to create a feed including all your products and their details, such as unique ID, retail price, image, etc... This information is what will be pulled by Google to populate dynamic ads. If you’re a retailer, you will upload your product feed to the Google Merchant Center, if not through the Business data section of your shared library.
If you are just starting out using dynamic remarketing tags, you will need to add them to all the pages of your website – you will be able to customise the parameters to your products. These tags can be found in the Audiences section of your Shared library, and they are used by Google to put visitors into one of the categories described previously and associate them with the unique ID of the products they viewed.
If you already have remarketing tags on your website, you will just have to add AdWords’ remarketing tags with custom parameters.You will most likely be required to make some adjustments to your website's code, refer to Google Developer Resources for guidance in this process.
More reasons to love dynamic remarketing
If the chance of doubling or tripling your conversion rates isn’t reason enough to make a convert out of you, consider the following:
Remarketing is scalable and cumulative, i.e. you can start with your bestselling products for example and gradually extend it to your whole inventory. The more products you add, the more opportunity for pairing feeds.
It is flexible. You can create feeds using formats such as .csv, .tsv, .xls, or .xlsx documents and Google will crawl these and intelligently stop displaying ads when stock levels are low, and also include sales promotions where specified.
AdWords will also predict which layout will perform best for each person and where the dynamic ad should be placed for maximum effectiveness depending on the device it is viewed on.
Dynamic remarketing is a relatively low-cost digital marketing strategy which yields impressive results. If you would like to find out more, contact This Side Up on 09 360 2299 or info@thissideup.co.nz.