Why PPC Re-Marketing is a Direct Marketer’s Dream

Last week I attended a really interesting webinar where David Szetela talked about increasing conversions through PPC re-marketing. If you haven’t already (and you should), you can see it here.

I love listening to Dave because when I do, it always spurs me into action (the first time I heard him speak was at SearchFest, on the topic of PPC Sitelinks). So I really shouldn’t have been surprised that he provided yet another lightbulb moment for me, but this time on the subject of re-marketing.

What’s funny is that the concept behind it is so straightforward, and not at all new. If someone doesn’t convert the first time, then you go back and try to get them to buy again and again, tailoring your message each time. Direct marketers (the smart ones, at least!) have been doing it for decades. This is why in the first ten minutes of listening to the webinar, I literally felt like slapping myself.

With PPC re-marketing you can identify different visitor scenarios. As an example, maybe the visitor just came to your site but didn’t really take any action. Or maybe they abandoned their cart part way through the shopping process. Maybe the person did go onto buy, but you feel like there are cross-sell opportunities to be had.

PPC re-marketing lets you arrange these different scenarios into lists so that you can then tailor your ad messaging across the Google network to these different groups of people, to help re-assure and convince them to take that final purchasing step. It’s like a direct marketer’s dream. It’s direct marketing on steroids.

As with the PPC Sitelinks tests I carried out, I’ll definitely be putting re-marketing into action on the E-commerce side and will report back on findings in a later post.

If you are already using re-marketing, I would love to hear your thoughts on it and how it has worked out for you.