Setting up Boomerang Traffic
Needless to say, not everyone who comes to your site will convert on the first visit
in fact, for most sites, only 2 percent of web traffic converts on the first visit. So
how do you get the other 98 percent to “boomerang” and come back to your site?
You do it through a strategy known as ad retargeting.
For instance, say that you go to the online shoe and clothing store Zappos. You
look at a pair of shoes and then leave Zappos without buying. Next you visit the
Huffington Post to read an article and notice an ad for the same pair of shoes that
you were just considering on Zappos.com. You are being retargeted. In this sec-
tion, we go into more detail about what retargeting is and how to employ it in the
following sections.
Defining ad retargeting
After people have visited your site, sales page, or social media page, you can safely
assume that they’re interested in learning more. Even if they left without buying,
you can also assume that they didn’t say no; they just didn’t have time to take
action right then or needed more time to think about your offer. To encourage
people to return to your site (like a boomerang), you use the paid traffic strategy
of retargeting.
The goal of retargeting (sometimes called remarketing) is to bring people back to
your site and get them one step closer to converting. You do this by serving former
visitors ads based on their prior engagement with your site. With retargeting, you
don’t try to change prior visitors’ minds; rather, you remind them about your offer.
Although other forms of retargeting exist, we focus on the most frequently used:
site-based retargeting. Site-based retargeting uses tracking pixels and cookies to
serve your ad to previous site visitors, as we explain in the next section.
Setting cookies and pixels
A tracking pixel (simply referred to as a pixel) is a piece of code that you place on
your website to trigger a cookie, which is the text file that stores information about
the user’s visit to your site. The cookie uses a simple JavaScript code and allows ad
networks and traffic platforms to identify users when they visit another site, and
then serves them targeted ads based on your preferences as an advertiser. Simply
put, the tracking pixel delivers information to a server, and the cookie stores
information in a user’s browser so that the server can read it again later. The
cookie stores the site visit but does not store any sensitive information, such as
the site visitor’s name, address, or any information that might personally identify
the visitor.
When people come to your site, a cookie is placed, and eventually, users leave and
visit other sites. The cookie lets your retargeting platform, such as Facebook or
Google, know when one of these “cookied” visitors goes to a site where retarget-
ing ads can be shown. If ad space is available, your retargeting ad may be shown.
This entire process is automated and occurs within a fraction of a second.
When done right, retargeting allows you to make relevant offers to specific audi-
ences, and the more specific and relevant the offer, the more likely the offer is to
resonate with your audience and lead to a conversion. The next section tells you
how to create specific retargeting offers.
Segmenting with content
The biggest mistake that a digital marketer can make with retargeting campaigns
is to assume that all visitors are alike and show every visitor the same ad. The key
to successful retargeting is audience segmentation (we also discuss content
segmentation in Chapter 4). Failing to segment your visitors can lead to poor
campaign results and the waste of many of your impressions (the views on your
ads) and ad spend. For instance, you wouldn’t want to retarget a user who has
viewed vegan recipes with a banner ad for a steakhouse restaurant.
When you segment your audiences, you can identify and understand their intent.
Segmentation allows you to retarget and send offers based on a person’s interests,
thereby personalizing the retargeting experience and making the ad that much
more compelling.
To segment your audience, examine your website or blog and divide its content
into like categories or topics. For example, a food blog might separate its content
by types of lifestyles such as vegan, gluten-free, and vegetarian. When people
visit content about vegetarian food, they are showing interest in vegetarian food.
Do you have an offer that is relevant to a vegetarian? If so, retarget those that visit
your vegetarian content with that relevant and specific offer.
Troubleshooting Paid Traffic Campaigns
After you’ve set up a paid traffic campaign, let it run for three to five days so that
you can start collecting data. When that time is up, you should assess and trouble-
shoot your campaign. Although you’re looking for problems or why goals aren’t
being met, troubleshooting doesn’t necessarily mean that something is wrong
with the campaign. The goal of troubleshooting a campaign is to fix any problems
that may have arisen since its launch, but also to look for ways to optimize the
campaign and possibly, if justifiable, to scale the campaign.
We examine four areas to focus on and the steps to take when troubleshooting a
paid traffic campaign, as follows:
» The offer
» The targeting
» The ad copy and creative
» The ad’s congruency
With paid traffic, a lot of trial and error is involved in a campaign, even if you’ve
done everything right. At our company, for example, for every ten paid campaigns
that we run, only one to two break even or turn a profit. But that doesn’t mean that
you should throw away an underperforming campaign and start all over. With some
digging, you can find what’s holding back the campaign and get it back on track.
Make sure to examine each of the following areas one at a time so that you can
isolate the specific issue of your campaign. If you try to assess all the areas at one
time, you won’t understand the root cause or what ultimately fixed your cam-
paign, so you may end up facing the same problem in the future. Implement one
step, run your ad for an additional five days and collect more data, and then move
on to the next steps if necessary.
Read on for more details about troubleshooting each of these areas.
Strengthening your offer
The first aspect to focus on when your campaign isn’t performing as expected is
your offer. Ask yourself: Do people want what you’re selling? If you don’t offer
something that your market actually wants or needs, you won’t get conversions.
To see whether your offer is appealing, answer these three questions:
» Are you solving a problem for a specific group of people?
» Does a specific need exist for what you’re offering?
» Are you offering your market value?
If your answer is “No” to any of these questions, you’ve already found your
problem.
No matter how compelling your landing page copy is or how attention grabbing
your image may be, the best marketing campaign in the world can’t solve an offer
issue. This is why your offer is so crucial and is the key to the success or failure of
any marketing campaign. A poorly executed marketing campaign with a great
offer usually outperforms a great marketing campaign with a poor offer. If a poor
offer is your problem, you need to come up with a new and better offer before you
run traffic to it. See Chapter 3 for more on crafting winning offers.
Tweaking your targeting
Another big culprit of a struggling ad campaign is your targeting. If you’ve con-
cluded that your offer isn’t the problem and have proof to back that up, examine
whether you’re targeting the right people. Regardless of whether you have the best
offer and marketing message, putting your offer in front of the wrong audience
means that your campaign will fail. Are you targeting people who will actually buy?
The biggest targeting mistake you can make is to go too broad in fear of missing
out on potential prospects. When starting your campaign, you want your market
to be as specific as possible. If you’re in doubt about the size of the audience
you’re targeting, go a bit smaller. Then, if the campaign meets or exceeds expec-
tations for this smaller audience, you can scale it and make your audience a little
broader.
If you believe that your targeting is off, reassess your customer avatar. You might
have a misconception of your audience. Go back and make sure that you’re being
specific enough and that your information on your audience is correct.
Another big issue that can impede your targeting is to advertise on the wrong
traffic platform. You might be placing ads on a platform where your market
doesn’t hang out online. Return to the “Choosing the Right Traffic Platform”
section, earlier in this chapter, to help make sure that you’re putting your ad on a
platform where your market is active.
Scrutinizing your ad copy and creative
After confirming that your offer is enticing and you’re putting your offer in front
of the right people, examine your marketing message. The ad copy and the cre-
ative (the image) are the segue between your offer and your target market. The
copy and creative ensures that people can see the end benefit of your offer. If your
marketing message doesn’t catch your target audience’s attention and give people
a reason to click, your campaign will fail because you aren’t generating traffic.
Inspect your ad copy to make sure that it does the following:
» Calls out to your audience
» Hits a pain point that your audience experiences
» Gives your market a solution or a benefit (a reason to click)
Next, the image needs
» To be eye catching
» To correspond with your marketing message
Overall, verify that your creative and your copy don’t say different things. They
need to match or you risk confusing your audience. In addition, this matchup
helps make your ad.
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