Just a couple months ago Google announced their Retargeting platform moving into the general AdWords advertising arena. That is, it’s now in a Beta stage, like all of Google’s products  This marks a new level of behavioral targeting and flexibility offered by Google.  They are starting to dip a Google-size toe into the waters prowled by the likes of Fetchback, Retargeter, and Criteo.

But before hopping too far ahead of myself it’s probably best to cover the “what” and “why” of Remarketing, also called “retargeting” and “behavioral remarketing.” This online marketing tactic continues the longstanding marketing adage that “it takes X touches on a person to get them to remember you.”  As in, it’s been researched and found that somewhere around 6-7 connections you can make with your potential customers greatly increases the likelihood they will have you at top-of-mind, and therefore take a favorable (buying) action towards you.  It’s the basic concept behind branding campaigns:  make your brand strong and recognizable, and then keep it in front of everyone as much as possible by whatever means you can.

The Bunny

So, in the case of retargeting, when a customer visits your website and does not perform your desired action, you will continue to show them ads even after they’ve left your site.  Not just any ads but ads that relate to their initial interests or behavior.  “But how?! How does this crazy technology work?!”

Is it fueled by little blue ad bunnies hopping behind a site visitor in an effort to get noticed?  Kinda.  When this phantom customer first lands on your website a persistent cookie (blue bunny) attaches itself to their browser and follows them (hops) through the path of your site.  When this visitor leaves your beloved website and begins reading blogs, news sites, help forums, etc, your cookie (bunny) will alert the ad networks to show your specific ad to this potential customer wherever contextual ad space is available and opted into the given remarketing network.

Good bunny.

Within the Google ecosystem your retargeted ads will appear on websites opted into the Content Network.  So, as a an example, a kindly Soccer Mom takes a minute to peruse Crate & Barrell’s fabulous best selling dinnerware collection but doesn’t purchase.  She leaves to go read about the latest oil catastrophe’s affect on those poor fishies, then checks her gmail account to find the latest soccer schedule.  In both locations Crate & Barrell’s ads are appearing and hopefully garnering her attention again.  And again.  And again.  The blue bunny is getting tired.

Eventually one of their strategically placed ads works!  Soccer Mom returns to Crate & Barrell, remembering the sleek design and the perfectly-matches-my-kitchen-decor plates, and purchases a set. Holy hopping Halleluja!  Bunny, go rest now.

See how that worked?  Now, where the “behavioral” part of the platform comes into play derives from what the potential shopper does on your site.  Did Soccer Mom check out bed pillows, patio furniture, and dinnerware?  Did she put several office chairs into the cart and then abandon the site altogether?  Is she someone who visited before and did purchase a few products?  What can we learn from these clues, and how can we better target our remarketing efforts accordingly?

Have you been working with any Retargeting Networks or providers?  Have you tried out the new platform Google’s rolled out?  Thoughts, advice, dislikes?

In a few days, I’ll have another post up about the “how to” of creating a Retargeting Campaign in the Google AdWords interface.  See you then.  The blue bunny misses you already.Retar

What if I told you that with a few easy steps, you could squeeze even more copper out of your pennies spent? You would immediately question me as that would be a near miracle due, in part, to the fact that copper is no longer in pennies. This would lead you to wonder what timeshare pitch you’re about to receive. Then when you realize that no, this is really about like a PSA, you’d come around and listen. All this rambling to say, if you are not versed in the ways of Keyword Negativity, you’re wasting a lot of valuable budget!

Aside from the peeps that were smart enough to create a BILLIONS O’ $$$ auction market around keywords, the next smartest set of peeps were the ones that brought us the ability to have negative keywords. You should use them as much as possible, in every one of your accounts, without question. Even to the extent that it could, and probably will take you longer to build your negative list than your account’s primary kw list.

So we’re all on the same page: The basic gist of Negative Keywords is that they allow broadly-targeted Paid Search campaigns to be refined so they are serving ads more precisely, to more closely align with user intention (at least as best as an algorithm can). I’m sure that most, if not all, of you as SEO’s have used keyword research tools and come up with lists of keywords. From this research, you will pick to high value terms for the organic optimization front and then you have to figure out what to do with the other billion keywords that paid search is the best method for visibility.

The biggest challenge from the Paid Search perspective, there is often less budget than available opportunity. This is where negative keywords come into play.

Negative Keywords reduce your cost and progressively improve ROI / CPA. One of our favorite advantages negatives allow is that they can help you refine (to a point) when competing for often ambiguous top-of-funnel keywords. These being the “Discovery” phase keywords we discussed in an earlier Keyword Awareness post. Such keywords can be highly valuable contributors to your downstream metrics, even if they don’t actually produce direct sales. Deciding whether to use such broad terms and if they actually help your business, of course, is a matter of attribution. But the key point here is that negatives can help you hone in your broad terms and let you be more competitive in a more defined space.

Enough of this, lets look at a few practical examples:

Client: Family Fun Sporting Goods
Goal: Sell more baseball gloves online

(Ed. Note) Where I grew up a “baseball glove” is what you wore to catch the ball when it was flying at your face. I believe, though, in some areas of the country these are more readily referred to as “baseball mits.” For our example, we’re using “baseball glove,” as it creates even more negative keyword needs!

If you take the goal at face value and go for gold on ‘baseball glove’, the types of queries the ads would serve for would include (but limited to):

• gloves for baseball players
• used baseball gloves
• ACME baseball glove
• leather baseball glove
• baseball batter’s glove…

Budget Drainers:

• Family Fun doesn’t sell ACME brand anything, especially baseball gloves. Clicks for these searches are wasted money for them.
• While Family Fun sells batter’s gloves, we wouldn’t want a baseball glove advertisement showing up for that search. Confusion in ad messaging lowers CTRs and dilutes user experience
• Family Fun does not have a “second hand” department. Again, clicks for these searches are wasted ad dollars.

Budget Champions:

• We’d want to have ACME, and any other brands Family Fun doesn’t carry, as negatives in the account. Perhaps even have multiple versions of these terms, and use them in every ad group or campaign (you can’t always trust the SE algorithm to pay complete attention to your negatives… better safe than sorry). And if we know at the beginning of an engagement that their product line is oriented in this way, then we’d definitely want to have these negatives in place from day 1 of the account.
• Similar to the above brand example, we would want to have “batter,” “batters,” and “batter’s” as negatives in our baseball glove ad group. And the opposite is equally as important. Let’s make sure we do what we can to add negatives to the batter’s glove ad group so that baseball glove ads won’t appear instead.

By now some of you have realized that building out a negatives list could end up being more extensive than your original keyword list is. Bingo! Think up the permutations we’ll need to avoid used equipment shoppers seeing Family Fun’s ads: used, preowned, pre-owned, secondhand, second hand, consignment. That’s just off the top of my head. I’m pretty sure I’m missing some obvious ones there.

Hopefully this is starting to click for those of you accustomed to using only Broad matched keywords. For good measure, lets do one more…

Client: Al’s Landscape Equipment Supplies
Goal: Introduce Honda Mower Line to Local Landscapers

Al’s L.E.S. sells all sorts of equipment for home lawn care warriors, as well as the professional level peeps you see out there with goggles, standing on mowers that make tighter turns at higher speeds than my car ever will (believe me, I’ve tried). But for our example, let’s just think about the Honda line of mowers that Al’s sells.

Keywords that might appear in a campaign for Honda Lawnmowers:

• Honda lawn mower
• Honda lawnmower
• riding lawnmower Honda
• self propelled Honda lawn mower
• 5hp mulching lawn mower
• big lawn mower

Once you start to think about the keywords for this subset of lawn care, you quickly realize that there’s a lot of options and variations you could be using (notice I didn’t even get into plurals or model names). But have you considered the overwhelming breadth of the machinery empire that is Honda? How can you be sure that your ads won’t appear for users doing searches like:

• Honda accord
• Honda manufacturing
• Honda weed eaters
• jet engines made by Honda
• Honda USA
• 5L lx engine parts for Honda

That’s right… you need negatives to help hone in your campaigns. You’ll need lots of them, perhaps even more than your original non-negative keyword set. And negatives to hone in your ad groupings as well. Just because you have different ad groups for different Honda Lawn Mower models, doesn’t mean that the algorithm won’t get confused and still serve the wrong ad… you need to give it some help. Help in the form of Negative Keywords means you’re being Keyword Aware and able to improve your client’s ROI.

Until next time, thanks for reading.