Increasing ad spend effectiveness by using remarketing

Remarketing is an online marketing technique that allows companies to show online ads to users who visit their site and leave it without buying anything. The ads are shown to these visitors outside the company’s site as they browse the Web.

Remarketing is a powerful tool to engage a target audience by showing them relevant ads and offers across the World Wide Web. This technique aims to help companies be top of mind when their target audience is ready to make a purchase improving ROI.

An example of using this tool effectively was done by Watchfinder (www.watchfinder.co.uk), a leading luxury pre-owned watches retailer in England.

Watchfinder’s average order value is over £3,500. Therefore, purchase decisions tend to take time; sometimes weeks or even months. Watchfinder found out that less than 1% of their visitors completed a purchase on their first visit.

Given the two previous facts, Watchfinder needed to come up with ideas to:

Engage and maintain a conversation with these visitors, and
Encourage them to return and make/complete a purchase

The approach

Watchfinder decided to use remarketing to address the challenge. Watchfinder worked with Periscopix, a leading British Pay Per Click (PPC) agency specialized in managing PPC campaigns to improve performance and marketing spend through analysis.

Periscopix created 20 focused lists of visitors who showed purchase intent but did not buy and groups according to different visitors’ characteristics such as location, language, purchase funnel stage, on-site behavior (e.g. time spend on the site, pages / brand / product viewed, etc.) and traffic performance (e.g. Internet Service Provider – ISP) among others.

Periscopix found that visitors who spend 10 minutes or more on Watchfinder’s site without making a purchase were more likely to return and make a purchase.

Another finding was that certain ISP’s in the London financial district yielded traffic with higher engagement and above average conversion rates.

Periscopix then created clusters around visitors who spend 10 minutes or more without buying and investment banks in London’s financial center to engage the companies’ employees. Periscopix was able to tailor ads across the Web for each group with specific messages targeting consumers based on key findings and their context. For example, visitors to the British site coming from France were presented with ads encouraging them to visit the French site.

The results

At the end of the six-month campaign, Watchfinder achieved:

An impressive 1,300% return on investment (ROI)
A 13% increase in the average order value (AOV)
A 34% decrease in the cost-per-acquisition (CPA) when compared against other search campaigns

The remarketing group that yielded the highest conversion rate both in terms of goals and transactions was the group comprised of visitors who browsed Watchfinder’s site for the first time for 10 minutes or more without making a purchase.

Conclusions

Remarketing allowed Watchfinder to effectively reach their target audience while delivering appropriate messages that increased conversion rates and reduced cost of acquisition
Remarketing not only allowed Watchfinder to engage their site’s visitors but enabled them to incorporate other variables into account to tailored messages that resonated with their potential customers (e.g. location, preferences, behaviors, etc.)
Given that Watchfinder started as a pure online player, using the Internet as the preferred media was a good choice