Maximizing Your ROI During Peak Seasons with Web and Facebook Retargeting

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Jessie Gallagher
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1 WHITE PAPER Maximizing Your ROI During Peak Seasons with Web and Facebook Retargeting

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Five Tactics to Help Drive More Sales in Just 15 Minutes 03 Tip #1: Extend Your Retargeting Reach by Retargeting Partner Audiences 03 Tip #2: Supplement Product Listing Ads by Retargeting Visitors with Dynamic Product Ads on Facebook 04 Bonus Tip: Cross-Promote Complementary Products in Your Dynamic Product Ads 07 Tip #3: Retarget Users Who Abandon Shopping Carts 08 Tip #4: Bid Up To Increase Your CPM During Peak Seasons 10 Tip #5: Drive In-Store Traffic with Geo-Targeting 10 About Perfect Audience & Marin Software 12 Copyright 2014 Marin Software Inc. All rights reserved. 2

3 Marketers are familiar with the yearly crush around the November and December shopping period. However, although the holidays get the most attention, peak seasons come and go multiple times a year, and the timing can vary by industry vertical and company. This guide will provide tips on how you can maximize your ROI during those peak seasons using Perfect Audience, an enterprise-class, demand side platform that offers easy-to-use, but powerful tools to create, manage, and optimize retargeting campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, and the Web. FIVE TACTICS TO HELP DRIVE MORE SALES IN JUST 15 MINUTES Tip #1: Extend Your Retargeting Reach by Retargeting Partner Audiences Everybody knows that retargeting is a fantastic conversion driver. It s a great bottom of the funnel tactic that s highly performance oriented. However, the inherent disadvantage of retargeting is that you re stuck talking to the people who already know you exist. What if there was a way to expand your audience, while still adhering to the performance marketing tenets that propel retargeting? Perfect Audience has the answer! Partner Connect is the first and only partner retargeting marketplace where marketers can team up to retarget each other s visitors and expand their reach with new, yet relevant audiences. And unlike buying third-party data, partners can target each other s audiences without paying a hefty CPM fee to use the data for targeting. Perfect Audience makes it easy for advertisers participating in Partner Connect to find new partners. Once an advertiser has opted into the Partner Connect platform, there are a few different options for finding and connecting with other partners. Advertisers can connect their LinkedIn accounts and send invites to their network Advertisers can invitations to direct contacts Perfect Audience also runs a cookie-overlap algorithm which determines similarities between two companies audiences, and then provides daily recommendations on potential partners based on the similarity scores Once two partners are connected, running a Partner Connect campaign is as easy as running a standard retargeting campaign. Currently, you can run Facebook News Feed and Right Hand Side campaigns. When you launch a campaign, you ll see an option to retarget your partners. From there, you can select your partner audience and then set up your campaigns like you would for any other retargeting campaign. Copyright 2014 Marin Software Inc. All rights reserved. 3

4 Our recommendation is to partner with multiple different companies and test campaigns with different types of audiences. One of the benefits of partner retargeting is you gain a level of control over your prospecting audience, but avoid the third-party data fees, which ultimately leads to better opportunities for improving ROI. Tip #2: Supplement Product Listing Ads by Retargeting Visitors with Dynamic Product Ads on Facebook Retail advertisers have embraced Google s image-heavy Product Listing Ad (now called Shopping Ads) format in recent years. PLAs are also favored by customers, with CTRs up to 50% higher than simple text ads. However, the limitation of Shopping Ads is that they only run on the Google Search network, and they only show when the user searches for a relevant keyword. But what if you could take the power of Shopping Ads and expand it beyond search? What if you could use it to reach the 1 Billion plus users who spend a significant part of their day on Facebook? Herein lies the power of Dynamic product ads. Dynamic product ads which serve customers ads based on the products they ve previously viewed ensure that the retailer stays top-of-mind when potential customers don t convert on the initial visit. Perfect Audience makes it simple to create dynamic retargeting campaigns. Copyright 2014 Marin Software Inc. All rights reserved. 4

If you have a Google Merchant Center feed set up, you are already halfway to the finish line because Perfect Audience is able to ingest this standard feed.

A recent sample showed that dynamic ads drove an 80% higher CTR leading to a 33% lower CPC and effectively lower conversion metrics.

5 If you have a Google Merchant Center feed set up, you are already halfway to the finish line because Perfect Audience is able to ingest this standard feed. If you haven t launched any campaigns on Perfect Audience yet, simply create an account and place the site tracking tag on your site s footer, ensuring it appears on every page. A recent sample showed that dynamic ads drove an 80% higher CTR leading to a 33% lower CPC and effectively lower conversion metrics. In Perfect Audience, start the process by going to Settings > Dynamic Ad Settings. From there, follow this quick setup guide: Step 1: Pass Product IDs into your Perfect Audience Tracking Tag Passing your product IDs enables Perfect Audience to track what products your customers have viewed. It s an essential part of the dynamic retargeting process. 5

Step 2: Import Your Product Feed and Connect with Google Merchant Center Perfect Audience gives you an easy way to integrate directly with your Google Merchant Center Feed.

6 Step 2: Import Your Product Feed and Connect with Google Merchant Center Perfect Audience gives you an easy way to integrate directly with your Google Merchant Center Feed. Click Authorize to select a Google Merchant Center account and follow the easy steps to bring in the feed. It will take a few hours for Perfect Audience to ingest all your products properly. Step 3: Create Your Ads After you receive confirmation that all your ads are ingested into Perfect Audience, the next step is to create ads. When creating Facebook Exchange ads, there are a few macros you can use: {{ name }} The name of your product. {{ category }} The category of your product. {{ brand }} The brand name of your product. {{ price }} The price of your product. Be sure to add currency symbols ($) as necessary. {{ sale_price }} The sale price, if provided, of your product. If no sale price is found in the product feed, the regular price will be shown instead. Remember that there are character limitations for Facebook Exchange ads, so be sure to take that into account as you use macros. Copyright 2014 Marin Software Inc. All rights reserved. 6

Step 4: Launch a Campaign Once you ve passed your Product IDs, imported your product feeds, and created your ads, you re ready to launch your campaign.

If you need a quick refresher, you can read more on how to setup a Perfect Audience campaign.

7 Step 4: Launch a Campaign Once you ve passed your Product IDs, imported your product feeds, and created your ads, you re ready to launch your campaign. This is probably the simplest part of the process, wherein you simply choose which type of Facebook campaign News Feed or Right Hand Side you d prefer to launch. If you need a quick refresher, you can read more on how to setup a Perfect Audience campaign. For more tips on dynamic retargeting ads, check out this blog post for a checklist to ensure all your bases are covered as you launch your new campaigns. Bonus Tip: Cross-Promote Complementary Products in Your Dynamic Product Ads Creating dynamic product ads that cross-promote additional items within the same ad is a powerful way to go beyond the products your customer viewed. Consider presenting complementary products or, given the season, remind the customer to also purchase gifts for others. Admittedly, this bonus tip isn t something you can do in under 15 minutes once you sign up at Perfect Audience, you ll need to engage with a Perfect Audience account manager to see if you qualify and get set-up but it won t take that much longer. Copyright 2014 Marin Software Inc. All rights reserved. 7

8 Tip #3: Retarget Users Who Abandon Shopping Carts We know that customers abandon their shopping carts at a high rate. In fact, 2 out of 3 potential shoppers who add an item to their cart will leave the site without completing a purchase. Consequently, one of the easiest ways for retailers and ecommerce businesses to increase overall ROI is to ensure that they re getting in front of cart abandoners with the right message and incentive. Consider this a natural progression from targeting potentially interested customers with dynamic product ads, to working further down the funnel by recapturing potentially lost customers. Follow these steps to target and re-engage your cart abandoners: Step 1: Create Your Cart Abandoner List Copyright 2014 Marin Software Inc. All rights reserved. 8

You can take your cart abandoner list and use it to retarget those users across any channel on Facebook,

9 Step 2: Create Your Campaign Retargeting shopping cart abandoners opens a wide variety of marketing opportunities. You can take your cart abandoner list and use it to retarget those users across any channel on Facebook, through display ads across the web, or even through search using Google Remarketing Lists for Search Ads. Step 3: Target Cart Abandoners / Exclude Purchasers Copyright 2014 Marin Software Inc. All rights reserved. 9

Tip #4: Bid Up To Increase Your CPM During Peak Seasons This particular tactic will take less than 30 seconds! During peak seasons, competition increases and overall CPMs rise.

10 Tip #4: Bid Up To Increase Your CPM During Peak Seasons This particular tactic will take less than 30 seconds! During peak seasons, competition increases and overall CPMs rise. Accordingly, you ll want to increase your CPM across all of your retargeting campaigns to ensure you re bidding enough to stay in front of your potential customers. As a rule of thumb,we generally recommend advertisers increase their CPMs by % of their current average to maintain competitiveness during these times. Adjusting CPMs in Perfect Audience is simple. Click to edit any of your campaigns and dive into your settings. In Step 3, Campaign Details, you ll see an option to set the Bid Type as Optimized Bidding or Manual Bidding. Select the Manual Bidding radial button and set your new CPM. Try testing different CPMs to find the right balance between reach and ROI. Tip #5: Drive In-Store Traffic with Geo-Targeting It wasn t too long ago when many considered showrooming, where customers in brickand-mortar stores use their mobile phones to compare prices online, as the beginning of the end for real-world retailers. However, one of the more interesting trends that s since emerged is reverse showrooming, where customers research online but complete the purchase in-store. In fact, this practice has become even more prevalent than the original showrooming phenomenon. 1 Not only is this good news for physical retail stores, it also provides advertisers additional opportunities via geo-targeting. Perfect Audience provides marketers a simple way to geo-target potential visitors by country, DMA region, and even down to the zip code. Advertisers can leverage this, for example, by creating ads targeted to specific DMAs that guide potential customers to the nearest store locations. 1 Copyright 2014 Marin Software Inc. All rights reserved. 10

11 Of course, one caveat with geo-targeting is that it greatly decreases reach. For this reason, you ll want to limit geo-targeting to larger DMAs that ensure your retargeting lists have at least 5,000 unique users. You can find the geo-targeting settings in Step One in any of your campaign settings: Boosting your ROI during peak seasons can be challenging, especially as competition increases across your different marketing channels, but by making a few strategic tweaks and complementing your existing marketing efforts with the tactics above, you can maximize your reach and return for great overall performance. Copyright 2014 Marin Software Inc. All rights reserved. 11

12 ABOUT PERFECT AUDIENCE & MARIN SOFTWARE Marin Software Incorporated (NYSE:MRIN) provides a leading cross-channel performance advertising cloud for advertisers and agencies to measure, manage and optimize more than $6 billion in annualized ad spend across the web and mobile devices. Offering an integrated SaaS platform for search, display and social advertising, Marin helps digital marketers improve financial performance, save time, and make better decisions. Advertisers use Marin to create, target, and convert precise audiences based on recent buying signals from users search, social and display interactions. Headquartered in San Francisco with offices in 9 countries, Marin s technology powers marketing campaigns around the globe. For more information about Marin s products, please visit: United States San Francisco 123 Mission Street 25th Floor San Francisco, CA Tel: +1 (415) New York 215 Park Avenue South Suite 1801 New York, NY Tel: +1 (646) Chicago 140 S. Dearborn Street Suite 300-A Chicago, IL Tel: +1 (312) Austin 800 Brazos Street Suite 320 Austin, TX Tel: +1 (512) EMEA United Kingdom 1st Floor, Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin s Lane, London, WC2H 9EA Tel: +44 (0) France Actualis Level 2 21 and 23 Boulevard Haussmann Paris Tel: Germany Neuer Wall Hamburg Tel: Ireland Block 2, Clanwilliam House, Mount Street Lower, Dublin, 2 Tel: +353 (0) APAC Singapore One Raffles Quay North Tower, Level Tel: Japan 3rd Floor, Sanno Park Tower Nagata-cho Chiyoda-ku Tokyo Tel: Australia Level 33 Australia Square 264 George Street Sydney NSW 2000 Tel: +61 (0) Portland A317 SW Alder Street Suite 850 Portland, OR Tel: +1 (971) (415) Mission Street, info@marinsoftware.com 25th Floor San Francisco, CA Marin Software. All rights reserved. Other trademarks belong to their respective owners. WP 600_111214

FULL FUNNEL MARKETING STRATEGIES

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