Can you do remarketing without analytics?
You can come a long way running great remarketing campaigns without analytics if you use common sense.
Retargeting campaigns aim at getting a user that previously visited your site to return to it. As such the goal is almost always to engage them to take one step further in your sales funnel.
The concept is this. You had their attention on a previous visit to your site, and now you need them to take a more committing action. So, they have to revisit your site.
And the question here is: Can you do this without analytics? The short answer is; yes it is possible – at least to design the campaigns so that you do not need to focus on the numbers. We will get back to this, but first a bit about the dynamics of remarketing.
It starts with your customers
Like so much else. It all starts whit your customers. In this case, their decision process. We have worked with companies that sold holiday houses in France, and it is not uncommon for their customers to use one year to make the decision to buy a house. On the other end of the scale is extreme impulse buying, like the product you buy on the TV shop networks. If they don´t sell instantly, they won’t sell at all.
Customer site interactions
So your first step is to be clear about where on the scale your product or service is. From the time a potential customer goes online for the first time to investigate the time a purchase has been made. What is the time frame? And how many interactions with your site does it require for them before they are willing to commit to a buy from you? https://www.youtube.com/embed/tYDvaICqT-I?feature=oembed
Remarketing planning
You don´t need analytics for that part of your remarketing planning. This requires business knowledge, so you are the best person to know this. Your business experience will decide the scope of the campaign. How long time should a user ideal be exposed to your remarketing campaign? Is it 24 hours or 3 weeks? You have the best answer to that question.
Cost benefits
What you do need to know is the cost benefits of your remarketing campaign, but that is more math than analytics. It all boils down to what is the margin on our product, and how much can you afford to spend on marketing. And how much of your spending do your allocate on first-time visitors and how much do you assign to retain your existing users.
Channels for retargeting
All add channels offer the possibility of doing retargeting on their platform, but not all will be equally relevant to your goal. As a rough role of thumb, you can divide paid traffic into awareness and sales channels.
Awareness Channels
The awareness channels are the ones that favour user browsing, and they are:
Instagram: There are several reasons why Instagram is not a well-performing retargeting channel. Most importantly, Instagram is a Visually oriented platform and not designed to click away from easily. Also, it is a mobile media, and this could be an issue if your site converts better on the desktop (as the most website does).
Twitter: The reasons for not using Instagram for retargeting, also goes for Twitter. It is a mobile browsing channel, and this will not work well for remarketing.
Facebook: Facebook can be used for remarketing, but some issues and conditions should be met if you choose to use Facebook for remarketing.
We have analyzed lots of conversion data, and Facebook does not perform well. It is the best converting Social Media channel but is almost always outperformed by Google Ads, direct traffic, and SEO. First of all, Facebook is a mobile platform, and this will be an issue for you if your sales are made on a desktop. It has probably to do with the state of mind that Facebook users are in. Our data shows two reasons why Facebook performs poorly. First of all, it is quite challenging to make the user leave Facebook and enter your website. So websites do in general not get much traffic from Facebook. Expect no more than 1-2 % of your total traffic. Our data also shows that the users that do come from Facebook convert more poorly than from other channels. We can not explain why we can only observe that their motivation to convert is a lover than an average website user
Sales channels
Google Ads: Google Ads are a safe choice when it comes to selecting the best performing remarketing. You have lots of options to configure campaigns that recapture your target and get great exposure to them. Looking at our data from the sites that we have analyzed, we can also see that it is the best performing remarketing platform.
Bing: Bing can be used for remarketing in the same way as Google Ads. However, the size of the platform means that you should consider it as a parallel channel (to Google Ads). Since you can not expect to get enough exposure just by using Bing
LinkedIn: If you are a BtoB company, then LinkedIn is probably on your radar as a possible platform to do marketing. It is especially interesting if your target is enterprise companies. In this case, the quality of the LinkedIn target groups can be very significant for you.
The biggest problem with LinkedIn remarketing is the cost. Ads on LinkedIn are priced much higher than on almost any other platform. So you need to dose your efforts precisely, if not you risk getting a quite high accession cost from that media.
Can you run retargeting campaigns without analytics?
And not getting back to the original question: Can you run retargeting campaigns without analytics? Not quite, but the core part of designing your remarketing set-up has to do with an understanding of your business and your products. If you get this right, then you are 90% there.
You need analytics to have data that supports your decision and to know what you spend your marketing efforts wisely. And remember that you never want to use analytic data from the source (Google Ads, Facebook et.). Allway base your decisions on data that originates from your site.
90% of your users stay less than three seconds on your site
The reason for this is that the source statistics will let you know how many clients from their website to yours. But as many as 90% of them stay less than three seconds on your site, and you want to filter them out. You what to make your decisions based on the users that interact with your content, and this requires site statistics.
Conversions
If you want to do more advanced analytics than this then this, then your focus should be on tracking how many actual conversions you get from re-marketing. You would want to know this to evaluate how much of your sales that can be contributed to your remarketing efforts. If you have Google Analytics skills, then you could set Google Analytics up to measure it for you.
As an alternative, you can get the information out of the box from your Canecto report. This will also suggest your best-performing marketing mix and the ideal remarketing period.
