Time is money and search retargeting offers a great strategy to quickly start tapping into hot leads with high intent as soon as they hit the search button online. This post highlights what search retargeting is, how it works, and 9 reasons why it should be a part of your marketing arsenal.
What is Search Retargeting?
Put simply, it’s a type of retargeting technique that helps advertisers target users who are searching for a specific phrase or term that could be beneficial for their business. Quite different from SEM (or search engine marketing), the user is shown display or banner ads, not in the search results but instead on other websites that the user would visit after the search and in the near future.
Many companies are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars every month on using search remarketing to bring in qualified prospects into their sales funnels.
In fact, according to a survey by Barometer, 92% of the businesses reported seeing an increase in revenue using search remarketing.
According to a recent whitepaper released by Marine Software – “The Performance Marketer’s Retargeting Guide: Key Benchmarks, Challenges, and Best Practices for Cross-Channel Success”, out of the popular channels for retargeting, search retargeting came in second only to display at 77%, while video, mobile and social trailed behind.
How Search Retargeting Works
When you go the regular retargeting route, the target audience is prospective customers who visited your website but didn’t take a specific action. But in the case of search retargeting, your audience would be far wider and consists of people who might have never visited or known about your website till now but are interested in buying a product or service that’s being offered on your website.
If the phrase or term searched by the user matches with a keyword in the list of targeted keywords of the Advertiser, the user’s intent is instantly recorded. This information is then used to show relevant display ads on various websites that the user visits later on with an attempt to drive action and tangible outcomes.
Why Use Search Retargeting In Your Business?
There are several reasons why you should be using Search Retargeting in your business but in this article we will talk about 9 reasons why every business (including yours) needs to be using Search Retargeting compared to other forms of advertising. I’ll show you facts and stats to support my views. So let’s get started.
#1: Find prospects at the right time in the funnel
Search retargeting is a good tool to confirm the customer’s intent before even interacting with them or showing them an ad. For example, if a user searches for “flight discount coupons”, it’s highly likely that they are interested in booking a flight ticket in the near future. The right kind of marketing message showed as soon as possible via display ads could convert this hot lead into a sale in almost no time. Only if we’re doing search retargeting would this be possible!
#2: Leverage the power of search and scalability of display ads
68% of businesses report increased on-site engagement. About 50% of businesses find it good for raising brand awareness. Since the campaigns are keywords based and traffic is virtually unlimited, these are highly scalable. Thanks to the bidding technology that relies on complex machine learning, it lets advertisers collect data at keyword level granularity and then optimize accordingly. What else could you want?
#3: Users Are NOT Offended By These Ads
In fact, the opposite of this common myth could be true! 30% of consumers feel positively about retargeted ads, vs. only 11% who feel otherwise, while they have a neutral reaction. To make this verdict even clearer, a Wishpond study reveals that 25% of the online buyers actually enjoy seeing behavorially targeted ads simply because these often remind them of what they were searching for previously.
#4: Offers Better Results than SEM
As you might be aware of, most consumers don’t make buying decisions when they first search for a product. So, instead of targeting first-time searchers with SEM strategy, it makes sense to target them later on when they have gradually made up they mind. This is why 46% of Search Engine Marketing professionals believe that search retargeting is one of the most underutilized (and highly lucrative) strategies in online marketing.
#5: Grab Users Attention
As opposed to SEM strategy, search retargeting makes use of graphics and visual features such as images, flash, movement, color, and text – which are much better for grabbing attention as compared to just plain text.
#6: Leverage Data Recency
Search retargeting can be setup to serve ads to users who have searched within 10 seconds, 10 minutes, or 10 days from the time of their search, depending on how long is a user’s purchase cycle in that specific industry. This is why recency is an important factor in optimizing towards better CTR (click-through-rate), CPA, or CPC goals.
For most industries, the intent signal has a high value. More importantly, it’s time that matters more. Say, a user searches [pizza coupon 90510] at 3:00 PM, it’s an important message to a pizza delivery service at 5:10 PM but not a week or even 1 day later as the opportunity to hit the consumer would have been lost by then.
#7: Optimize Your Campaigns Better
Advertisers can check the spends and performance of each keyword, time of day, location, and more. To employ search retargeting profitably, marketers need to practice clean and precise keyword-level and page level retargeting with respect to time and creative message shown.
This could be time-consuming more often than not, but only after this it will be possible to boost the campaign’s performance for direct response as well as branding across various mediums. Just talk about hunting down those users with your laser-targeted display ads.
#8: Quicker Scale To All The Prospects In The Marketplace
While most branding campaigns cost a good chunk of money and a long period of outreach, search retargeting can be used to create an awareness program for a company in just a fraction of the time and cost required for other online marketing techniques. such as ppc advertising and traditional method of retargeting.
A good example of this is that why it may take up to 6 months to retarget 50,000 prospects with site retargeting because they have to visit your website first, with search retargeting, this same amount of prospects can be retargeted within 2 weeks in some industries. This gives advertisers quicker scale to reach all the prospects in their marketplace.
#9: You can save up to 70% off your advertising costs with search retargeting.
But how is this possible? First, people don’t have to visit your site before they are re-targeted saving you the upfront cost of building your retargeting list. This no ‘first-click’ cost will chop a chunk off your advertising cost. Secondly, you’ll get consistent inexpensive traffic – something that’s peculiar with retargeting marketing. You save money upfront and when people in your retargeting list click on your ads, you pay cheaply for the ad.
Search Retargeting is a powerful tool for online marketing and should be an essential part of every digital marketing toolkit. If you want to optimize your retargeting campaigns, and make sure your campaigns remain relevant and personalized to your market, look no further.
This strategy can provide an effective plan to align your search engine marketing (SEM) as well as display advertising campaigns by mixing the power of search and intent with sustainable and repeated brand exposure to increase sales and overall business profits.