The Best Way To Use Retargeting Ads For Your Dropshipping Business
Why should I bother with retargeting?
A lot of well-meaning businesses fail to realize that the most common reaction a consumer has, especially when they’re first in the market, it’s not a “yes” or “no”, it’s “maybe later”. Just because someone comes to your site, and they choose not to convert at that moment, it does not mean they were a bad customer or a bad visitor, all it means is maybe later. So retargeting is an incredible way to ensure that you’re staying in front of people – it’s very valuable.
Retargeting is generally display-based: Image ads, or banners and things like that. And you see these all across the internet. So you may be asking yourself: Are people actually going to engage with these ads, or is this just another tool that just gets in front of people and just blinds them?
That absolutely can be the case, but something important to consider is if you’ve already interacted with a brand, you’re now familiar with their logo, or at least you’ve seen it recently. Familiar with a product, familiar with a service, you’re already thinking about it, so subconsciously users that have already interacted with your site are more likely to see those ads and not really become blind or get that ad fatigue to them, this is particularly true for shopify best sellers.
The steps to a purchase when a consumer usually comes to your site, purchase, or filling out a form, or making a phone call is initially they have a need. They intend to find something, wherever they happened to be in that sales funnel. So they search for it, and they find it. They evaluate their options. In fact, historically or statistically many people will search for or compare three to five different service providers or three to five different places where they can buy a product. So, if you think about it, those first four places within Google, there’s a reason that they are highly valued real estate.
Generally speaking, people are going to click on each one and evaluate from there. This is where retargeting comes in incredibly handy. Because you’ve already spent the money. You’ve already spent the click to get them there. And now you want to make sure that they get into your sales funnel and actually come back and convert. Once the consumer’s researching they hesitate, they don’t take any action yet because they need to collect all of their options. So they continue to research, they weigh their options. And they start to narrow their list down to their trusted sources. From there that’s where you want to be. You want to be top of mind. You want to be the business that they recognize, that they’ve engaged with. And you’re the business that’s in front of them. You seem bigger, you seem more trustworthy. So they go back to the brand that they favor the most. And that’s when they convert. So, retargeting establishes a lot of top of mind awareness. And it influences what’s called brand bias. And we talked about this a little bit before. The more often your brand is seen or at least witnessed by an individual after they’ve first interacted with it, the more they begin to trust that brand. It’s just a bias that most humans have. They’re automatically going to bias themselves to the things that they’ve seen the most, they’re more comfortable with. They feel it’s the most trustworthy. And if they’ve seen your ad all across the internet you must be a large and trustworthy company. So they decide that they’re going to work with you.
Segment your lists and platforms
Now that we’ve already talked about why you need to retarget, hopefully these reasons have convinced you. Google isn’t the only place that you can run retargeting ads. I touched on this briefly. You could also run retargeting ads across your social media networks. And it’s incredibly very, very highly valuable to do this. In fact, if you’re only running on one platform and you’re not segmenting your list across multiple platforms you’re missing out, and again leaving money on the table. So, with more than two billion users, obviously, Facebook is an incredible way to reach new and existing customers and for doing dropshipping product research in particular. It’s a fantastic targeting solution. And considering most consumers, regardless of demographic or what age bracket they fall into, most consumers are interacting on Facebook in one way or the other. Now, you may be in a different demographic where it’s not as widely used. But all that means is that you’re able to really highly target and that those individuals at low cost to you may be a really high source or a high value conversion. Additionally, you can run retargeting ads on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, which is highly, highly valuable. And many, many other different networks.
So for the purposes of this article we’ll focus on Google, and Facebook, and talk about those because those are the primary networks. But we’ll also go on and talk about a couple of these other ones, specifically YouTube, when it comes to mashing together your multi-channel marketing mix, and layering in these different opportunities for people to see you and interact with your brand. Once we’ve decided what our platforms are, and there is a lot of value across each one of these platforms depending on your demographic and depending on what service you’re providing, if you’re a B2B customer you’re looking primarily for businesses, LinkedIn may be a great opportunity, whereas, Facebook maybe not quite as much. If you are a consumer selling a product, then retargeting on YouTube is incredibly valuable, especially if there are videos already existing on YouTube that are reflective of what your brand is selling. It could be unboxing videos. People that are purchasing a product and unboxing it for people to see and kind of get their hands on. It could be how-to videos, maybe you’re a photographer, a videographer, and they’re using a camera or accessories that you sell.
These are great places to have your retargeting videos. So, decide your platform, and then you want to segment your lists. Now, list segmentation is probably one of the most powerful aspects of retargeting. When you segment these lists you’re able to identify who people are and where in that sales funnel they fall. That top of mind first funnel, usually we like to refer to that as all site visitors. Literally, anybody who comes to your site should be added into a retargeting list of some sort. And we like to start with all site visitors. Anyone who’s visited your site is going to be added into this list. From there you can start to segment this. You can segment and create another list based on people that have visited your pricing page or maybe your contact us page. All we’re trying to think about here is what is the intent. What’s the user’s intention based on the page that they’re visiting? I think we can agree if somebody’s visiting a pricing page or a contact page they’re probably interested a little bit more so than someone who’s just doing their research, they’re talking, they’re already thinking price. They’re already wondering where you’re located. They’re wondering how to get in contact with you. They should be in their own list. There’s a lot more value there. Other lists that you can create are people that watched your video. If you’re posting videos on YouTube or posting videos on Facebook you can now segment those lists. As an example, say you have a video, and it’s about a minute long. Well, maybe you want to create a list of people that have watched at least 50% of your video. Those folks aren’t just scrolling by. Those folks aren’t just reviewing you, or seeing you in their desktop feed, or anything like that. They stopped, they paused, they watched your video. They are more valuable than somebody who’s just scrolling on by and just saw it for three seconds or so.
So you can create a list that way. People who looked at a specific product or a specific service, you can target your ads and create a list for people that have been to a very specific page on your site. So if they’re looking for pink women’s shoes for example you probably don’t want to show them an ad for men’s blue sneakers. Probably not very valuable to them. But what you can do is create that list for people on your site that have visited pink women’s shoes, that category, or even specific products, and create ads specifically for them. You already know what they were looking for, so now all we have to do is bring them back when they’re ready to make that purchasing decision. So, a lot of value here in creating these multiple lists. Once you’ve created these lists you can always add in more segmentation if you want, especially on Facebook. Facebook allows you to segment by age, and demographic, and location, and socioeconomic status, and other interests, and things like that. If you get a lot of traffic to your site you may find that your lists are very large, and you want to narrow those down a little bit. Now, our recommendation is to ensure that your Facebook lists are really no less. If you’re just doing demographic and interest targeting don’t make the lists smaller than 55,000 people. Facebook’s algorithm doesn’t really have enough information there to give you the power of its machine learning and its algorithm. So keep those lists at a little bit larger. Now, lists that are based off of lookalikes. You have a retargeting list, and you ask Facebook to create a list of similar-minded people.
Those lists are incredibly valuable. And they don’t have to be very large, although the larger lists you’re starting with creates more value because, obviously, it’s got more data to go through. So you can go crazy with these lists, and then narrow them down even further based on information that for a fact is a part of your core demographic or your best buyer persona. On Google you can go through here, and you can create these lists, and you can add them to your campaigns, your retargeting campaigns or others. Using the RLSA tactic, the retargeting lists for search ads. You can actually influence your bid on those. You can bid more for people that have been to your site recently. You can bid more for people that are searching or searching again for a product page that you’ve already created a list for. Or you can say, these folks haven’t really, these are people that haven’t been to my site in 90 days. I’m not really as worried about them, so you don’t increase or change your bid at all. There’s a lot of opportunity and a lot of different things to focus on here that can give you a lot of power behind your lists and behind your retargeting campaign. Again, this may seem really overwhelming, but it’s not. Once you’ve established your idea and your baseline for what you want to accomplish with your lists this is very easy to roll out and easy to build upon. It just takes some effort and energy at the very beginning. But if you don’t do it you’re leaving money on the table. And as business owners that’s one of the most important things for us to watch out for.