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Every day there are opportunities to learn, grow, and serve.  I want to thank Paul Potratz for indirectly reminding me the power of remarketing campaigns.  How did this learning take place you may ask?  Well, all I had to do is visit his website. So before I continue, take a minute to visit http://www.ppadv.com so you can better understand the lesson I learned.

You see once you visit his website, you will be “haunted” by banner ads from Potratz Advertising on websites that you surf.  Haunting is a good adjective in this case. Paul’s remarketing campaign keeps the Potratz brand message in front of consumers (and me) who visited his website.  These haunting banners are displayed on thousands of third party websites in a remarketing network.

His smiling face was on his banner ads that followed me around the Internet which forced me to dig into the subject of remarketing once again.  For this, I have to thank Paul because the opportunities I discovered for my own business and car dealers is significant.

Leveraging Your Existing Website Traffic

Have you ever wondered how you could leverage the thousands of visitors that come to your website every month in a new way?  Have you ever asked how you could market to the mystery shoppers that view your vehicles but never call or submit a lead?

The average car dealer get’s between 3,000 – 5,000 unique visitors a month so wouldn’t you like to automatically follow these consumers as they shop on competitive websites?  How about having your ads show up on review websites, metro information websites, and popular automotive websites to people who already visited your site?

If you are answering yes to any of these questions, then continue reading.

Re-Marketing Campaigns Leverage Visitor Traffic

If you have never taken time to learn about remarketing which is also known as retargeting, I’ll provide a simple summary.  Remarketing campaigns are offered by many companies including Reach Local, Cobalt, as well as Google Adwords.

Since many readers are using Google Adwords already, let me review how you can add re-marketing lists to your existing Adwords Ad Groups.

• Google Adwords groups keywords and ads into Ad Groups. Let’s assume a dealer has an Ad Group setup to market the 2011 Ford F-150.   In this Ad Group a dealer would include keywords associated with the Ford F-150.
• The dealer would also create text ads and banner ads which have a call to action message to purchase or test drive a Ford F-150 from their dealership.
• These ads, when clicked go to a landing page.  In this case, let’s assume it goes to an optimized landing page for the Ford F-150 on the dealer’s website.  This landing page has clear calls to action and engages the consumer.
• Even the best landing pages do not convert high percentages of visitors into leads or calls. Re-marketing allows you to get a few more tries at winning over this PPC visitor.  (see graphic above)
• What you need to do is to create a “tag” that will track anonymous visitors to this F-150 landing page.  You do this by going to the “Audience Tab” on your Ford F-150 Ad Group, and click on the “Add Audience” button.

• Once you click on “Add Audience” you will be asked to select a “remarketing list” but you will not have any.  This means you need to create a remarketing list.  In this example, your remarketing list will be all people who visit your F-150 landing page.
• To create your remarketing list, click on “Create and Manage Lists” on the page and you can now define your list.
• Then click on the button “New Audience” and select “Remarketing list” from the drop-down menu.  Notice that I have created two other remarketing lists which can each have a membership duration.

• We’ll pick a name for our list as “Ford F-150 Landing Page Visitors”.  (see below)
• You will add a description to remember what this tag was created for and set the duration.  Since car shoppers may be in the market for a 90 day cycle, I have set the membership duration to 90 days.  If the consumer re-visits your website in 10 days, the clock will be reset.

• Once you click on the “Save” button, you can retrieve the HTML code for this tag.
• To get the code, click on the hyperlink for your remarketing list under the column “Tag/Rules”.
• You then need to place place this HTML tag (aka HTML Code) on the Ford F-150  landing page.  You may need help from your website provider to insert the code if you are not comfortable with working in the HTML editor mode.
• This code sets a cookie on the consumers web browser.  Every visitor to your F-150 landing page is tracked via a cookie.
• Once this cookie activated by a visit you can take advantage of the millions of websites in the Adwords Display Network that will show Google Ads.  These websites need to have content that matches your Ford F-150 Ad Group keywords.
• So for example, any website that allows Google Ads that has articles on the Ford F-150 can pop up your ads to consumers who visited your website.
• By the way, if your keywords include “Ford Dealer” for “Ford” then you can expect your ads to show on popular review sites and business directories for competing Ford dealers in your market.
• This includes review websites like Yelp.com, Dealerrater.com, InsiderPages.com, MerchantCircle.com, and popular automotive websites like Motortrend.com.
• Which websites your ad will appear on will be determined by your automatic and manual placement setting in the display network and your bids.

Does ReMarketing Interest You?

It should.  You should consider testing it for your dealership but there are many strategies to consider and options in this advertising medium.  Questions?  Well the good news is that at the PCG Pit Stop tour, we will have experts in attendance that can show you how remarketing can help your dealership. 

Secondly, the man that inspired me to write this post, Paul Potratz, will be speaking at the Pit Stop Conferences on effective digital advertising strategies and of course you can chat with him on remarketing.  You’ll have ample time to speak with Cobalt Remarketing Experts, and the other industry experts that have experience with remarketing.

Get registered online for the closest conference to your dealership:  http://www.pcgpitstop.com.  Here is an example of our remarketing campaign for the PCG Pit Stop tour showing on the CNBC website.  This is powerful stuff!.

Google Remarketing Video