Google Remarketing – The Why and How

Google Remarketing is a feature within Google AdWords that allows you to track visitors of your website and remarket to them through the Google Display Network.
Essentially you create a snippet of code within AdWords and place it on your site, when someone visits your site a cookie is written to their browser (pixel tracking) and that is communicated back to Google AdWords which compiles a list of those visitors and allows you to show specific ads to only those individuals. This is very efficient and an effective way to market.

Here is another way that I have used Google Remarketing. I needed to identify the occupation of an individual to effectively advertise to them. The product was group insurance for this particular profession so they had to be employed as a professional in this field. Since Google does not have the ability to identify occupation, I had to figure out a way to qualify who I was going to advertise to.

Very specific keywords could be used, but the volume was low and accuracy wouldn’t necessarily be very high.
So I thought that I could use Google Remarketing to help me out.

The client would send emails out regularly to its members (400,000 email addresses). All of these members were employed in the profession I needed to market to for them. So I placed Google Remarketing code on the landing page that was linked within the email.

This accumulated more than enough traffic to create a substantial remarketing list and now these individuals are being served ads for this group insurance with virtually 100% accuracy.

Five Ideas to Get Your Marketing Efforts in Top Shape

1. Get into database marketing. Do you know the difference between income and equity? Income is the money you take home at the end of the day. Equity is what you build… and hopefully sell for plenty of money in the years to come. Let’s call it your business “savings account.” As a publisher myself, I learned long ago that the inherent value of a magazine like SUCCESS is the amazing list of readers it reaches. It’s their database! Your business is no different. When Borders Books went under this past season, the first asset that Barnes & Noble bought was Borders’ customer database. In the old world, staying competitive was simply a matter of having a mailing list of past customers. Not anymore. These days, the competitive advantage goes to the firm with the most information and data points about its customers. We’re not talking about simply knowing their names and addresses. We’re talking about who bought, what they bought, when they bought it, where, why, how and even how much time and money they spend with you. You want to be able to drill down to the point where you even know what words your customers clicked on in your emails so you can better target them in the future. Luckily, there are powerful software packages to support these efforts, so that database marketing can become an incredibly powerful tool for you. For most small businesses, and especially for the tens of thousands that consider themselves “Internet marketers,” any of three popular packages—ConstantContact (find it at ConstantContact.com), aWeber (aWeber.com) and Infusionsoft (Infusionsoft.com)—will work.

The No. 1 most important part of any company in today’s competitive business climate is its database. Create it, build it and protect it. How do you protect it? Well, imagine if your No. 1 salesperson was hired away and left with your most valuable asset—your list of customers and everything you know about their buying habits and preferences. I’m sorry to tell you, but this happens every day. Talk to your lawyer about creating legal and binding contracts with anyone who has access to the database. Don’t ever print it out and hand it to someone to use for a mailing. Even if you are renting your database out on a limited basis, as some firms do, don’t hand out that list. Instead, you mail to the people in your database on behalf of those you’re renting it to or give the list to a bonded, third-party mailing house where you are guaranteed legal protection against theft.

Email Service Providers, Email List Rental, Email List Purchasing and Email Deployment

Email Services Providers

Information and Methodology

List Rental, Purchasing, Deployment

 

The advantage to working with an Email Service Provider is that they have a “relationship” with their ISP (internet service provider) and they utilize seasoned IP (internet protocol) addresses.  This means that over time the Email Service Provider has increased their send volume and the rate of bounces, undeliverable and spam identified messages are maintained at a “reasonable” percentage.  This “reasonable” percentage will depend on the age and reputability of the IP that the messages are being sent from and are ultimately determined by each ISP.

 

In my experience, “low cost” lists yield low deliverability (i.e. 25%).  Lists that cost more usually have higher deliverability (i.e. 80 – 90%), but vary in quality.  The quality factor varies and can only be approximated based on the source of data or from experience (personal experience or reference). I am defining quality as a measure of the activity generated from an email deployment (i.e. open rate and click through rate).  The most significant quality measure for me is the open rate.  Even though a message was delivered it may have been delivered to an abandoned email address or an email address that is not checked often.  I have personally obtained open rates from 0.5% to 12% from purchased lists and from those rates received between 0% to 30% click through rates.   In the majority of these cases I managed these deployments myself using an SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) server provided by an Email Service Provider.

 

A major obstacle exists when managing your own deployment through an SMTP server.  This is that many reputable Email Service Providers want you to prove that your list was obtained through a specific opt-in process.  Some will ask to see live collection points online and in most cases they let you know that when creating an account with them you are on a watch list to ensure that your list does not generate a high number of opt-out, spam filtered, undeliverable or bounced responses.  Many of the Email Service Providers will tell you that they do not allow purchased lists to be deployed through their system.  They are very sensitive due to the fact that they must maintain that good standing relationship with their ISP.

 

CAN-SPAM is defined by 3 methods of compliance:

Unsubscribe compliance

  • A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails.
  • Consumer opt-out requests are honored within 10 days.
  • Opt-out lists also known as Suppression lists are only used for compliance purposes.

 

Content compliance

  • Accurate from lines (including “friendly froms”)
  • Relevant subject lines (relative to offer in body content and not deceptive)
  • A legitimate physical address of the publisher and/or advertiser is present.
  • A label is present if the content is adult.

 

Sending behavior compliance

  • A message cannot be sent through an open relay
  • A message cannot contain a false header

Content is exempt if it consists of:

  • religious messages;
  • political messages;
  • content that broadly complies with the marketing mechanisms specified in the law; or
  • national security messages.

There are no restrictions against a company emailing its existing customers or anyone who has inquired about its products or services, even if these individuals have not given permission, as these messages are classified as “relationship” messages under CAN-SPAM.

 

CAN-SPAM compliance is easily achieved and does not limit an individual/company/agency to only send to opt-in email lists.

 

Direct Mail in the Insurance World Works Well with Online


In today’s marketing landscape digital seems to dominate everything, but there are some areas where that physical mail still holds a strong position. One such industry is in the Insurance Industry.
There have been studies that show a product such as life insurance is an intimate purchase and the psychology behind receiving the physical mail solidifies this type of offer for a recipient. Campaigns that we have worked on that include “Self Mailers” and Postcards both utilizing PURL’s (personalized URL’s) which direct a recipient to a landing page that allows them to sign up for the insurance or has them download an application that they can mail in at their convenience, continue to work well.
The combination of the two give a greater bond to it’s legitimacy and can increase enrollment response time when the prospect signs up online.

We have seen response rates up to 1.5% from these mailers and then clickthrough to enrollment at 50% plus!
We are now utilizing split testing in our mailing efforts to increase the response rate and ultimately drive higher volume to the enrollment process.
When you’re talking about 350,000 plus mailers, increasing the response rate can mean big profits!

Digital Marketing and Traditional Marketing Mix.

Google Analytics Keyword Not Provided

google keyword not provided

Google recently announced that they would begin encrypting searches for searchers who were logged in to their Google account. So now many search marketers and business owners are seeing a rise in the number of keywords labeled as Not Provided in their analytics from the Organic Google traffic source.

Google originally stated that it would most likely account for 10% or less of searches, but many small companies are seeing larger spikes. And as many of you search marketers out there would agree, “This Sucks!”

Matt Cutts even stated that this would only affect searches by a single digit percentage. But within the last two weeks we have seen as well as others higher than 10% results for the not provided keyword in our Google Analytics Accounts.

The word is that you will get the full keyword results in your google webmaster tools account, but this is aggregated and cannot be placed at the individual level.

Darn it Google, what’s the deal?!

Chevy Sonic Adventure Experience and Clues

Today my wife and I took part in the Chevy Sonic Adventure in St. Louis.

It was a very fun and sadly I did not win.

Let me describe the experience, the clues and how to win the Chevy Sonic Adventure challenge.

We arrived at registration around 8:40 am and registration began at 9am.  We just gave them our name, they checked us off the list, gave us an instruction card and sent us to get our Chevy Sonic Adventure T-Shirts.  We waited until about 10 minutes to 10 and then they started telling us how the contest would go, what to do if we have a problem and cheered for the sponsors.

You can either receive text clues and answer by text or if you have an iphone or Android OS you can download the SCVNGR app to play, which is much better because there is a map showing you where each clue is relative to your location.  *USE the SCVNGR app!!!

The way to win is to be quick!  Hit as many challenges as possible !  You get 3 chances to answer each clue so if you think you know the answer,  quickly give it a try so you can be off to the next if you’re right.  If you aren’t right that first time take a bit of time to READ the clue Carefully and then answer.  (HINT) the harder the clue/question the more points it is worth.

Here are some examples of the challenges/clues/questions:

“Go to Christ Church Cathedral and find a red information sign and find the reverend who is listed last and send back his last name as a seven digit phone number.   So the reverends last name on the sign was KILGORE so the answer was 545 4673.”

“Go to Busch Stadium and find the player statues outside of the Team Shop, add the number of players with one foot on the ground to the number of players with two feet on the ground and divide by the number of players with no feet on the ground.  There were 5 players with one foot on the ground, 4 players with two feet on the ground and 1 player with no feet on the ground. 5 + 4 = 9  /1 = 9″

“Go to Flamingo Bowl and count the number of bowling pins and martini glasses dancing on the edge of the marquee/sign then text back as a roman numeral.  there were 35 pins and glasses so the answer was XXXV.”

“Go to the Statue of a pink suit in the city garden and count the number of visible buttons then add that to the birth year of the artist.  There were 13 buttons and there was a small round plaque on the ground that showed the artist was born in 1964, so the answer was 1977.”

“Go to the wainright building and look across the street at the production posters and text back the number of syllables of the longest title in production.  The longest title was Joseph and and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  The answer was 13.”

!!!VERY IMPORTANT!!!

Some of these challenges that involved the chevy sonic cars didn’t require you to be there.  For example one question was on 6th and Pine there is a silver Chevy Sonic with its smooth lines and angled tire stance what kind of animal does this remind you of?  There was no wrong answer, you could have said anything and it would have been right.”

 

So my advice to you is use the SCVNGR App, work off the map and do each challenge by location – move to each one as quickly and as efficiently as possible, if you aren’t as familiar with the city look where others are going / at and jump on it.  See what they are doing to gain a quick edge at that challenge, don’t stop moving, run as much as possible (this thing is two hours long so it is a workout).

The prizes are a Chevy Sonic Car for first place – two Ipads for second and 3rd through 10th get one Ipad per team.

In St. Louis there were around 150 teams.

Exact Match vs Partial Match in SEO Today

Wistia

It used to be that when obtaining backlinks you would want to get every link to be the exact match for the keyword you were looking to rank for. An example is “PPC Agency” vs the “Second Best PPC Agency” the first would be an exact match for PPC Agency and the second is a partial match for the term PPC Agency. But now the times are changing and you are seeing much more weight attributed to partial match anchor text links. So get em!

Below is a transcript of the video above:

Google Plus, Plus One and Online Marketing

By now you have mostly likely experienced the Social Side of Google with Google Plus and may have noticed many websites now sporting the Google Plus 1 or +1 button (similar to a facebook like or digg).

Google Plus

What does all of this mean for Online Marketing ?

Well it could actually mean a lot.  The fact that Google has found the social integration to be such a massive force that it has put its efforts into this new development says to the world of online marketers that social media is a must!  Most of us good online marketers already know / knew that social media is a huge key to successful online marketing campaigns, but this is a confirmation to the enormous impact it actually has.

Social Media and Influence

It’s no secret that Social Media is an integral part of any successful online marketing campaign.  But what some view as new, others view as just a new channel for the same old thing.

Many will talk about social media as connectivity, friends, FarmVille!  There are many great attributes within the many popular social platforms out there, but the real successful marketers out there will implement age old strategies in their social media campaigns that get results.  Catchy Headlines to get people to act, Flow and Games.  All of these tools become exponential grabbers of attention and exposure.

The Groupon Business Model

Today it is evident that even online marketing can work for businesses who aren’t even online! If you look at the business model Groupon.com has put in place it makes sense for a company to put a deal up where the online marketer pays for all of the advertising and still pays them out a portion of the purchase of the deal itself. In traditional models you could put a coupon out there that you had to pay for all advertising expense and then the customer just gets the discount.
Anyway we think it is a great model and many start ups have come a long way with the idea as well. Niche Daily Deal sites are springing up and these types of sites are very popular in smaller markets that Groupon or Living Social do not touch.