What is Remarketing?

What is remarketing? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. Remarketing, sometimes also referred to as retargeting, is a strategic digital marketing technique that we use to re-engage individuals who have previously interacted with our website or some other form of digital content, but they didn't convert into customers or clients or, in our case, a lot of the time, it's just leads. And essentially, remarketing allows businesses to follow up with potential clients who have shown us an interest in our services but they haven't taken that final step, like making a purchase or scheduling a consultation.

And the basic concept behind remarketing is that we want to keep our brand and our services in front of our audience, even after they have left our website, and we want to keep ourselves top of mind all the time. So we achieve this by doing some simple things. First, we place a small piece of code. This is usually how remarketing or retargeting works. We place this code it's usually called a pixel or a snippet on our website, and then, when visitors come to our site, the pixel drops a cookie in their browser, and that allows us to target these users with specific ads as they browse through other websites on the internet. These ads can be really effective and they serve sometimes as a gentle reminder, but sometimes not so gentle, encouraging users to return to our site and complete that intended action. Remarketing can be done through a bunch of different platforms, with Google Ads being one of the most popular because of the extensive reach, the strong capabilities, all of that kind of stuff, and through Google Ads we can create really tailored ad campaigns that target specific audiences based on their previous interactions on their website. But Google isn't the only one, and I should mention that remarketing and retargeting these are terms that are often used interchangeably in digital marketing, but they do have some subtle differences, particularly in their methods and their applications, and so let's just really quickly talk about the differences between remarketing and retargeting, because I even use these, sometimes interchangeably.

So remarketing generally refers to the practice of re-engaging previous visitors or users through other content, often through email campaigns or through staged content, through retargeting campaigns. So, for example, let's say, if a user visits your law firm's website, subscribes to your newsletter, but doesn't schedule a consultation either on the website or through a link in the email, you could use remarketing strategies through email to send them up a follow-up with additional information or a special offer for an appointment or just something that will encourage them to book an appointment, but you could also do a staggered set of display ads through Google ads, and that would also technically qualify as remarketing. Retargeting, on the other hand, is more commonly associated with online advertising. It is more commonly associated with those display ads and with Google ads, and this involves using those cookies to track the website visitors and then displaying those targeted ads to them as they browse other websites or other social media platforms, and the real difference here is that retargeting is about targeting them again, and often this means targeting them for a different product.

Remarketing generally refers to re-engaging users who haven't made the first purchase we want them to make. Retargeting is using the people we already have and targeting them again, but the reality of this is it doesn't really matter. Like I said, these terms are often used interchangeably and the key part here is that we are targeting or marketing to the people who we've already marketed to again, and sometimes the semantics do matter, but today it really doesn't so much, and we're using the term remarketing and we're talking about remarketing specifically, but that's not because retargeting isn't important, and we are going to talk about that in more detail today, but today we are talking about the key reasons. Remarketing is a strategy that you need to be using. So let's run down the list. Number one is increased conversion rates, and you all know why this matters, but remarketing helps in converting potential clients who are already familiar with your brand. People who have visited your site are more likely to respond positively to your ads compared to just completely cold audiences, and by staying top of mind, you keep nudging these warm leads closer to becoming actual paying clients. Number two is that it's cost-effective advertising. It tends to be one of the most cost-effective advertising forms we have access to and since you're targeting this really specific audience that has already shown a lot of interest, the cost per click or your cost per acquisition, is generally going to be much, much lower than campaigns that are targeting new audiences or search campaigns. Often this is by a factor of five or 10. So this immediately ensures a better return on investment for our marketing budget, and the reality is it's kind of hands-off, so it's very cost-effective.

Number three is personalized ad experiences, and really in the legal universe we don't get a lot of chances to do this. Google has some restrictions on it and there's some things we can't do on Google, but one of the really powerful elements of remarketing is these personalized ad experiences. You can create highly personal ads that are tailored to the specific interests, the behaviors of your website visitors, and so, for instance, if someone visited the section of your website that's about family law services or, more specifically, about child support calculation, then you'll target them with ads that are specific to that expertise. They're specific to child support and maybe even they include success stories in child support cases. This level of personalization, while not calling out the user individually, makes your ads significantly more relevant and much more compelling. Number four on our list, though, is brand recall and recognition, and for a lot of firms, this isn't the most important point, but it is something to pay attention to, because consistent exposure to your brand through remarketing this helps build brand recall and recognition, even in the local market, and even if the users don't convert immediately, this repeated exposure to your brand reinforces your presence in your market or in their city, in their users' minds, when they are ready to seek legal services. When these users are ready to call in and make an appointment, your firm is already on their mind and it's probably going to be the first one that they call.

Number five on our list is targeted follow-ups. Remarketing allows for much more strategic follow-ups based on user behavior. Kind of similar to number three with the personalized ad experiences. You can create different ad campaigns for users who visited your site but didn't fill out a contact form versus those who added a service to their inquiry list but didn't complete a booking or made a specific search in your blog. This type of targeted approach ensures that your follow-up efforts are relevant and effective and they actually hit the user where they need to be hit. And last but not least, on our list here of why remarketing is so effective and it's because it has measurable results. One of the really significant advantages of remarketing is the ability to track and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, because, while Google provides detailed analytics and insights on all of our campaigns, remarketing gives us some really interesting data because it's users we've already collected. So when we're working with this information, we know that it's going to have much higher rates of click-throughs and conversions, and this allows us to do some really interesting things with our campaigns. Now, before we move on to the key metrics you need to understand about remarketing and the key things you need to be looking at, let's quickly talk at one of the strategies I like to use to make sure that our ads have success over the long term.

This is something that a lot of people forget. I've seen it a lot of the time on Facebook where people really forget to implement this, and there's a really big problem that happens with remarketing ads, and that problem is overexposure or ad fatigue. They're kind of separate problems but they're kind of the same. Overexposure is where you're getting too many views of your ads from the same people, so they're seeing the same ads six times a day, 10 times a day, and it's just too much. It's going to annoy the user, it's going to cause them to become indifferent or just ignore the campaign entirely.

And the other side is ad fatigue. Ad fatigue is a similar thing where a user is seeing an ad over and over and over, but maybe it's not six times a day, maybe it's three times a day, but it's over three weeks, and over that period of exposure to that ad, where they're seeing it 60 plus times, they're going to fatigue. It's not going to be interesting to them, and so to prevent this, what we want to do is implement frequency capping. Frequency capping allows us to control how often our ads are shown to the same user. Google has this, facebook has this, most display ad companies have this. So, for example, you would set a cap to ensure that your ads are shown no more than five times a week to a single user. This balance it helps keep your brand top of mind, but it avoids becoming intrusive, which is where we really start to see problems with remarketing. And on top of that, the other thing to consider is rotating different ad creatives and different messaging to keep your audience engaged. So if you have a couple of different ads in there, this can prevent fatigue and actually increase the chances of capturing the user's interest. So in that same scenario where we have one user seeing it five times in a single day, if we have five separate ads running, that's going to really keep things broken up, prevent fatigue and really increase the chance that we're going to get a click and a lead out of that user.

But at the end of the day, we do have to come back to my favorite subject, which is A-B testing. No, we're going to talk now about the key metrics we really need to understand for remarketing, and these are very similar to the typical metrics you need to understand for pay-per-click. So we're not going to spend much time here, but these are the metrics you'll be looking at when you do perform my favorite activity, which is AB testing. We're not talking about it today because I talk about it all the time. It's something you'll need to do with remarketing as well.

So the key metrics we really want to stay on top of, obviously our number one is conversion rate. This is the metric that tells us the percentage of users who are completing our conversion, our desired action. That happens after clicking on the ad and landing on the landing page, something like scheduling a consult or filling out a contact form. And obviously a higher conversion rate tells us that our ad is effectively driving the actions we want. So conversion rate is number one. Number two is cost per conversion. It's very close to conversion rate, but cost per conversion tells us how much we're paying to generate each conversion and obviously we want to keep this as low as possible. So if we're seeing this bump up a little bit, it's probably time to revisit things, adjust our copy, adjust our strategy, our targets, and see how we can do. But this is a very close number two cost per conversion.

The number three is click-through rate. This is really important, especially in the first week or two, so that you can see how the users are reacting to your ad. A high click-through rate tells us that our ad is relevant, it's engaging to the audience and people like it, and if our CTR is low, people don't love it so much. We need to test a little bit more. We need to see what we can change in our copy, in our graphics or maybe even in our targeting options.

Number three is our impressions and reach, and again, this is more important in the first couple of weeks, where we can see whether or not we're getting the appropriate reach, the appropriate impression share for what we're bidding on, because if we're really getting slammed, then we might want to adjust our bidding, we may need to adjust our creative a bit more to improve our quality score, but these impressions and reach will tell us how much exposure we're getting and how many eyeballs we're in front of, which is really important for understanding if we're being effective with our outreach strategy. And finally, this is a metric that there is definitely some controversy over, but I am including it here because if you're able to track this, it's really, really effective and it's our return on ad spend. This is measuring the revenue generated for every single dollar we spend on advertising and, at the end of the day, this is what helps us understand the effectiveness and the profitability of our remarketing campaigns and our pay-per-click. Overall, a high ROS is ROAS is really where we want to be, and a low ROAS tells us we have a bit more work to do. And really, these metrics are no different than most of the stuff we're watching.

When we do pay-per-click, the concept of doing remarketing is a bit different. Our audience is a little bit more captive, so to speak, and we have a little bit more flexibility with the display ads that we can run on this network. But the reason that it's so effective is because the people are already familiar with us and it gives us an opportunity to speak very directly to these potential clients and try to allay concerns or provide more information and to urge them along this process. So, when it comes to remarketing, if you're eligible unlike family lawyers are on Google Ads because unfortunately they're not if you're eligible for remarketing, I strongly suggest trying it. If you're not ready to actually run the ads, just go into Google, set up the pixel and start collecting users, in case you want to try it in the future. If you have questions about how remarketing works, don't hesitate to reach out. I'll be happy to help you out. That's it for legal marketing 101. Check out Rosenadvertisingcom for more Thanks.