When done well, PPC remarketing can be incredibly effective. (If you’re new to the concept, take a look at the AdWords help file.) Essentially, remarketing campaigns allow us to serve up ads to people who’ve previously visited your website, which makes the campaigns extremely targeted.
Consequently, we often include remarketing as a tactic in most PPC client campaigns from the get-go.
But once the initial excitement of campaign launch starts to fade, remarketing sometimes takes a backseat to other tactics. It chugs along quietly in the background, with little fuss.
But as you and your marketing team know, nothing in the world of PPC remains static for long. Lots of things can change, and those changes can impact your remarketing campaign efforts.
These changes can include:
- Changes to your business
- Changes to your website
- Changes to product features
- Changes to the market.
And that’s why every remarketing campaign can benefit from a little TLC now and again, in the form of a remarketing audit.
Changes to Your Business
Part of what makes a business successful is the ability to find and respond to new opportunities.
And so, over time, you may introduce new product lines and discontinue existing ones. When you introduce new lines, you’ll probably remember to let us know. You and your marketing team will be excited about the new additions and eager for us to promote them on your behalf.
However, sometimes clients forget to tell us about old product lines they’ve decided to quietly discontinue.
Fortunately, remarketing audits capture those changes. And this allows us modify the campaigns accordingly.
Changes to Your Website
As product lines change over time, so will your website. You may decide to add new sections or adjust existing ones. And often this entails changes to your website’s URLs.
URL changes can create problems with remarketing campaigns because many remarketing rules are based on your site’s URLs.
If your marketing team forgets to inform us of these URL changes, a remarketing audit is a good way to catch them.
Changes to Product Features
Usually, we’re able to catch product changes as they happen and add them to current remarketing campaigns or create new ones.
But after making ad hoc changes over several months, sometimes it’s smart to take a step back and look at the overall strategy. Because while ad hoc changes are fine, over time they may take your campaigns in a direction we hadn’t entirely anticipated.
So, we use remarketing audits as an opportunity to take a holistic view and ask, “If this was a new client, would we take the same approach?”
Changes to the Market
Remarketing audits also allow us to take another look your target market and the ads we direct to them.
Display ads that worked perfectly a few months ago may need some adjusting today.
We see this most often with seasonal products. Images and calls-to-action that worked great in December probably won’t work as well in July.
And sometimes these nuances don’t become evident until we audit your campaigns.
So don’t assume that your remarketing campaigns can run indefinitely without careful review. Most of them could benefit from some TLC. And a remarketing audit is a great way to do it!
For more on remarketing, see our post Getting Started With a PPC Agency Part 7: Remarketing.
