There’s no arguing that retargeting is one of the most effective strategies for converting your website visitors, driving them to your properties, and filling your communities. But as effective as retargeting can be, it’s not a guarantee. In order for your retargeting to be effective – and deliver the kind of results you’re looking for – you need to structure your campaigns in a way that set you up for success.

 But what does that structure look like? What’s the secret formula for successful retargeting campaigns?

 Know What’s Important

 Before you start structuring campaigns for your building business, you need to know what to structure them around. What’s are the important components?

 When it comes to building effective retargeting campaigns for your building business and communities, there are four questions you need to ask yourself. The answer to each of these questions will drive your strategy and how you structure your different ad groups.

 Those four questions include:

Where did the user interact with my website?

Where the user interacted with your website is extremely important, and it’s equally as important to segment your ad groups based on where that interaction took place.

 Now, you don’t have to create separate ad groups for every single page or component on your website. But you do want to segment your audience based on their likelihood to convert. So, for example, a person who briefly visited your homepage is less likely to convert than someone who made it to your sales or “Learn More” page. Those groups require different strategies and different messaging – and, as such, belong in different ad groups.

How long has it been since this user visited my website?

A general rule of marketing in the building world is the longer it’s been since someone has interacted with your website, the harder it’s going to be to convert them. Your most recent website visitors are much more likely to convert.

By separating your ad groups into cookie durations, you’re able to target your messaging based on how long it’s been since someone has visited your site – and increase conversions in the process. How you break down your cookie durations is up to you, but a good rule of thumb is to create ad groups with one day, two day, one week (seven days), and one month (30 days) cookie durations.

What type of ad will work best with this audience? 

Not all ad types are created equal. And if you want to find success with your retargeting campaigns, you need to know which ad type and format converts best for each audience. 

And the only way to do that is to create separate ad groups for each ad type: static display ads, dynamic display ads, and text ads.

 By separating ad types, you’re able to compare apples to apples and see which formats are performing best for your building business. So, for example, you might find that serving text ads to people who checked out your listings page generate more clicks, but dynamic display ads generate more conversions. This data will help you decide how much to bid for each ad type, keeping your CPC (cost per conversion) as low as possible.

Where are my ads appearing?

You can have extremely strong ad campaigns, but if they’re not showing in the right places, they’re not going to be as effective as you’d like them to be. So, for example, if you’re trying to get people to view – and hopefully buy – one of your properties, showing your ads when they’re shopping for home goods is likely a fit. While they’re reading health-related news or checking the weekend weather? Not so much.

By segmenting your ad groups by contextual relevance, you’re able to better control where your ads are shown – and drive better results.

Structure Your Campaigns Based On The Answers To Your Questions

So now that you know what’s important when structuring your ad campaigns, let’s talk about how that looks in action.

Let’s say you wanted to create campaigns for four places users had interacted with your website: your homepage, your listing page, your FAQ page, and your contact page. And you wanted to create those campaigns for four different cookie durations: one day, two days, seven days, and 30 days.

When you’re creating your marketing campaigns, “Where did the user interact with my website?” and “How long has it been since this user visited my website?” come into play in two separate sections: the “People who visited a page with the following” section is WHERE the user interacted. The “Membership duration” section is HOW LONG it’s been since the user interacted, where you set your cookie duration.

So, you would create an audience for each place a user had interacted AND each cookie duration, for 16 audiences total (make sure you name each audience in a way that’s easy to remember and won’t confuse you later). Once your audiences are in place, you can create 16 ad groups and apply a different audience to each.

Once you have those ad groups, you’ll need to duplicate each for every type of ad format you’ll be using. So, if you were testing dynamic display ads and text ads, you would need to make duplicate each of your ad groups, for a total of 32 groups (Four places users interacted with your website X three cookie durations X two ad types). 

Then, it’s time to duplicate one more time: this to add context. In remarketing, you don’t need to be as specific with your contextual targets as you would in other campaigns; since you already know the user is interested in what you have to offer (as they already visited your website), you can widen the net to where your ads are served while still keeping things relevant. 

So, for example, you might want to have one campaign that covers the entire “Real Estate” topic and another for “Home and Garden;” a person who visited your website who is browsing these topics is far more likely to convert than someone reading up on the latest fitness craze or shopping for new shoes. 

How To Bid On Your Campaigns 

Now, when all is set and done, you’ll have a lot of campaigns on your hand (in the above example, the final number is 72). Each of these campaigns has a different and unique combination of data based on the answers to the important questions you asked yourself at the beginning of this exercise.

The key to bidding is to start with a base bid on all campaigns, and then adjust your bids based on the value of the audience. So, for example, the value of a user who visited your sales page two days ago is far higher than someone who visited your homepage 30 days ago. Bid higher for the more valuable users and then use the data that comes in from each campaign to adjust your bids accordingly. 

If you’ve managed remarketing campaigns before, you can use that data to help you set your bids, but if not, don’t worry: it’s totally find to base your initial bids on instinct and/or “guessing’ and then tweaking each campaign as the results roll in. 

Switch How You Bid When The Time Is Right 

Once you’ve got a good amount of conversions under your belt with your campaigns (let’s say 15 – 20), you can let Google take over the bidding and switch your target to CPA (or ROAS) for even better results. 

Google takes additional information into account (like device and location) when setting their bids. This allows them to get a more precise CPC, better understand which audience segments are most valuable to your company, and bid accordingly. 

The secret formula for successful retargeting campaigns for your building business starts with just four simple questions. These four questions create a foundation (pun intended) for your campaigns and can help you better understand your audience and how to remarket to them effectively, which will ultimately lead to more conversions – and more homes sold.