Behavioral targeting and PPC

As you know two members of our team have just passed the Google Adwords Qualified Professionals test with flying grades (and we knew they would ).

Following their successful passing of the accreditation and the results we see every day from the PPC campaigns they manage, I have asked them some key questions about the way they use web analytics to improve the campaigns’ ROI.

During our conversation we started to compare the various ways people advertise their products today. Whether it be by “traditional” methods like TV, radio and print or by online campaigns like Adwords, advertisers are constantly looking for ways to increase their conversion rates and ROI. This is when the discussion took a turn towards behavioral targeting and the possibility to retarget visitors. So I decided to write about retargeting and PPC instead.

PPC – How Does the Google Adwords Content Network work?

Google Adwords metrics are centered around keywords and websites that relate to those keywords and allow Google to place your PPC ads on them.

According to Google:
“Using your keywords, Google’s contextual targeting technology can automatically match your ads to web pages in our content network that are most relevant to your business.”

Google Adwords - contextual targeting technology

Google Adwords placement performance reports also allow you to refine the placement of your ads in order to improve your ROI:

“With the Placement Performance Report , you have visibility into where all your ads appear. Review your ad’s performance on a site-by-site basis to see impression, click, cost, and conversion data, and use this data to identify well-performing sites to target more aggressively and low-value placements that require content optimization or exclusion.”

Google Adwords - placement performance report

Retargeting and PPC

The basic idea behind Retargeting is that by visiting a website, the visitors are showing that they are interested in what that website has to offer. Retargeting uses a website visit — or a search ad that led a web user to a website — as a behavior that can be targeted. This behavior can then be used to serve relevant ads to the visitors after they leave the website.
 
For example, if I search for digital camera reviews and click on a PPC ad for a site that is relevant, then by using retargeting methods I could be served PPC ads for digital cameras sold on that site after I already left it. If I click the PPC ad and go back then I am more likely to purchase a camera because I have previously shown an interest in the products. Moreover, I placed interest in a brand, and the retargeting re-enforces the marketing message of the brand I already met (“oh, I already saw that nice site… let’s come back and buy the camera…”)

PPC data – Relevancy or Recency?

As the interview with my colleagues progressed we discussed such web analytics metrics as search queries, top referrers and time on site. But then the conversation turned to retargeting.

One metric that is available in Google analytics but is currently underused by PPC managers is “Visits to purchase”.

Google Analytics - visits to purchase

Right now it is less useful to them because the Adwords PPC ads are arranged by ad groups and not by visitors. This means that you can track a certain Ad’s performance right down to the keyword level and see which keywords perform better than others. But you can’t track visitors that clicked the PPC ads after they leave your site. Google however, can and does.

The Future of PPC?

This is where the conversation got interesting. We all read about the fact that Google has started to serve PPC ads that are targeted to the searchers based on their previous search queries. Google also knows how long it takes for a visitor that came from PPC to convert. Basically, this is the way Google calculates the “Visits to Purchase” metric. This means that using cookies, and Google search history (if you are logged in) Google knows if and when you visited my site before.

Wouldn’t it be great if Google was to add a new feature which allows you to create special ad groups to be shown specifically to user that visited your site before?

Now this is COOL!!! We have keywords campaigns, content campaigns, placement, radio, print, TV, local, mobile – why not “retargeting ads”!

Think about it, you could serve highly targeted and personalized ads for your would be returning visitors. Imagine being able to have an ad on the lines of:

“Remember your last visit to our site www. oursite.com?
You won’t believe the things we have to show you now!”

Hey, I don’t create PPC ads I just analyze them . The above example may be a little simple but you get my point.

 Targeted PPC traffic – would you use it?

After going over the idea several times I finally asked both PPC managers the following question:

If you could create ads targeted specifically for visitors that saw your site before, would you?

One answer was a quick “yes. For sure” while the other one was “probably not. I’m not sure it’s worth the time or even if it will be productive. But it might be interesting to test.”

We all agree that it’s better to make this distinction on the site itself and have special welcome messages and pages for returning visitors, but most sites today can not do that.

I am interested to know what you think on the subject:

If you could retarget visitors that saw your site before, would you?