How to get your previous website visitors back to your site to signup as coaching clients by using an online advertising technique called Retargeting – with Alex Holmes

Owen: Hi, Everyone. My name is Owen McGab Enaohwo and welcome to The Coach Blueprint™, Episode 2. You’re watching this because you’re a coach looking to discover what’s currently working for coaches and what marketing ideas to implement in your business so that you can take the ideas that you learn from our show and go ahead to implement them in your business. Hopefully, you will come back and share your success stories with us as well. 
Assuming you’re currently marketing or promoting your business online by sending out many marketing messages to get new leads to your website and get them to eventually convert into paying coaching clients. The reality is that most people will not convert and become your clients after seeing your first message, so you will have to send sequential messages to them. So, you’re in a situation where if they don’t sign up the first time they come to your website or they don’t sign up for your e-mail list, then that means you’ve lost those particular website visitors. 
I want to share a new online technology with you, especially if you’re marketing your business online that will allow you to bring back those people who came to your website and did not take a desired action. It’s an online advertisement technology called “Retargeting.” And today my guest Alex Holmes is the founder of Hidden Audience, an online resource that teaches people how to go about setting up retargeting campaigns for their businesses. So Alex, welcome to The Coach Blueprint™.

Alex: Hello. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Owen: Let me explain the big ideas that we will be sharing with the audience. The first big idea that we will be discussing is how to setup a retargeting campaign that brings past website visitors who did not take a desired action back to our website and get them to sign up to become coaching clients. And also the next big idea is how to setup retargeting campaigns wherein you reach out to owners of websites that currently have your target audience and get them to become your retargeting partners so you can actually end up marketing to people who visited their sites as well.

Alex: Yeah, totally.

Owen: Please can you mention what you did for a personal finance client of yours. Please highlight that story first of all.

Alex: Yeah. Cool. There’s a ton of steps to talk about there. I co-wrote the Hidden Audience with a colleague of mine who’s also a consultant down here. We basically saw the same thing happen over and over again with all the retargeting campaigns that we managed. And so I can explain how to set up on retargeting display ads to people who have been to your website who haven’t performed the action that you want yet. And so yeah, we saw the same kind of problems happen over and over again. So we built this whole info product just around our findings:
A.) How to setup it up really quickly and make it work. 
B.) A 5-minute checklist on things that you can do to optimize your retargeting campaign and make it work.
C.) We put together some really advanced retargeting tactics that no one else is doing such as retargeting off your e-mail list, Facebook, mobile and all kinds of stuff like that.

 
Owen: And so let’s talk about what you did for that personal finance client because I want you to share that story with people listening so they know that you really have retargeting experience. So please tell us the story of what you did?

Alex: Yeah, of course. Basically, with personal finance guy, this actually goes one step beyond retargeting. This is actually audience targeting so it’s retargeting traffic from other sites. It’s bringing new people to your site and kind of fills up the top of your sales funnel. I targeted this list of audiences, target all kinds of finance audiences, stock audiences, people interested in trading, house investing, all kinds of stuff. But then I was like, “What the heck. I’ll throw in some web developers and web designers…” and that ended up being the best performing audience list which creates all kinds of really interesting theories about why that worked. 
So basically, people who’ve already been reading about financial products, they’d already made up their minds so they’re not very interested in your product whereas you got this kind of really smart and relatively well-off web developers and web designers. They’re not actively thinking about your product or your competitors so that could actually be your best target audience.

Owen: Can you share any kind of information on the return on income or metrics of what you delivered or the personal finance client?

Alex: Yeah. It’s awesome. I mean, the conversion rate was massive. It was probably 10X higher than what their average conversion rate was and then also they’re getting conversions. They’re only paying per click and I actually saw people seeing the ad and then signing up. So I’m talking about giving a 10X conversion boost on the click-through traffic, they’re also getting free conversions through view-through traffic. So it was an awesome situation to build upon definitely.

Owen: And so, we’re going to dive into more details in this interview and really break down what some of the terms that you just mentioned are so that those listening who doesn’t know what retargeting is can really get to understand it. But let me just share a real quick story of how I discovered this technology. I would go on certain sites like Zappos.com and some other sites that I love like SEOMoz.org mostly to learn about SEO and I would notice that if I go to other sites like even CNN.com or Time.com just to check the news, I would see the ads of the website I had recently been to on these other sites and I’m like, “Man, these people have a lot of money for advertising and they seem to be everywhere”. It felt like their ads were just following me all around the internet. 
Being someone that is curious about technology, I thought, “There has to be something behind this” and I did my research only to find out that this is something that has been going on for quite some time but only now the technology is now available to the small guys like us. And that’s why I had to get you on a show to teach my audience who are coaches how they too can use retargeting in their business. So what is retargeting? I think I’ve given them an idea of what retargeting is but from your perspective, what is retargeting?

Alex: So retargeting is the process of showing ads to people who have been to your site before and that at the most basic level, that’s it. If someone goes to your site you then have the ability for the next year and a half to show an ad to them at any number of times that you want. And then within that, you can get super fancy and do lots of fancy stuff. You hit it on the head by saying, “Oh, they must be advertising everywhere!” 
I think that’s one of the best effects of retargeting that now many people talk about. It really makes you appear bigger than you are and it has a massive awareness impacts. If you think about it, people who have been to your site before are pretty much the best audience to advertise to. These are people that know your products, they’ve heard of you before. So in addition, to being like in that perfect audience, they also will recognize you. So, they’ll really likely to see your ad and when you start writing these campaigns, you’ll see it for yourself the increase in the numbers; both in terms of click-through traffic as well as people who see your ad and then a week later, do something.

Owen: And earlier you said click-through traffic and view-through traffic. Can you explain them because my audience might want to know what do you mean by those?

Alex: So click-through traffic is just the kind of traffic that you’d see in like Google Analytics report. Someone clicks on the ad, you can say definitely this person came from my retargeting campaign. The beauty of banner ads is that people just don’t click on ads for whatever reason. So often people see the ad and then rather than click on it, they go into their browser and type in your website and you can track all that with the retargeting companies and retargeting networks. So it’s really important to track that and that’s actually a whole other discussion, how to correctly assess, if you’ll see like a hundred sign ups come from view-through, I usually attribute about half of those to the actual retargeting plus other tactics.

Owen: So the click-through thing is where they actually clicked on your retargeting ad and they come back, so that’s click-through. And then the view-through is where the system tracks the fact that they just saw the retargeting ad but instead of clicking on it, they specifically went to the URL entry point of their browser and typed the URL of your website?

Alex: Yeah. It’s all tracked via cookies. We have browser cookies.

Owen: Okay. I think that’s where we try to figure out now. We understand the concept, the technologies but how does exactly retargeting work so we can explain the technology to coaches listening so far.

Alex: Of course. So yeah, like how to practically kind of set it up and make it work for them?

Owen: Yeah, the technology behind it. I mean it has to do with cookies but just explain and let us understand what it is.

Alex: Yeah. Cool. So from a technology perspective it all has to do with browser cookies. So basically every browser got hundreds of little data points in there and all kinds of people are kind of putting these anonymous little signals in there saying that someone has been to this website like he was interested in sports, music, that kind of thing. By dropping a retargeting tag on your site it basically adding another little signal on that person’s browser saying, “This person is interested in my product.” And then as an advertiser, who has a Google Adwords advertising account; you have the opportunity to bid to show an ad to that person. 
Basically, whenever you go to a website, say you go to The New York Times, there’s that leader board at the top, basically there’s thousands of advertisers all bidding to show an ad to that person on that placement in real time. And so it’s got like the contextual advertisers and the audience advertisers and they’re all bidding because that audience is super valuable to you. You can bid a lot more and basically make sure that you show up there every time for that person which is pretty cool and that’s kind of why retargeting is still powerful.

Owen: Yea why exactly does retargeting work? I mean, I have already given you example of my own situation. As in what got me to investigate the technology, but as the expert in this field, why does it work though?

Alex: Think about it, it’s the absolute perfect audience. These are people, I think it’s like only 2% of people actually buy something when they first go to websites so that’s 98% of people that you can just remind over and over again. If you think about it, they come back as the perfect audience. These are people that know who you are, they like you, and they’re ready to buy. They just need that little nudge to get them over the hump. 
Similarly for a lot of advertisers, banner advertising just doesn’t work if you’re targeting context. So if you’re armed doing this retargeting audience data, you can basically bid a lot more than everyone else and get better impressions and clicks for super cheap especially when you’re comparing it to search, I mean it’s much cheaper – pretty much everyone that does retargeting right, it’s the best performing marketing tactic.

Owen: In our pre-interview, just so the audience gets to understand that we actually spend some time researching and discussing what we’re going to talk about in order to make sure that we make the interviews are jam-packed with information that is actionable that you can take and apply. You mentioned something about the three rules to retargeting success. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Alex: Yeah, totally. So you should be creating multiple audience lists on your website and then you should be creating ads for each audience lists that really speaks to that audience. So typically, you have a website, you have an e-mail, you have a Facebook page, you have all these people that are showing different intents based on what they’re doing on your website and what you can do is create multiple audience lists where you should to do it with AdWords, create multiple audience lists, place these tags in different parts of your sites and based on how they’re acting on your site, you create ads that speak to each of their interests.

Owen: So if I could dive into that a little because you mentioned something on audience list. So you’re saying that based on what the person does or the pages where the person visits on my website and I created a separate audience list so that way I can tell the retargeting tool that I’m using that this person for instance, in my own scenario they went to the “How we work” page. So they are trying to find out about the process of how we do our work. So if I will create an ad for that person who visited that page, it has to be in context of with what they saw on that page. Then if I created audience list of people who went to my sign up page, obviously this person now is really trying to take the next step to becoming a client and then the ad I’m creating for them to see when you go around the internet has to be something in line with what they were doing on my website. Is that what you’re saying?

Alex: Totally. Yeah. That’s a great way of thinking about it too. So based on what pages they go to, you can figure out if this person is like more interested in your product or not and if the person is more interested, you can show them more ads that are kind of this nudge awareness retargeting. Another kind of using your product as an example, you could have pages that show different features that you offer and then you drop a tag on one of those pages and you’re like, “All right, this person is interested in this feature specifically” and then when you show that person an ad, you mention that this feature kind of before the other ones. 
So if you really speak to those interests or if say you add a new feature that’s related and you kind of make that reference. They’re super powerful stuff like that if you often do that, basically no one does and the beauty with retargeting is if you get more specific with the audience list and the ad creative then click-through rates just go through the roof. I’ve seen like 1 or 2% of click-through rates which on banner ads is unheard of and super super cheap. I mean you can get clicks for like 10 to 15 cents in the U.S. if you’re doing it right. So yes, it’s pretty cool stuff.

Owen: And so how can we get with the audience list, we’re trying to break down this into the three parts you mentioned. You said the audience, the creative and the context, right?

Alex: Yeah. The context is important too. That’s probably not quite important but in our ebook we really kind of show Venn diagram to illustrate it. I’d say, the audience and the ads are the most important but context is very important too. Basically, when you run the campaign it’s important to block all kinds of spammy sites. There are lots of like in game and video stuff that tends to not perform as well; it depends on your product because sometimes it works. And then the other thing is you can overlay a context you want and white list of sites on top of the audience and ad that you already have. That’s totally better once you have kind of a bigger audience list and you’ve been doing it for awhile. But yeah, you can do really cool stuff like one thing we talked about in it is video retargeting. So basically, if you have a video, you can promote that video to your past visitors only when they’re on YouTube or only when they’re already viewing another video. That’s pretty powerful stuff. So you have the perfect audience and the perfect ad for that audience and you have an ad that has content that someone is already viewing and wants to view. I mean, it’s like the perfect, it’s the three…

Owen: I pay attention to several notable internet markets and they always say, “Try to get people onto your website and get onto an e-mail list” but it seems that with retargeting, you probably don’t even need an e-mail list. I mean, am I wrong to assume that?

Alex: Yeah. I kind of think of retargeting as an e-mail list. I think your audience list is kind of like the new e-mail list and e-mail is always going to be super powerful. I don’t think email is going out of fashion. But that’s what retargeting is, you’re building this audience list and it’s important if nothing else to at least drop this tag on your site. So if two months from now you can retarget to these people and you can retarget off e-mail list, if you want to or you can build e-mail subscribers from your retargeting tag as well to create call of action so there are lots of ways to do it.

Owen: And so you mentioned like there are 5 tips and tricks that in a way any coach thinking about making use of retargeting as part of their online marketing strategy can get started with. Can you mention some of those during this interview?

Alex: Yeah, totally. So yeah, we actually also got the Cheat Sheet for the audience. So you just download that, in 5 minutes you can kind of get your campaigns optimized. But yeah everyone’s site is different but just kind of taking a quick look at some examples. I started out, I created two audience lists, they’d be all visitors and then there would be subscribers or people who’ve already contacted you and you’d basically setup two retargeting campaigns. 
One would be for basically everyone that’s been to your site that hasn’t performed an action yet. So, another list could be negative audiences; people who’ve already performed that action or already subscribed and I’d created 6 or 7 different banner ads with different messages and cycle those through. Then show them banners ads across the internet, about a couple impressions per week kind of thing and then you’d have your second audience list which are people that already know you and already subscribed to you and were just only called “drip” for every retargeting which is showing them an ad once a week or once a month. It just kind of like a little reminder that you exist and doing something like that is super cheap as well.

Owen: I’m trying to make sure that every word or term you say, we break it down. You mentioned “impressions.” Just so that someone who doesn’t know what that is, explain that please a little bit.

Alex: Yeah. It’s just an ad showing up on a website. So your ad shows up a thousand times, that’s a thousand impressions. And if you do, the numbers of impressions are super cheap. I mean work it out, often like a dollar per thousand. So that’s pretty good like you’re serving ads to the perfect person for pretty much cheaper and better placements than anyone else. So, it’s pretty cool.

Owen: So let me see if I can make it more concrete. In the sense of different people, they are listening to this right now, a coach who has a website where maybe two things you can really do. Either you go on the website and buy the coaches’ time in terms of group coaches. So, you’re signing up a group coaching, you’re paying for that or signing up. For those people who don’t want the group coaching right now, sign up to receive kind of an e-mail information so they can get like a free info or whatever. So there’s really two call to action that they want people to do, either you’re going on that sign up for the group coaching and pay for that service or you sign up for an e-mail to receive a free content. So, in the context of retargeting and just that example, how can we break it down for the coaches on what they would do just based on that example I just gave?

Alex: Yeah. Cool. So phase one would be just getting more people to subscribe. So I’d create two lists. One list would be all visitors and then one list would be people that have already subscribed. So you’d create, setup an ad. Once you get those two tags live, you setup an ad, you say, “I want to reach all visitors on my site” and then you setup a negative audience for people subscribed. So you’re always showing ads to people who haven’t subscribed yet. The way you do with people on that.

Owen: Negative audience to me based on what I understand about it is that okay, now in this example we have the people who viewed your sign up page to sign up for your coaching services and then people who viewed the other page where they are signing up to receive a free information from you via e-mail. So anyone who goes to any of those two pages, you basically create two retargeting audience list, right? One for each of those two examples and then a negative audience would be someone who actually completes that action. Any of those two actions, right?

Alex: Right. Yeah. So this basically sounds like there’s three points in the sales flow. It’s visitors, there are subscribers and there are people who’ve already contacted you. And basically, you can run two campaigns. One is to get visitors to subscribers and then one to get people to actually contact you and then just run those separately.

Owen: So anyone listening to this right now knows what retargeting is what is the easiest way to get started with it?

Alex: Yeah, totally. So I would log into the AdWords and I’d create two audience lists – one for visitors, one for subscribers. Make sure you have conversion tag setup for those actions you want people to do and then you build the audience list off those conversion tags which you can do automatically in AdWords and then set those. When you create a new audience list off the conversion tag, then you turn that audience into the negative audience when you setup the campaign. Sounds kind of complicated, once you’ve done it a few times, it’s pretty quick.

Owen: Let me see if I can break it down for my audience as well. So you have these two actions we want to achieve. People who go to the sign up page and become group coaching client and the people who go and look at the page where they opt-in to receive your e-mail. So those two people now become two separate audience list and then there’s obviously going to be a page when if someone completes any of those actions, there’d probably be “Thank You” page that they would see on the next page. “Hello. Thank you for signing up to receive my free info” or “Thank you for becoming a coaching client, we’ll get back to you ASAP.” So once they do any of those two actions, they’d go to the “Thank You” page. Now you put in another retargeting tag on those “Thank You” pages and that will kind of be like the conversion, a negative audience.

Alex: Yeah, totally. That’s exactly it and then you can do all kinds of cool stuff if you want. You could also thank them with a banner ad like for the next 7 days after they sign up. Like that’d be a pretty cool thing like no one does stuff like that. But as a marketer, it costs next to nothing to setup a campaign like that and I think it’s a really cool kind of awareness builder. It’s a great way to add another touch point between you and your customer. It’s a great opportunity.

Owen: It’s really beautiful because in Marketing 101 where in order for someone to buy your product, you need… For instance if someone was sending out direct mail, you don’t just send out one direct mail and say “Okay. I’m going to get clients” you’d send a one direct mail and then you’d send out multiple direct mails in the sequence at different time intervals. Just trying to get there to a point where they’re comfortable with you and they want to work with you, at this point they will actually pick up the phone or whatever and do something with you, the whole idea with retargeting now makes this thing more automatic and even you can get multiple touch points with your clients a lot faster or potential clients a lot faster because you will be everywhere and around the internet wherever they are and they will see your ads everywhere. It’s remarkable!

Alex: Yeah. And Owen, I’m glad you brought that up because the thing is from a pure click-through basis, retargeting does really well. For a performance marketing tactic I think it is great. It’s definitely performance but there’s also a massive opportunity to build brand awareness as well and if you just keep those regular touch points between you and your customer then when they’re actually ready to buy or remember you or know you and I think that should be the goal pretty much any marketing campaign. You want customers to know about you when they’re ready to buy or ready to tell a friend about you. I mean, with retargeting, you can do that incredibly easily to the perfect group of people.

Owen: Definitely. I just use Google AdWords to place ads based on search, people searching for keywords, in my case “virtual assistant” or whatever. And now Google AdWords, I guess last year or 2 years ago that came out with their own retargeting platform so that you can retarget your ads on their network. I am sure though that there are other retargeting platforms, so what are the names of the top three retargeting platforms out there besides Google AdWords so that my audience can give them a try.

Alex: Yeah. So I’ve worked with Google AdWords for retargeting because it has all these extra layers of filters. So you can do all kinds of optimization and really make it work the best. The two probably other really big ones are AdRoll and ReTargeter. Well, those guys do serve your ads on multiple networks so you get a lot more reach than if you only used Google AdWords. Generally, they also add a margin on top so you pay extra 20% or 30% on top of what the actual cost them to display you retargeting ads. 
So, it kind of depends on everyone. I usually suggest starting with AdWords and just try to make it work for you and keep it simple because most people already run campaigns in there anyways. And this is me, kind of as a marketer talking, that’s my background. It’s good to kind of have everything in one place. Keep it organized. You already have the conversion tags setup. Make sure it works and then if it works, figure out ways to expand from there.

Owen: Definitely. We’ve been talking about how someone can setup a retargeting campaign, where you put the retargeting tag codes on our sites to build your audience list and then also build a list of people who have converted. So you build your negative audience so that you’re only showing retargeting ads to people who have taken a specific action on your site. In this case, sign up for free e-mail info or becoming a group coaching client. But there are other advanced retargeting tactics that you might be willing to share with the audience. One of which I think partner retargeting. Can you explain what that is?

Alex: Yeah. Alright, I love partner retargeting, that what I spend all day doing actually. So if you have a smaller site, there’s only so many people coming to your site in the first place and hence only so many people who can view your retargeting ads. What I found is that if you already shown these people 10 ads a month, it’s not always better to show them 20 ads a month. If you think about it, you’re interrupting these people in their daily lives. I mean, if they don’t click after 10 impressions, after 20 and there’s kind of bigger problems to solve there.

Owen: Sorry for interrupting but you just made a very good point about how to set up a frequency cap to control the number of times your audience sees your ad impressions. From your perspective, how many times should this be?

Alex: Good question. It’s different for everyone. Generally speaking, the more ads you show them, the lower the click-through rate. On the other hand, if you only show one ad per person per month, your volume is going to be really small and you’re not going to get much out of it. I usually started about 6 per week. But yeah, everyone is different. I’ve seen people go as high as 20. I have some clients which are running at like 1 or 2 a week just because they haven’t big enough audience list and can only afford to do that.

Owen: So I guess maybe the best thing too if you’re going to actually show them more impressions of your ad, it might also mean that you add alternative versions of that ad so that they don’t experience ad fatigue I guess?

Alex: Totally. That’s absolutely it. Yeah, I recommend anyone just crank out lots of that creative in their tools. I use a tool called bannersnack.com and it’s free. It does flash ads as well as static ads.

Owen: Bannersnack is free? Okay. I’m going to write it out. Go ahead.

Alex: Yes, it’s a great tool. And then actually, my colleague Mick, he uses PowerPoint. He created templates that have like the banner size is already built-in so we can just crank them out that way and there are all kinds of other tools. If you’re not much the designer, you can go to 99designs.com, fivver.com. We actually have a list of banner makers in our free ebook as well so make sure you get that. But I mean, once you’ve done it few times, you can crank out ads pretty quickly and I think it’s really important to create ads, refresh it every 3 months because don’t forget, I mean these are your customers, these are the people who are going to build your brand and your product for you. Like you don’t want to piss them off and you want to show they understand with the thinking and just give them new messages to think about.

Owen: Definitely. And just to bring you back on track of where we’re talking about Partner Retargeting. Explain that.

Alex: Yeah. Cool. So partner retargeting is basically the process of putting retargeting tags on your partner’s websites. So often, what you might find is that “Hey, this blogger or this friend of mine has a product that’s like very similar to mine.” It’s not competitive but it’s the same type of person would be going to this site. That would go to my site, be interested in my product and so you can actually build a retargeting list off someone else’s website. So obviously, you have to be friends with that person to let him put your own code on there. They have to trust you but it can be an incredibly effective way to build your audience list and basically gives you a lot more volume for your retargeting tags. Actually, I started my business a little over a year ago doing just that because my last company, retargeting was our best performing tactic but I wanted a bigger audience list and I couldn’t do that. So I went out and started contacting all kinds of blogs and built these niche audience lists for advertisers. That’s why I spend most of my time doing.

Owen: That tactic is really beautiful and I want to even explain it more to the coach listening to this right now. You understand that you have a target market that you go after, right? In my case, I go after coaches to provide them with virtual assistance services but then I realized that I’m not the only person or only type of service going off after coaches. There are marketers who are trying to teach coaches how to find more clients. There are people that make tools, online tools that coaches could use. There are people who have magazines for coaches and they have an association that represents coaches. In my case, potential retargeting partners that I can go to and put my retargeting code on their sites so that when their audience who’s never been on my site before but they are my target audience get tagged by my retargeting code, now I have more people to see my ads as they go around the internet.

Alex: Totally. Yeah. And actually brings up another interesting point too. What is your target audience exactly? Like no one really knows and with retargeting, you can define that in about 20 minutes. So basically, what you do is you create 10 to 20 audience lists so you target third party audience through me or through someone else and we can say “All right. We’ll target people who want to work more efficiently. We’ll target people that have been to the business coaching websites. Well target these 10 groups and within a week we’ll know. All right, this group had the highest click-through rate, this group had the highest conversion rate, this group has the most view-through conversions” and so, rather than doing this like big survey, you’d actually be able to say “All right. This site, this audience is my target audience”. I don’t know any online tool in the history of the internet that works like this.

Owen: Well, the power of technology these days is just wonderful because at the end of the day, if you’re doing all these different marketing tactics, in this case we’ve been talking about retargeting specifically as an online advertising tactic, you’ll have to be able to track the data to know how is your marketing spend? How is it working to get you some return on income? So in the case of retargeting, what can of ways can one kind of track the data and make sure that there’s positive ROI?

Alex: Yeah. So there are more things to make sure your conversion tags are setup and like any other advertising campaign, you can track everything. There’s no minimum spends. So you can kind of bring it up and down as it works. Again, we have this Cheat Sheets that just gives you a couple of things to watch out for and check off the list. If you do those things, retargeting is basically going to work. If not, send me an e-mail. Set up the negative audiences so that if someone has already done your desired action, they don’t see your ads. Set up a reasonable frequency cap. Block of certain categories of sites. We made the checklist for you so that you can get started with retargeting right away. And the next step is how do you get more volume? How do you make it work even better? And we’d give you some tips for that as well. Often you’ll find that your audience plus these four sites really perform the best. So then you could actually bid or show your ads more frequently on certain types of sites. Also you should start to segmenting your audiences, you’ll find that “Hey, Someone that’s been to my sign up page is much more likely to convert than just general site visitors.” Another really interesting retargeting tactic I’ve played with in the past is the latency window.

Owen: What is that?

Alex: Within the AdWords, you can actually create audience lists within audience lists. So say you have an audience, so you can say, all right there’s 10,000 people have been to my site in the last month. If you want pretty quickly, you can say, “All right. I want to create audience with people who have only been to my site in the last day.” And then what you do is you say, “All right. I’ll pay a dollar per click for anyone that’s been to my site in the last month, okay, $2 per click for anyone that’s been to my site the last day.” So then anyone that’s been to your site just in the last 24 hours they’re much more likely to see more of your ads and that can bring up your ROI.

Owen: I like that because it’s kind of like they just had been on your site and you have created a separate list within all your list of visitors. But then you’d say, “Okay. Now, we want to create a list of people that just recently been to my site and I don’t even mind paying even more.” So that when they go on other sites, they see my ads much quicker because we still kind of top of mind in their mind at that point.

Alex: Yeah. And you want to get them before they go to your competitors. Well, a lot of people, they type in a service and they’d Google and they’d go to 5 or 6 websites, if you can get people before they go to competitor, that’s super powerful in all pretty much every case. Advertising to someone within a day of them going to your site is always going to perform the best. Interestingly though, I’ve seen this with a couple of clients often like after 30 days can be a really nice window as well. So, if you target people that have been to your site 30 days or later, it can actually convert better than some that’s been to your site in the last 30 days which actually goes against the logic I was thinking of before. But then it just goes the show.

Owen: Test, test, test.

Alex: Okay. Test, test, test. Yeah.

Owen: Well, I love that. Well, Alex I mean you’ve been very helpful sharing all these retargeting information and I always way to leave my audience listening with a means to take the next step regarding what they just learned. So it’s not just an interview where you just listen for fun but an actionable interview. So in order for them to take all this information they just learned about retargeting as an online advertisement technique, what’s the very next step that they should take in order to get started with retargeting?

Alex: Yeah. We got the Cheat Sheet on there on hiddenaudience.com. It’s free, anyone can download it. We also have a blog, we talk about a lot of interesting retargeting tactics on there too. And then if you want to try some audience targeting stuff, some partner retargeting, that’s what I do all day every day. So just find me at Yaudience.com. There’s a contact box there.

Owen: Yeah. But I was thinking maybe if it’s Google. Where do they go? What’s the first thing they need to do to get started with retargeting?

Alex: Yeah. Go to Google and then there’s a little link. I think there’s a Get Starting Guide. I don’t know if that’s in their community or not. If it’s not on their main website, in our free ebook we basically walk through exactly how you can get started with Google Adwords retargeting, how to create an audience list and how to create a negative audience for people who have already signed up.

Owen: That’s why you’re talking about how to get started, making use of Google AdWords. That’s what you mean, right?

Alex: Yeah.

Owen: Okay. So, I guess what you are saying to the listener is that they can immediate get started with retargeting by making use of Google Adwords and then later later try the other retargeting platforms once they know what’s work best.

Alex: Yeah. I mean, you can just contact any of them. They’d be glad to talk to you. So yeah, there’s an opportunity with any of them.

Owen: Definitely. And so, Alex what is the best way for anyone who’s been listening to this to connect with you and thank you for doing the interview, I guess?

Alex: Yeah. So you could drop me an e-mail, alex@yaudience.com or there’s a contact box on yaudience.com. Just drop me a note there, always happy to talk to people about retargeting. I’m glad to kind of point them in the right directions for what’s right for them.

Owen: Definitely. And anyone, listening to this interview so far, if you have any additional retargeting questions for Alex, please feel free to use the commenting form below and let’s get this conversation started because I want as many coaches out there to understand that you don’t have to get the people on your website and then just loose the bulk of them because they did not convert into clients or did not sign up for you email list. You can get them on your website. If they don’t take the action you want, you can actually get them to come back to your website and retargeting is one of those online techniques out there that allows you to be able to do that. Thank you very much everyone for watching the interview.

Alex: Cool. Thanks.

Owen: So we’re done. So what do you think?

Alex: That was cool. That was great.

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