Tired of all those cart abandoners or the returning users that still aren’t converting? Let’s take a dive into the wonderful world of “How to retain customers using paid search.” There’s an endless number of tactics that can be applied in this situation, but we’ll cover three of the strategies we implement the most at Seer.
3 Ways to Retain Customers with PPC
#1: Set Up a Smart Dynamic Remarketing Campaign
This can sometimes be a minimal effort task but one of the most effective. Smart Campaigns allow you to retarget users with the most relevant products related to their site behavior. When a user comes to your site and looks at x amount of products, these campaigns will allow you to remarket them with ads on their favorite YouTube videos or websites. They could be looking for what they should make for dinner, topic websites that interest them, etc. with those exact products or products that your users are most likely to be interested in.
- Example: I was on Nike.com looking at their Cyber Monday deals and looked at a few different pairs of shoes. These ads have the exact shoes that I was looking for with the exact landing page to my size.
#2: Promote an Offer Using If-Then Statements
If-Then Statements allow you to dynamically change ad text in Headlines or Descriptions to specific audiences based on a number of different conditions. They are an efficient way to appeal to users that are either close to purchasing or are in the research phase.
Say a user visits multiple different websites doing their research about the product you offer. They’ve most likely been to your website and a handful of your competitors’ websites. When that user comes back the next day or searches the product again they may see the same 3-4 ads at the top of the SERP. As the advertiser, you need to stand out somehow, which you can do through a promotion. Let’s admit it – we all love balling on a budget! When that user sees that the other 3 ads aren’t offering some type of promotion they are most likely to click on your ad and convert.
- Example: Say that I want to drive more people to our general PPC blog site, but I want to dynamically change our ad text based on if a user has been to our site and what type of content they would most likely click on. If a user has been to our website before we would want to show them something we know they would be interested in versus a general message to an unknown audience.
- If you’re one of those people and want to try IF-Then statements in DSAs, this functionality is not yet available, unfortunately.
#3: Utilize Google Analytics User Behavior Flow Analysis
Look to see where you have your biggest drop-offs in users and implement tracking to allow you to deduce what could be happening and why a user is dropping off. Once you’ve developed a few hypotheses – test them. Create a couple of different Responsive Display Ads or, if your audiences are large, enough create a search campaign and test your messaging on that audience.
Behavior Flow From Google Analytics
For instance, say that I see more than 30% of my users exit on their second product page. We think that those users just didn’t really like either of the products, or we should dive into what page is causing that drop-off and what two product pages are causing the most users to drop off.
Pin-point your issue and hypothesize again. We see that the two pages causing the biggest drop-offs are products that are both $1,000+ and are generally priced higher than the market average due to quality. That informs us that users are looking for a cheaper price point and if your client agrees you have a great case to remarket to those users that have gone to either of those pages with some sort of promotion. You can try running some Dynamic Display ads with an image of those products and see what happens. If it ends up not being successful, it’s back to the drawing board to take what you learned and apply it to the next hypothesis.
Another great test - If your business charges shipping, go to your analytics platform and look at how many people abandon carts when they see a shipping cost versus not seeing one.
Shopify recently ran a test and has uncovered that 28% of shoppers will abandon their cart if presented with unexpected shipping costs. What does 28% more sales look to you?
Bonus Strategy For Ecommerce
Retarget to your abandoned cart users or create a wish list functionality within the website and target users based on those products. You can do this through Dynamic Remarketing or even set up a custom Gmail or Display campaign. This way you give yourself the opportunity to upsell and promote similar items.
There’s No Better Time to Test Than Now
With the holiday season just around the corner, some of these strategies are going to be more important than ever. Make sure to keep an eye on your audiences and don’t forget testing is key here! Let the data speak and the actions follow. Make sure to keep an eye out for all of our new content coming out.
Let us know what your go-to strategies are for retaining customers and some of your success stories! Make sure to sign up for the Seer newsletter, and subscribe to our channel on YouTube for helpful PPC content like this!
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