If you do have a vibrant remarketing program running, then congrats! This puts you ahead of roughly 90% of small businesses out there that don’t yet see the value remarketing brings to boosting online conversions.

But…what next?

Optimizing remarketing campaigns to increase total conversions and improve conversion rates is great, but its also important to minimize your total costs without impacting total conversions.

One commonly overlooked area to save cash without reducing total conversions is to use exclusion groups.  You build a remarketing list of people that you want to NOT target.  For instance, let’s say you are selling tickets for a large festival.  Once someone has made it to the checkout confirmation page for that festival, you need to make sure you exclude that same customer from ongoing remarketing.  Or you can be proactive by changing up the message to promote a different show, to continually pique their interest. Even a simple “Thank you!” message that is automatically generated to go out to consumers can keep them engaged.

Let’s use our ticketZone Remarketing guide as an example. When a customer makes it to the “add event confirmation page,” we no longer remarket ticketZone ticketing services to them, instead, we change up the ads to promote other myZone services that they have not yet bought into.

So, how do you know when you’re doing remarketing wrong?

The following are two (2) big web companies that need to rethink their remarketing strategies: Dyn and Pingdom.  These are services we use to improve website performance and security.  We are already clients of both of these sites, and they definitely know that.  Still, myZone staff is constantly bombarded by Dyn or Pingdom remarketing ads after we’ve logged in to their website to check our stats.  They have not properly set up exclusion groups, and this is costing them a lot of money.

There are many different ways you can build remarketing lists to use as exclusion groups. You can separate them into groups such as these:

• Customers who have already purchased something
• Customers who have visited specific pages already
• People who haven’t completed a specific action within a period of time (i.e., if someone hasn’t pulled the trigger on a purchase in a year or longer)
• People who have bounced from your site (only looked at one page view ever)

So if you want to help minimize your remarketing expenses without reducing the total number of sales you make, be sure you are using remarketing exclusion groups properly.  If you’d like one of myZone’s remarketing experts to review your remarketing strategies, then contact us today to get started!

Have other examples of the types of people or customers you should consider excluding?  Please add them in the comments below.