3 Google & Facebook Re-Marketing Tips

Are you familiar with online re-marketing? Re-marketing occurs when you show advertisements to prior website visitors. The theory is simple: most customers that come to your site don’t convert (my Google Adwords conversion rate is around 10 to 12%). That’s 90% of traffic leaving. With re-marketing, you show them another ad keeping your business fresh on their mind with the goal of the user returning and converting.

There is two common places this occurs for our industry: Facebook re-marketing and Google Adwords Display Network.

If you’re like me constantly reading, writing, and studying real estate – your Facebook page is bombarded with real estate gurus. This is often re-marketing from pages you viewed. If I have to watch one more video about flipping houses with no money down . . . or a “blind postcard that increases response rate by 400%” . . . or doing $1,000,000 in real estate deals (but how much profit did you make) . . . I digress . . .

I’ve been re-marketing for a year. I’ve learned first-hand that re-marketing and SEO growth conflict. Here’s the problem: you want your site to rank in Google, right? You need backlinks to major real estate industry sites. These links – although great for SEO – are not customers. Showing them re-marketing wastes precious financial resources. As you develop into a major SEO player, your site will naturally be linked across the internet. Unfortunately, your customers aren’t all over the internet – they are in the search engines.

For this reason, I’ve had to completely revise my re-marketing to handle the quantity of non-customer visitors on my home page.

Here are some tricks to “reign in” unruly re-marketing:

• Traffic Control on Google Display Network: Google display network allows you to choose traffic source. For example, you can select organic and pay-per-click. Using this audience, you’re re-marketing will only show to people who found your site on search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo. Similarly, you can choose “referral sites” – like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and add in Yelp and Facebook.
• URL Specifications on Facebook: Facebook re-marketing doesn’t permit select traffic type. You need a work around. Here is the solution: Facebook audiences allow you to limit audiences to users landing on specified URLs. It is bad practice to direct any paid traffic to your home page (there is only “so much” optimization you can do on a general home page vs. a specific landing page). Similarly, your sub-pages should be more keyword optimized than your home page. Only allow Facebook re-marketing to occur from your paid traffic and SEO optimized pages. While you lose some re-marketing value to customers that organically arrived on your home page – it’s well worth it to keep costs in check.
• Exclude Converters: Paying for advertisement to home sellers you already made contact with is throwing away your budget. You can prevent your re-marketing from showing to converters on both Google and Facebook re-marketing. On Google, create an audience of “Converters” – i.e. users that engaged an event you defined as a conversion on Google Adwords and/or Analytics. Set this audience as an exclusion to your re-marketing audience. Facebook is a bit different. Although you can’t “exclude” converters, for most lead generation websites the first step is filling in a small form that directs to a second larger form. The second larger form has a specific URL (like yoursite.com/step-2). On Facebook audiences, you can exclude users that landed on a specific URL. Set that to “step-2” (or the URL for your long form).