“Why don’t I see my remarketing ads?” is a question we get asked. Or, some variation like, “Our CEO isn’t seeing our remarketing ads, how come?”, “Employees are always on our site but don’t see remarketing ads. What’s wrong?”
Often, the correct but unsatisfactory answer is “because they shouldn’t.”
The Purpose of Remarketing Ads
Before we get into why you may not see your remarketing ads, we should talk about why we are running them in the first place. The short answer is to drive more business. But, we need to understand the role the website has in driving that business.
For most remarketing, we are trying to encourage a specific action—E-commerce sales, lead form submission, app download, newsletter sign-up, etc. Remarketing ads are intended to nurture the prospect to take action. When the action is taken, we consider the campaign a success.
Who Are We Targeting with Remarketing Ads
Our target is people likely to convert and take the desired action.
While many people may visit the website, only a subset of visitors are good prospects and should see our remarketing ads. An efficient and effective remarketing program targets the best prospect, not everyone who visits the website.
Past Methods to Hone in on the Remarketing Targets
To eliminate wasted impressions, we were limited to a few tactics to narrow down the people who saw our ads. These were ‘best guesses’ weeding out those less likely to convert.
Time-based Audience Filter
One approach is to look at the time lag from the first visit (or most recent visit) to the conversion and use that (or something close) as the window during which a visitor would remain in the remarketing audience. The idea is that the time to decide was relatively the same regardless of who the person bought from (or contacted, downloaded, etc.) Once outside the time window, they’d be removed from the remarketing list.
Frequency-base Audience Filter
How often does someone have to see your message before deciding to buy? Frequency can be a number of times per day, week, month, or max exposure. At some point, we have to know that they don’t want our product or service, and we need to remove them from the remarketing audience. That frequency will vary by industry, product, or even company. It’s not the same for all campaigns, so advertisers have to make the assessment for themselves.
Counter Action Audience Filter
This is challenging, but identifying actions that indicate a user is not really interested (or serious) can filter them out of a remarketing audience or switch them to a different one.
Car dealerships selling sports cars and minivans may have two different lists, one for sports cars and another for minivans.
A visitor may spend a few minutes on the sports car page and be tagged for the sports car remarketing campaign.
But, then, they spend much more time on the minivan pages, diving deep into options and the configurator. The minivan remarketing list is the better match based on their actions.
The user should be dropped from the sports car remarketing list and added to the minivan list.
AI and Managing Remarketing
While we can still place our filters on remarketing, AI has rendered our input redundant, if not counter-productive. With access to information we can’t imagine and could never process, AI is far better at remarketing (and other campaign types).
While our past efforts have been to weed out as much waste as possible (and likely do it poorly), AI goes at it from the other side. AI is finding the best prospects and actively nurturing them to a conversion.
AI uses on-site and off-site behavior, matches profiles to past converters, and dynamically delivers messaging in a way humans cannot.
How does AI Managed Remarketing work
With an AI-managed remarketing campaign, we set objectives, and the AI strives to achieve them.
Common AI Managed Campaign objectives are based on the following:
- Target Cost Per Acquisition
- Target Return on Ad Spend
- Maximize Conversions
- Maximize Value
The AI will manage the campaigns to hit the targets within the budget.
Why You Won’t See Your Remarketing Ads
In the past, our best efforts would still result in every visitor seeing remarketing ads. It was just a matter of how long/how often.
But, with AI, the delivery is more selective. Ask yourself:
“If I had limited funds, would I spend them delivering ads to myself or someone else who visited my site?”
With an AI-driven remarketing campaign, you very likely won’t see your ads. You simply do not match with the most likely-to-convert profile (or even remotely-likely-to-conver profile.)
How Do I Show Remarketing Ads to Everyone Anyway
Don’t trust the AI and want everyone on your site to see your ads? You can do that.
Use impression-based bidding, set high viewable CPMs, and ensure your budget is big enough to cover the size of your remarketing audience. Since your goal is to be seen, you want to be sure you are not capping your frequency too low. Multiply your audience by the desired frequency, and you have your target impressions level for which you should budget. The budget depends on the CPM estimate from the channel you are advertising.
Manage your Remarketing to Achieve Your Goal
Not being able to see our ads can be unnerving at times. We have to trust the results. In a world where seeing is believing, not seeing the ads leaves a gap hard to reconcile. “If I don’t see it, how do I know someone else did?” With AI, that is the world we live in now. We provide the inputs and have to wait for the results. What comes in between is often unseen.