Remarketing to home sellers is a powerful marketing technique. “Remarketing is a clever way to connect with visitors to your website who may not have made an immediate purchase or enquiry. It allows you to position targeted ads in front of a defined audience that had previously visited your website - as they browse elsewhere around the internet”, said eloquently by Adhesion.
Prospects normally don’t convert on their first contact with your business or advertising (See The Rule of 7). Awareness, trust, and motivation build with time and repetition. Remarketing fast tracks the process by showing you advertisements to an audience that already demonstrated interest in your business.
There are two common platforms for remarketing in the real estate industry. The “Google Display Network” allows you to show advertisements (including text, picture, video, and animation) to previous visitors of your website as they browse the internet. Facebook remarketing allows you to create an audience of website visitors and show them content in their Facebook feed. Google Display Network requires Google Adwords or Google Analytics to build an audience, and Facebook requires it’s “pixel”. This may be very elementary to those already executing with an online remarketing strategy.
There’s a problem with remarketing. Remarketing and Search Engine Optimization don’t always work hand-in-hand. Search Engine Optimization requires backlinks to your website to climb the Google ranks. Valuable backlinks commonly come from reputable real estate websites. Here’s the rub: it’s often not customers who will be clicking the backlink.
Here’s an example. You’re a realtor in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Your such a rock-star that a national website such as Realtor.com wishes to feature you along with ink to your website in a “Who’s Who” or “40 under 40” feature. The exposure and backlink are great – but this recognition drives large quantities of non-clients to your website.
This can negatively impact re-marketing budget depending on how you’ve set-up your website.
Here’s how it happened to me. I had my Google and Facebook remarketing tied to any site visitor on any part of my website. If you visited my site, my advertisement followed you around. Sounded good. However, the more exposure my business received, the more non-customers came to my site. Lenders, wholesalers, realtors, investors, marketing companies. It’s great to make industry contacts. However, I can’t afford to spend remarketing budget to all these “non-customers” finding me online. My cost per lead – which is supposed to be great for remarketing – became abysmal.
I was forced to devise a solution to this “unnecessarily large” remarketing audience. Of course, precise solutions will vary site to site – but this worked for me to control the remarketing budget:
(1) The Google Solution: Google Analytics/Google Adwords is so nuanced that there are a multitude of options to narrow the remarketing audience. You can limit remarketing audience to referral websites like Google, Yelp, Youtube – with the exclusions of websites like ActiveRain & LinkedIn. You can also narrow the audience by source of traffic. At a click of a button, I was limited the Google Remarketing audience to organic and paid search traffic (where my customers are).
(2) The Facebook Solution: Facebook isn’t as flexible as the Google Display Network. You can’t choose “traffic type” or “referral sites”. You can, however, narrow the audience to include and exclude visitors that entered certain URLs on your site. For me, I excluded remarketing to anyone that landed directly on my home page. This made sense for me since, as a rule, I do not send paid traffic to the home page and most of my organic traffic goes to “long tail keyword” pages (not the home page).
Is your motivated home seller remarketing budget out of control? Hopefully these tips can help develop a cost-cutting solution!
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