Consider this – an inside perspective of the customer buying process.
It’s 8:00 am.
Maybe you’re just now getting to the office, checking a few personal emails or quickly scrolling your newsfeed before you tackle the pile of work sitting on your desk; maybe you’re not even ready to get out of bed, so you grab your phone to do some leisurely social networking or continue researching that new car you’ve had your eye on for the last 3 months. Whatever your routine is, technology always finds its way into our hands.
And then it happens. You see an ad for the Year End Sales Event at your local dealership. You click the ad, and there it is. That new, fuel efficient SUV you’ve been pining over for months now – the price and features are better than ever, but you’re distracted because your boss is looking for that expense report you were supposed to submit 2 days ago. Your dream car will have to wait.
It’s time for lunch. Whether you make a quick trip to the nearest fast food restaurant or you’re eating at your desk, your leisurely clicks resume.
Click. Scroll. Scroll. Click.
There it is again. Your local dealership has made its way back to your screen, but this time your dream car is front and center, with low lease payments and 0% APR. You’re now more interested than ever to discover the savings, but you’re already behind and late from lunch. Your excitement is depleted; you close the tab.
It’s 8:00 pm.
Your routine, before-bed scrolling begins as you prepare to end this day and start the next. But wait – there it is again. The Year End Sales Event is now just days away, they’re advertising your dream car AND you get a complimentary gift just for attending? When did car buying become so easy?
You click the ad and you’re redirected to the RSVP page. You’re free of obligations this weekend and you’ve finally saved up just enough to swap out that old hand-me-down vehicle and trade it in for something new, something efficient, something yours. You RSVP and shut off your tablet, excited as you prepare to come face to face with the car of your dreams in just a few short days.
Introducing A Powerful New Tool: Cross-Device Remarketing
Google has changed the way we reach customers with the rollout of cross-device remarketing, a feature that will allow marketers the ability to “close the loop,” and target users across their devices. For example, say someone researches your product or service on their smart phone in the morning. Your ad is clicked and a potential customer has found his or her way to your website but left before converting. With cross-device remarketing, marketers now have the ability to serve ads to these same users on each of their devices, whether it’s a tablet, smartphone, desktop or other. This new feature will also allow us to track which devices were used in the user’s path to conversion. Fascinating, right?
What Is Cross-Device Remarketing & How Does It Work?
Let’s first dive into what this new feature is, and more specifically, what it means across devices.
Remarketing is the advertising practice of marketing to users who have interacted with your website in the past but didn’t convert. What does it mean to convert? To convert, or a conversion, is any action you want someone to make on your website. This includes any form submissions, adding a product to the virtual shopping cart or requesting more information on any products or services you may offer.
But why is this so important? When someone interacts with your brand and your website but doesn’t convert, does this mean we chalk it up to a loss and move on? Of course not. Remarketing allows businesses to stay fresh in the minds of consumers as they battle daily distractions.
Cross-device remarketing will help advertisers close the loop across all devices customers are using, including apps and sites across the Google Display Network and DoubleClick Bid Manager. Until now, advertisers have only had control over frequency capping across single devices. For instance, say a customer clicks on your ad using his or her smartphone but revisits later in the day on a desktop or tablet – this individual user is counted as 2 or 3 users due to cookie and IP matching across devices. With cross-device remarketing, each user will be counted only once using a cookieless matching system that will assign each user with a unique ID across devices to ensure a more strategic targeting approach. Finally, marketers can tell a single story across devices rather than serving the same ads to the same users logging in and out of multiple devices.
Why Should You Utilize Cross-Device Remarketing?
Let’s face it – your customers are becoming more difficult to reach in today’s technology driven society. Why limit your marketing strategy to only one device when we now have the capabilities to follow your customers wherever they go, across all of their unique devices?
Consider the consumer’s path to conversion – what do we know, what can we do and where is the disconnect between the two? Until now, marketers have been plagued by the mobile movement as there has yet to be a solution to bridge the gap between mobile and desktop messaging. Before multi-device remarketing, marketers’ messages have failed to come full circle due to the inaccuracies in reporting due to multi-channel research. Cross-device remarketing will allow advertisers to send a single, customized message to consumers as well as providing an easier customer experience as users transition from mobile to desktop and, most importantly, identifying the role smartphones play in the consumer’s path to conversion.
Remarketing creates top of mind awareness for your customers and is a great way to engage people who have previously interacted with your brand. A Google/Ipsos study found that 67% of smartphone users began researching a product or service on their mobile phones and converted in-store, and 76% of smartphone shoppers are more likely to convert in-store compared to the 59% purchasing from their desktops or the 35% who purchase directly from their mobile devices.
Cross-Device Remarketing gives us the ability to streamline a single, cohesive message across multiple devices to ensure no one customer is seeing the same ad twice. This powerful feature gives all marketers the opportunity to deliver personalized, sequential messaging across all devices as customers go about their daily routines to ensure a meaningful and relevant method of ad delivery.