Shopping cart abandonment is one of the most pervasive concerns among online retailers, and with good reason. Studies show that 75% of your site visitors will likely leave without making a purchase, and 85% of the top 1,000 online retailers are doing nothing to combat this growing issue (Listrak 2011).

If you are investing in channels to drive traffic to your site this holiday season, take advantage of the opportunity to add value to your campaigns and maximize ROI by using your existing AdWords Conversion Tracking pixel to remarket to past converters.

Remarketing using Conversion Tracking (RMCT) adds an innovative and personal layer to your remarketing investments by targeting loyal customers who have already purchased from you. This creative approach to Remarketing has twice the win rate of conventional Remarketing (Google internal research), and is a great way to multiply conversions among loyal customers during the crucial post-holiday period.

By tracking conversions and collecting cookies associated with visitors who have completed a purchase, RMCT targets customers have done their research and chose you. Use RMCT to remind them why they did by separating converters from non-converters. With these two separate lists, you’re able to assign different values to them, and target them with specific copy and image ads. Reach the past converters with “loyalist” coupons, accessory and gift ideas to complement their most recent purchase, or even bulk and last minute discounts.

There are two ways to enable RMCT:

1. Easiest and most simple approach: Create a “Converters” Remarketing List based off the AWCT code (no additional pixel needed). This is a quick and easy solution for upselling or cross-selling to existing customers without having to implement additional pixels, but it is more limited in scope.

• Select the conversion code in the section Control Panel > New Audience > Existing Tag > Select your conversion tag

• The system will activate your conversion code into a Remarketing mode and will collect AdWords conversions and cookie IDs of people who hit your conversion page (regardless the traffic source they came from: AW, Search, Direct traffic, Referrals, etc.)

2. “You’re Halfway There” approach (a little more advanced): Deploy a basic but high ROI Remarketing ‘Shopping Cart Abandonment’ strategy (one additional pixel needed, placed on the cart page) and collect converters in one click. With this method, the existing conversion tracking tag can double-duty as a Remarketing tag and be used to exclude converters without any additional pixeling (see above). You can also choose to expand to tag Homepage & Product pages if your pixel implementation bandwidth permits. If AdWords Conversion Tracking is enabled in your account, use the same code to create a list of users that are reaching your conversion page.

• Select your Conversion Code in the List Creation Panel > “Select from existing tags”

• By adding the pixel to your thank you for ordering site, a list of all converters will appear in your Audience Tab--use this list to directly target only those people

• Start taking advantage of RMCT now and challenge competitors to win more loyal customers and conversions with this innovative approach to Online marketing this holiday season

Nearly 57% of shoppers plan to do most of their holiday shopping after Cyber Monday this year (Google/OTX Holiday 2011 Study), so make sure you stay top of mind, challenge competitors, and increase conversions for the rest of the holiday season by taking a novel strategic approach to online marketing by implementing Remarketing with Conversion Tracking (RMCT).

Please visit this site for more information on Remarketing, and this site for FAQ.

Posted by Benna Wise & Andrea Cohan, The Google Technology Team

(Cross-posted on the Small Business Blog)

Please enjoy the second post in the series of tips and tricks for advertising within your industry. This week: Retail! Up next is Travel.

There are countless varieties of products, services, and companies within the Retail industry, but one thing unites us all: seasonality. Whether you’re selling school supplies, MP3 Players, or sports gear, you probably have a ‘hot season’ and some semblance of a ‘down season.’ I think our biggest trap as Retail advertisers is to only focus our efforts on the hot season; whereas Retail marketing should really happen year-round.

You have a lot of options and resources -- both free and paid -- available for marketing your business throughout the year. Below I’ve outlined a few of my favorite tools and tips.

• Figure out when your hot season actually starts. Many marketers assume they know when their hot season starts and ends or they base this year’s strategy on last year’s season. Use Insights for Search to better understand when customers begin to search for your products. If you look at search volume on ‘swimsuits,’ you’ll notice that queries actually begin to rise in January and maintain steady volume throughout July. Don’t fall into the trap of advertising swimsuits only in the summer!

•  Use different types of campaigns at different times. Once you fully understand your seasonality, think critically about the different types of advertising you’ll do throughout the year. For AdWords customers, for example, I recommend exploring the Remarketing Tool to keep track of customers who may have visited your site during the down season. When hot season strikes again, you’ll be able to reach these customers when they are more actively pursuing your products. Remarketing is also a great way for AdWords customers with multiple seasons to reach people throughout the year. For example, if you sell flowers, you can set up a cookie to target people who purchased flowers from you on Valentine's Day, and then begin showing them ads for your Mother's Day specials in April.

• Through it all, continue to optimize your account structure. Once you’ve established the initial structure of your account, be sure to track performance and optimize your keyword lists and ad texts, particularly during down seasons. I recommend using the ‘Search terms’ report on your broad match keywords or the Opportunities Tab to identify new keyword ideas as well as negative keywords. For your ad text, look at which ads converted best in the previous hot season, and see if any consistent themes jump out. You may notice that mentioning ‘Save 20% on Gifts’ worked better than ‘Save Big on Gifts’ and you can edit your text accordingly for the next hot season.

• Take advantage of free offerings, particularly during the down season. For Retailers with physical locations, it’s imperative that you create a listing on Google Places. Particularly as consumers increasingly search while they are on the go, it’s important that people know when they are near your physical location!

Think of how much more time you have when you’re in the down season -- and use this time to optimize and grow your business in advance of the hot season. Our customers’ interests and behaviors change each year and yes, it can be difficult to keep up. Lucky for us, we have plenty of options to reach our customers at different phases of the conversion cycle and many tools to better understand our customers. Best of luck in 2011!


Posted by Tim Freeth, Team Lead, AdWords Retail