Ask Store Growers #1: Retargeting platforms

We love it when an article goes really deep into a particular subject. So that’s what we try to do on this blog.

But we get a lot of questions that can be answered a lot quicker.

That’s why we are launching a new video series: Ask Store Growers. Every week we’ll tackle one question about ecommerce from one of our readers.

The question for episode 1: What platform should I use for retargeting campaigns?

Enjoy!

Got a question of your own? Let us know in the comments or send it to dennis at storegrowers dot com

If you’d rather read, you can find a full transcript of this episode below.

Video transcript

Hello, and welcome to the first episode of Ask Store Growers, the show where we answer all your e-commerce questions.

Today’s question comes from Brian in the U.S., and he asks: “What platform should I use for retargeting campaigns?”

Well Brian, there’s two big platforms to use — mainly Google Remarketing or Facebook Retargeting.

In today’s episode, we’re going to focus on basic remarketing, which is basically [when you show] one type of ad to all people that have been to your website — as opposed to dynamic remarketing, where you will show the actual products people were looking at. Those are more complex to set up, but maybe we will tackle those in a future episode.

So, Google versus Facebook. Well, what does a retargeting ad look like on Google? Well here, we’ve got an ad for the Nexus 7. It gives us some more information, shows a bit about the product. We can click through to buy it. What does it look like on Facebook? Well, it basically looks like your averages News Feed post with a good image and some text.

Talking about reach: is there a difference between the two platforms? Well, the Google Display network, where your retargeting campaigns will show, cover about 93 percent of all internet users; so that’s basically everybody. On Facebook, on the other hand, the average user spends about 40 minutes A DAY on the site; so that’s also a huge amount of time.

So you can see that both platforms are really interesting for reaching people that you need to reach.

Next, I want to talk about how easy it is to get started on those platforms. On Google you’re going to need design skills to create banners or have a designer on staff. On Facebook it’s easier: all you need is an image and some basic copywriting skills.

Then, who can you target? Well, this is a huge advantage for Google because you can use all the data from Google Analytics — things like: what traffic source did the user come? which URLs did they visit? And the behavior: how many pages did they visit? How long did they stay on the site? All things like that. On Facebook, it’s more basic: basically, which URLS did you visit? have you targeted all users that haven’t visited the website since a certain date? And the really nifty thing about Facebook is that you can target email subscribers. So everybody that’s on your list, you can also show them ads on Facebook.

So, the big face-off between Google and Facebook: who wins?

Well, for me, Facebook wins, basically because it’s easier to start, and you can have really fast iterations, especially in the beginning of new campaigns: you’re not sure about which images will work, which copy will work.

So Facebook makes it a lot easier to create these different versions, while on Google you always have to go back to Photoshop, or badger your designer to make changes, which makes things a lot slower.

That said, if you start on Facebook, there’s nothing limiting you from moving on to Google as soon as you’ve found out [which images and texts work well].

So, that’s all for today.

If you have any other ecommerce questions, feel free to send them over to dennis at storegrowers dot com, and we’ll try to tackle them next time.

To learn more, you can visit www.storegrowers.com for more information about the show or the topics that we discuss.

Thanks a lot, and see you next time!