Retargeting is a hot trend in online advertising these days. Retargeting (also known as remarketing) campaigns serve ads up to customers who have previously engaged with your Website. When customers leaves your Website, retargeting ads appear to them as they travel around the Internet. The purpose is to keep your brand and products in front of prospects, with the goal of luring them back to your Website.
Retargeting is popular because it works. Customers who have already visited your Website tend to be further down the sales funnel. Retargeting keeps your brand in front of these people and, most important, increases conversion rates at a relatively low cost, compared with PPC campaigns.
Digital marketing experts know that when it comes to online ads, images deliver better results than text-only ads. If you want to take your retargeting campaigns up another notch, the next step is video ads.
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Rich media ads with video generate nine times as many post-click Website visits as standard banner ads, according to MediaMind. For dealerships, the best platforms to create retargeting campaigns on are the Google Display Network, Facebook and YouTube.
When creating a retargeting campaign with video ads, there are quite a few metrics you can measure, but don’t let that overwhelm you. The three most important metrics to pay attention to include:
- Video Completion Rate/Total Views — The completion rate measures the percentage of times a viewer watched your video to the end. The higher your completion rate, the more engaging your ad is. If you get low video completion rates, you want to focus on the content and quality of your video ads. An average industry benchmark for video completion rates is around 77 percent (excluding skipped ads).
- Click-Through Rate (CTR) — The click-through rate (CTR) is the total number of clicks on your video ad divided by the number of people
that the ad was served to. If your goal is to drive more people to
your Website or click through to a video landing page, CTR is the
right metric to look at and optimize for.
The higher the CTR, the more engaged viewers are with your content and the more interested they are in learning about your business and products. Tracking this over time gives you a good overall sense of how well your campaign is performing. - Cost Per View (CPV) — Instead of cost per click, with video ads you get charged for cost per view (CPV). How much you pay will depend on the platform you’re advertising on. Google and YouTube have a TrueView option so you only have to pay for users who watch your entire video ad, or for a minimum of 30 seconds, whichever is less. This gives you a pretty accurate CPV.
Facebook on the other hand, charges advertisers by the view and starts counting views after a video has played for three seconds. This may not sound like much but according to research from Nielsen and Facebook, watching just three seconds of a video lifts ad recall by 47 percent and brand awareness by 32 percent
If you’re running retargeting video ads on Facebook and other social sites, your goals will be different, so you’ll want to track some additional metrics. In a report by Mixpo, digital agency professionals ranked “engagement with interactive elements,” “shares” and “conversions” as the three metrics most important to them, even above CTR and completion rates.
When creating video ads for retargeting, the most important tip for success is to ensure that a play button or arrow is visible on the ad. This makes it easy for people to recognize that it’s a video versus a still image.
Another important tip is to choose a thumbnail that evokes emotion or curiosity. Thumbnails featuring peoples’ faces always perform well. But if a viewer has been looking at a particular vehicle on your site, you may want to retarget that person with an ad featuring that exact piece of inventory.
If you’re concerned that creating video retargeting ads is expensive, don’t be. You can get creative on the cheap and buy a video clip from BigStockPhoto.com, hire a voice talent from Fiverr.com and, for less than $100, you have a video.
Just remember that relevancy is the key, so when you retarget visitors to your Website’s vehicle display pages (VDPs) featuring your existing inventory videos, you are presenting the most relevant video content to your shoppers without having to produce any additional video content.
Video retargeting is the next logical step to take if you want to boost results from your existing retargeting campaigns. Video ads are still somewhat of a novelty, so dealers who take the plunge first stand to benefit the most.
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