Welcome back to Second Girls' Nax. I'm Steph Pranula and I'm here with Libby Shell and Melin Wojai Naioka. What is the best snack you each have in your house right now? If I told you to run to your pantry and come back with something good, what would that be?
I just picked up a box of donuts yesterday so I still have some leftover there that's probably my go-to right now. We have some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies that I am probably going to destroy tonight and there will not be any left and we'll actually have to go to the grocery store. Thank you both so much for being here. We are back talking about remarketing and this time we are getting into measurement and budget allocation.
We are starting with some metrics and measurements. What do you usually use to continually improve or refine your target audiences? You've got information coming at you daily. What's a good standard to make sure that you are refining enough but not too much?
How do you start here? I'd say there are tons of APIs to look at. Not just remarketing. As you get into these digital platforms there are a lot of different things to look at.
I'd say I do three of the main things that I tend to always go look to at first is one engagement. Looking at click-through rates, engagement rates on our remarketing audiences. Are they dipping? Are they increasing?
I see that whenever we have a set of creative running for too long past a certain amount of time whether if you have a small audience or large audience it depends what that duration looks like. If an audience is seeing your way too often you will start seeing engagement decline. That's where I look at click-through rate and if I notice week over week or month over month it starts trending downwards that signals to me that we need to refresh. That's a good moment for you to take a look at what might have performed best in your creative and try to reintroduce some newer creative utilizing the winning messages from that pry around.
That speaks to engagement and click-through rate. Another metric I like to look at very closely actually is frequency because remarketing audiences tend to start out pretty small unless you have a website that has tons of website traffic. You're starting off with a pretty small remarketing pool and what typically happens is that we tend to fund these audiences higher than we should be and we tend to oversaturate their feed with our ads. People are pretty savvy these days.
They know when they're being remarketed to, especially marketers. If you're one minute shopping for something and don't buy it, you close that Amazon app and you go somewhere else, you're expecting to see an ad for that same product you were shopping. What you don't want to do is fatigue your audience by constantly bombarding them with those ads because they're going to catch onto it. Looking at frequency to make sure that metric is not jumping up too high.
I like to look back in a 30-day window and try to keep that within six or below. Anything beyond six, to me I've noticed results starting to take a hit in terms of engagement clicking through in terms of conversions. They're just over serving your ad content. I'll definitely look at the frequency there and look at click-through rate.
A third metric that I would look at is at the end of the day, are these ads working to convert the users? What's our conversion volume looking like? What's our cost per lead? What's our conversion rate?
Identifying which audiences? We could make very specific sub-segments of remarketing audiences, people who visit specific pages, people who spend extra so many minutes or seconds on site trying to test out different audiences and as well obviously we're testing out different creative to see what lands with the audience. Looking at which audience, which creative converts better, that's another metric that I like to look at. When you're doing that, you said last 30 days.
Are you looking at the ad level, at the campaign level, at the account level? Where are you looking for that kind of max frequency of six? I'm looking at the ad level for sure. I want to make sure that not a single particular ad is being over-served.
That's where I'll look at the six and above as being a red flag that I'd want to pause a certain ad. At the audience level, it is a little wider in range. An audience level that takes into consideration the mix of different ads are seeing. If that frequency range is, I like to go a little higher on that end.
I'm okay with my audience seeing tons of different messages for me at a higher rate above six. I'd look to around the six to 10 range for an audience level. At the individual ad level, I like to keep the cap that's six. I think that as you think about adding diversity of ad types into your remarketing mix, you have to fudge that number up a little bit because you have to think about all of the different competing assets that you have in market.
For example, if you're running static, video, and maybe a document ad or a spotlight ad, you're going to have a lot of different assets in market. That's probably going to boost your overall audience frequency, but your ad level frequency may be more of one to two over the last 30 days. Thinking about the breadth of all of the assets that you have in market at one time is also really important when thinking about your frequency and your reach. It helps diversify things, but sometimes you have to think about the full picture.
If everywhere someone looks on a platform, they see something from your brand. Is that a positive experience or is that maybe starting to rub them the wrong way? The other caveat there is, I know I mentioned spotlight ads. If you are running spotlight ads, your frequency is going to be through through.
Those ads, it is not going to be reasonable. You're going to have a 30 day frequency of 20 to 30. That is expected. If you are looking at frequency on an audience level and you're running spotlight ads, consider excluding that because it will absolutely skew your data set.
Honestly, with a spotlight ad, we're hoping to have a really high frequency because it's a very minimal corner of your line of vision, asset, or ad type. We want it to show up a lot and get a lot of eyeballs because it's really more of just getting your logo in front of people. What have been your most successful types of remarketing ad types? Would you say spotlight is working for you or have you seen static being kind of the dominating asset type?
I've been playing a lot with my remarketing asset types just to see what works the best with a variety of different audiences. But lately, I have seen that conversation ads for remarketing. So that direct message ad on LinkedIn, but more of that, she was your own adventure chat bot style where people can click on a bunch of different options. It takes them to different destinations on your website or allows them to get more information.
That has been really successful, especially with a very small, kind of engaged remarketing audience. So basically pulling that from people who have engaged with your ads or visited a very high intent page on your website within the last 30 days, that tells me that they're actively thinking about this. They've been on those high intent pages. They've seen an ad.
The recollection is probably going to be there. I've seen that those are converting fairly well, both in platform and then also with onsite conversions, so setting up a demo, something like that. The other one that I have been seeing success with is spotlight. The best thing I can say about that is they seem to work when you use some humor and an emoji occasionally.
It really grabs the eye. A spotlight ad, it's never going to stand out. It's not the most interesting thing you've ever seen. But the thing that I really like about it is this is the one place on LinkedIn where you can create your own CTA.
You are not locked into that list of 10 Learn More, Sign Up, Register Now, download the standardized CTA. You can make your button, say whatever you want, as long as it's within the character count. And you can add a little flair. So you can be a little cheeky here.
One of the ones that I have been running for rebindlabs or was testing for rebindlabs was saying, are you sick of being on the MQL hamster wheel? And then I put a little hamster emoji and the Ferris wheel emoji. It all depends on kind of what your brand tone is, but especially thinking about LinkedIn as a platform and just catching someone's eye with a text only ad. Sometimes a little more kind of director adventure is where fun messaging seems to resonate.
Another example of a spotlight ad, kind of ad copy testing that I did was more of that reengaged style. So it was a last 180 day remarketing audience. So it was people who we probably wanted to get back in the folds and they hadn't really interacted in a while. What I did there was I decided to do a play on breakfast club.
So I said, don't you forget about me. And then another variation was are you ghosting me and the little ghost emoji? And that actually got a lot of reengagement and got people to click and visit the site and actually put them in the earlier stages of that more engaged remarketing audience. So I'm a big fan of testing that out.
It's also super low cost. So it's not going to break your budget if you want to test out five variations at a time. And then you can just see which one's getting clicks, which one's not, and kind of refine the humor of your brand a little bit from there. You hinted at it a little bit Libby, but I want to get into budget.
What percentage of your marketing budget should go to remarketing efforts? What kind of cost are you looking at? I've worked with accounts that have a really, really healthy remarketing budget. I've worked with ones that have very conservative budgets where we maybe only have a few thousand dollars to work with on a monthly basis.
So depending on how much budget you have, you can steal your program accordingly. If you have on the lower end, you're probably going to be running maybe one campaign, probably one ad type, not overcomplicating it. But if you have a very healthy budget, cool, you can segment out all of your different personas in the last 30 day, last 90 day, last 100 day, day. And then also think about all these different asset types that you can be running simultaneously.
It really does depend, like you said, on the breadth of activations you're launching, the breadth of platforms you might be doing remarketing on. As a benchline, I like to allocate at least 10% to 20% on allowing you to do there, on just having that fund reserve for remarketing, whether you're dealing with small budgets or large budgets, having that kind of coverage there. And as far as budgeting goes, I think one important mistake that marketing teams tend to make regarding budgeting is that they tend to over budget remarketing because of attribution, because remarketing tends to capture those conversions from warm audiences so much better than our cold targeting campaigns. And then see from marketing teams to say, hey, remarketing is working well, it's getting demos and conversions.
Let's keep funding that, let's keep scaling that. And that's where you get into an issue where you might overfund a remarketing campaign, where you're serving your ads too often, the frequencies go through the roof, and now you start some diminishing returns. So I want to mention that because when people are budgeting for your marketing, you will see really good performance metrics coming from remarketing campaigns, but don't let that only be the guiding factor for how you budget those kind of campaigns. There is a limitation to your remarketing audience size.
So if you throw more money at it, you will hit kind of a cap. And at that point, you're just going to start ramping up your frequency and getting yourself into trouble. So I think that that's really a solid call out, Melin. And from a perspective of kind of like the cadence, I like to make sure that I when I'm monitoring for frequency, I'm also making sure that I'm taking a look at budget.
And if we're getting to a spot where we're hitting frequency really quickly or over a very, very short period of time, that's going to tell me that we may have too much budget here. And that is a moment to scale back and identify, you know, exactly how much should we actually be spending and communicate that back to the client, because it's easy to kind of just spend that money as a marketer, you know, going in, it's easy to spend on paid social. But the last thing that we want to do here is kind of spend your responsibly. So that's a perfect opportunity for you to have a conversation about, you know, I think we've over allocated here and here's where we could potentially reallocate this budget.
Or here's another experiment that we can try. So whether that is a new asset type or a sub segment of that audience where we could use that budget and we're not competing directly with like one to one frequencies, that's another option and a really good impetus for a conversation with your client. Awesome. Libby, you're incredible at segues because next time we are going to get into experimentation.
Thank you both for being here. Thank you all for watching and we'll see you next time.