Maybe you’re starting to think PPC isn’t for you. You’ve spent some money, it hasn’t delivered the results you were hoping to see, and now the powers-that-be are getting restless about the expenditure and wasted man-hours.

And it should be said: you could be right. As an agency, we offer PPC marketing management as a service, but not every single online business or brand needs to be doing big budget PPC marketing.

Now, with all that said, if you have limited budgets (or possibly a limited appetite) for PPC marketing, one tool has proven to offer significant ROI that you may or may not be aware of: Remarketing.

With remarketing (also known as ‘retargeting’) campaigns, you install a snippet of Javascript code on one or more pages on your website and every time new users visit that page, an anonymous browser cookie is activated. This enables you to serve up relevant ads to these visitors if, and long after, they bail from your site.

Even successful PPC campaigns often fail to convert 90+% of traffic driven to a landing page. So naturally, the question becomes: how can you follow up with those visitors and increase the chances they will eventually return and become bona fide customers?

For many companies, the answer is remarketing.

Here are some of the benefits and advantages of remarketing:

1. Considerably less ‘accidental’ traffic

Unless your campaigns feature highly tuned negative keyword lists (and even if they do), invariably, your ads will occasionally be triggered by irrelevant searches with just enough analogous keywords to serve up an impression.

Those impressions can then result in clicks from less qualified lead traffic, hurting your on-page conversion rate or worse, they do somehow manage to convert and then they waste both your marketing budget and your sales team’s time. With remarketing, you skip past the ‘errant click’ phase of SEM.

Remarketing ads are served only to users who’ve visited one or more pages on your website in the past, thus demonstrating an interest in your brand.

(Now, it’s true: if they got to a landing page with remarketing script on it by accident in the first place, you will continue to market to them–but unless they accidentally click your ad again, there’s no additional cost.)

2. Virtually unlimited free impressions

Granted, while visitors to your site have already been exposed to your company, remarketing has the effect of ‘following’ these visitors everywhere they go, serving a valuable function as brand reinforcement.

Your name, logo, and message will help to keep your firm top-of-mind for users who are browsing the Web in a more developed stage of the buy-cycle. You are only charged after an action has been taken, meaning your ads have a virtually unlimited amount of time they can serve to potential customers before costing you a penny.

Remarketing has the added benefit of conveying the message that “your company is everywhere”, which can assist brand visibility and recognition.

(Another important note: when using Google AdWords, be sure to set caps on your impressions in the ‘Advanced’ subsection of ‘Targeting’, so you’re not driving people nuts or creeping them out with excessive ads, following them around the Web.)

3. Reduced cost compared to paid SEM

Here’s one any marketing team will like: costs-per-click (CPCs) for remarketing campaigns are typically but fractions of the cost of first page bids in competitive keyword markets.

It isn’t at all uncommon to see CPCs, particularly in the B2B space, upwards of $20-$30/click. Conversely, CPCs for remarketing ads are generally in the one to two dollar range. I don’t think any more needs to be said: the traffic’s just cheaper–it’s sort of like a paid search campaign without most of the cost of an actual search.

Remarketing can also be an invaluable companion tactic to your other search engine marketing efforts, be they principally paid or organic.

As we at Kaleidico like to say, “there’s no such thing as free traffic”, so if you’re focusing on your organic search, there’s still a significant content production cost to all that. Remarketing gives you additional opportunities to talk to people you’ve already invested in reaching.

Not only is the traffic far less expensive, remarketing acts as a kind of cargo net, “catching” traffic you’ve paid (in one form or another) to drive to your site before.

Oh, and if you’re just considering snuffing PPC, consider simply pausing your more costly campaigns and leaving your remarketing campaign active while you reassess your situation. Sure, it may not be as aggressively growth-minded as full-blown search or display ad campaigns, but at least it keeps that net open and ready to receive business.

Are you using remarketing or retargeting in your strategy? If not, are you considering it now? Subscribe for more digital marketing pointers.