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Use Event Tracking to Create Higher Converting Audiences When You Remarket with Joe Martinez

Joe Martinez is the first veteran Confluence speaker of the 2017 conference and as he jumps on the stage full of energy, he immediately brings up the central theme of his discussion–intent.

What is intent?

The intent of your users is simply their purpose. Why did they visit your site? What were they looking for and how can you help them in the future?

Intention is easy to understand when you are looking at search query data, Joe explains. The question is there in the search and you know what is needed by the words they use. There is a very clear purpose or intent.

Joe discusses when we understand the intent of the user when they visit a website, this is is the best way to adequately understand how to remarket to them.

Remarketing

“I usually hear two things when I talk about retargeting,” joe said.

The first thing he hears is that his clients have tried retargeting before and it didn’t’ work for them. The second issue people use to argue against retargeting is annoying users. No one wants to be the company who annoys the people they are trying to sell their product and service to.

“But, when are ads not annoying? When they speak directly to the user,” Joe said.

Joe continues asking what are your website users’ goals or targets when they visit your website or landing pages? If you track those interactions with your website, you’re on your way to finding out the answer.

Figuring out intent to use in remarketing is much more difficult than looking at search query data. If you just retarget visitors to all pages of your website, then how you know what they were looking for? Was it a whitepaper they wanted? Or just your phone number? Was it your competitor looking to see what you have available online?

If you don’t know why they visited you, then when market to them, it will most likely be a waste your money.

Meet Joe’s new best friend

Joe’s new best friend is Google Tag Manager (GTM). With one piece of code, you can follow all of your data through Google Tag Manager. You can do a lot of complex tracking with this one tool and Joe can’t say enough about how helpful it is.

One of the best things you can do to track your audience is learn GTM, love it, and then use it. If you aren’t using GTM already, head over to your Google Analytics account and start tracking your user interactions.

Once you are tracking those interactions with your users, you can use those events and create an audience out of those users involved in each of those events.

Joe used three specific event related audiences as examples.

Intent Audience 1–Outbound Link Clicks

The first thing you need to do to track this audience is to look at all of the outbound links on your website and set up GTM for all of those links. As you follow those links to their destinations, look to see if those destinations have ad space where you can do direct placement ads.

If users are leaving your site to download an app, set it up in GTM and remarket to those people using the benefits of the app. For those who did download it will remind them how to use your app, and it will continue to entice those who didn’t download it to come back and do so.

Intent Audience 2–Form Abandonment

The forms on your website can all be created as events and each of the fields can be followed to see where your users are leaving the form. When people skip out of your site before completing the form, you can retarget them.

Those users who filled out most of your form before bailing are more likely to convert as a member of a retargeted audience since they were the most engaged users.

Intent Audience 3–Mobile Click-to-Call

On mobile websites, when your phone number appears, people are going to click it. Do they always reach you?

Joe shares how easy it is to follow those users with a little work in GTM. After setting up a trigger and a click-to-call tag, make audiences for the calls you miss. You can then add those audiences to your Google Ad Group.

Let’s Close This Out

As Joe finishes up his presentation he wanted to end with three simple points:

  1. Start Tracking user behavior with GTM.
  2. Remarket to the high-intent users first. Then expand your reach.
  3. Change your ad message to connect with the user and the actions they took.