AdRoll is one of the hottest advertising platforms on the market. With over 20,000 customers in more than 100 countries around the world, AdRoll helps companies large and small reach their customers and site visitors through personalized retargeting.
How does AdRoll work? Whenever a visitor comes to your website, AdRoll’s tracking pixel will follow the visitor’s behavior, including what specific pages and products that they looked at on your site. When the visitor leaves your site without purchasing, AdRoll can serve ads to that customer to get them to come back to your site and convert.
AdRoll offers a lot of great features – but what are the best ways to utilize them for maximum results and ROI?
Optimization Tip One: Create Visually Interesting Ads With a Strong Call-To-Action
AdRoll ads are all about the visual value that you can provide to prospective customers. Make sure that your ads are compelling – you want them to be clicked on as much as possible!
To create click-worthy ads, follow these recommendations:
- Make your logo on each ad stand out. You want viewers to know exactly what they’re clicking on and drive brand awareness in the process.
- Have a strong, clear call-to-action on each ad. This can come in the form of a button or graphic, with text like “Shop Now”, “Click Here” or “Learn More” to prompt customers to click back to your site and purchase.
- Try to keep text minimal but impactful. Balance text with engaging images that reinforce the copy on your ad.
- Keep colors and fonts in mind. As a rule of thumb, stick away from ads with a white background, as they will easily blend in with the colors of a webpage that has a white background. Make typography bold and engaging to contrast with standard webpage text and draw attention.
Optimization Tip Two: Run Seasonal and Promotional Ads to Reach Cyclical Groups of Site Visitors
While general, evergreen ads are great to have running throughout the year, retargeting with AdRoll offers a big opportunity to reach customers with targeted ads based on the season.
Create themed ads that are specific to heavily-trafficked eCommerce holidays, like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Back to School. Your content and images should match the time of year and customers who are likely to be shopping at that time.
Running a big promotion during a holiday like free shipping or 25 percent off sitewide? Create ads that highlight a coupon code or on-site incentive to help increase click-through rate and create buzz for your products.
Optimization Tip Three: Create and Target Specific Segments of Customers on Your Site
AdRoll is all about personalization. Make sure you are showing ads that are relevant to customers and what they look at on your site. There are two great ways to do this through AdRoll – using HTML5 ads (also known as dynamic or liquid ads), or static ads targeting user segments.
With HTML5 ads, AdRoll watches visitor behavior whenever someone comes to your site. When the visitor leaves and navigates to another site within the AdRoll advertising network, the visitor will see the HTML5 ad on the other website. In the ad, the person will see your store’s logo, as well as a scrolling feed of the products that they viewed in your store, and can click on any of the products to purchase.
You can also target visitors through static ads (ones that aren’t animated) which are segmented by product or category pages. For example, if a customer views multiple products on the Dresses category page on a clothing boutique site, we can create a segment to target all visitors who have been to the Dresses page. Then, we can show those customers a variety of static ads with content related to that page.
Optimization Tip Four: Target Customers at Each Point in the Purchase Process
AdRoll makes it easy to reach customers at every step of their discovery and purchase process of your products. To put it into context, each visitor who comes to your home page for the first time moves through a funnel. They probably start by visiting general pages like About Us or Contact to learn more. From there, they hopefully start to look at the specific category and product pages before making a purchase.
AdRoll allows us to break up each piece of the funnel into a segment. Using segmentation, we can target visitors at each step during the purchase process and serve them ads specific to their stage in the cycle.
For example, we can serve a site visitor a more brand-focused ad if they initially view those general site pages. Then, as they start to look at products in your store, we can serve them ads that match the categories and products they were viewing (as noted in tip 3).
When a customer abandons their cart, we can show them ads that prompt them to go back and purchase the specific items in their cart, perhaps with a promo code to sweeten the deal. Finally, when the customer has come back to their cart, we can serve ads to capture an expiring offer like free shipping to drive the purchase home.
Optimization Tip Five: Set up Geo-Targeted Ads to Reach Customers by Geographic Location
AdRoll provides functionality to geo-target ads, from entire countries down to an individual zip code. If your store’s brick-and-mortar location is running a big sale, or if you’re having a pop-up shop or regional event, geo-targeting makes it easy to reach customers in just those areas with ads.
If you’re looking to provide incentives for local customers, geo-targeting is also a great resource. You can slightly differentiate your ad offering to local shoppers to get them back in the door at your physical retail location.
You’ve created, segmented, tweaked and updated your AdRoll retargeting ads. Now what?
The most important step in any type of optimization is to track your results. With AdRoll, you can deep dive into engagement analytics to understand how often and when customers are viewing, clicking on, and purchasing from AdRoll ads. If ads are underperforming, you can replace them with new ads and test content for optimization.
Within Springbot, you can see revenue generated when a customer clicks on an ad and purchases. You can also see a line-item breakdown of what the customer bought after they clicked on the ad which allows you to see the full story of what happens after shoppers click on your ads. Using our tips above, these insights can help you better understand where in the funnel that customers are purchasing and how to guide purchase behavior in the future.
