Max’s Retargeting Pro-Tip

I thought you’d want to hear Max’s tip because you clicked on one of his previous Mixergy programs:

November’s Most Popular Interviewee Teaches How To Buy Customers

Burnt-Out At 20, Making $20K A Day – with Max Teitelbaum

The tip

Who’s Max?!

Max Teitelbaum is the co-founder of WhatRunsWhere, which helps customers buy display media more intelligently and profitably for their campaigns.

Transcript

Andrew: Max Titlebaum of What Runs Where popped in with a quick tip. Here it is.

Max: Okay so before I say you know what this bonus tip is I need to explain what retargeting is. What retargeting is you drop a pixel which is a small 1 x 1 image that can track when people come to your website onto your page. Now if you’re an affiliate this would be a landing page, if you’re an advertiser this would be your direct page. And what you do there is with the networking (?) so you can drop it through sidescale through Google, through Retargeter.com. There are tons of retargeting networks. You drop this pixel and then everybody that comes to your website, you start to build a list. Not of people but of pixels that you’ve dropped.

Now that’s Retargeting 101. Is when they go around the web you can then send them advertisements to remind them about your website, you know, maybe you should come back and buy this. Now there is one big problem people see that I’ll address first which is, if I’m retargeting everybody aren’t I going to be sending advertisements to people that already own or bought the stuff that I’m selling? And what you do is, there’s a quick fix around this. Which is you can build a second retargeting list. So you can drop a pixel on your confirmation or order page. The page that says thank you for ordering or something like that. You can build a second list of people that have you know bought the actual product. And then you just untarget basically based on that. So you target everybody but then you exclude a segment, you know, that’s already bought it. So you’re only hitting people that don’t buy it. That’s Retargeting 101.

What, the tip that I’m going to drop, and you know I did a, I was talking with a couple of media buying friends last night and they said crap I’ve never heard this, I’ve never thought about this, this is fantastic. Is, you know, building an asset using retargeting lists. As an affiliate one of the main problems is you don’t have a lot of assets in your business. And you know a business could always use more assets. So you know who’s coming to your pages. You know the demographics of the people that you know, come to your website. Or you should. These lists that you build therefore aren’t just lists of customers that came to your (?) but they’re demographic lists. They’re highly targeted demographic lists. So same with the people that bought it.

So let’s say that you have another person or a friends product that is similar to yours, you know, covers the same type of people or you have an affiliate (?). You can use that list to target that product or those people with that same laser point accuracy. Then instead of wasting money on impressions and people you know, you might be hitting, you know, 13 year old girls as well as your target of like 40 year old women if you’re getting on a game site or something. Instead of targeting that you can buy across a bunch of sites but only hit the people that you want to hit because you’ve already sort of added them from your segment, already know a general idea of what demographic they are. So you can use this to a, make more money because you have audiences built which are extremely valuable. And b, you have an asset that noone else really has because you’ve built it yourself. And then for business that, and then you’ve built this untargeting list. If you launch a new product iteration or you launch a similar product, you can say you know, in your ad you can say, love the i-pad, come get the i-pad 2, it’s out now. Similar to that. So you can tell, you can use it for smarter targeting to say you bought this, you might like this. Or you bought this, here’s another similar product that you might want to buy.

Andrew: Aha, I see. Let me see if I’ve understood you right. You’re saying basically, retargeting, I put a pixel on my website. If somebody clicks one of my ads on the internet and ends up on my website and doesn’t buy, I could of course buy a retargeting ad and advertise to them on other websites to bring him back. If he does buy….

Max: Exactly. Have you ever gone to. I know Grasshopper used to be a sponsor here. I’m not sure if they still are.

Andrew: They are. Do you want to use them as an example?

Max: Yeah. So when you go to Grasshopper.com, they only do part one. But when you go to Grasshopper.com, because I use Grasshopper, I love them.

Andrew: Grasshopper, they”re a virtual phone system.

Max: When you go to Grasshopper.com, immediately no matter where you go on the web you are going to start to see ads for Grasshopper. You’re going to go, gee, I never knew they advertised so much. They’re not actually advertising, they’re just retargeting you. So they have you know your, they drop a cookie onto your (?) browers, and they start targeting you across any website you go on reminding you that they’re around. Because it takes a couple exposures sometimes to get a customer to actually buy it. But then part two of what I said which is what you were trying to hit on is you know, what if it’s a person like me that already owns Grasshopper? I don’t want to be seeing Grasshopper banners, I already own it so they’re wasting money on me. So what they could do is they could place a pixel on their confirmation page and start collecting the ID’s of people that you know have bought it, and then apply that list sort of as a suppression list in e-mail where you know as an untargeting list. So they applied and they say, I want to target all these people but I want to exclude the people that bought it. And then you’re left with an audience of people that have not bought the product.

Andrew: Okay. And then what you’re saying too is, if Grasshopper has a new product that they’re coming out with, they might want to target the people who already clicked one of their past ads. Or if they have a new service on top of Grasshopper they might want to target current Grasshopper customers around the internet and say, hey, you already like Grasshopper, buy Grasshopper Pro and you’ll have an insanely good experience with Grasshopper.

Max: Exactly. Or if they come out with Grasshopper for Fax.

Andrew: Grasshopper for Fax, right.

Max: One of those (?) fax services. God knows, if they come out with a similar product they can say, love Grasshopper? You’re going to love our new product as well, because you’ve already bought it. And they can also target those other people, interested in Grasshopper, you might be interested in this. But then the other side of it, you know, is sort of the affiliate side and you know, saying I don’t actually own the product, I’m promoting somebody else’s product. All of a sudden I’m building an asset. I’m building lists of people, you know, lists of demographics that I can then, you know, when I go to test our new campaign and stuff, wasting a bunch of money testing it. I can load up one of these lists that I know the demographics for already, or have a good idea of the demographics for, and then test that campaign against a prequalified audience.

Andrew: Okay, so let’s take the Grasshopper example but this time from a new perspective. Suppose I’m an affiliate who sends customers to Grasshopper and Grasshopper let’s suppose pays me 40 dollars every time somebody signs up for Grasshopper. Well I go out on the internet and I buy a bunch of ads. Some number of people are going to click to the ad, and a portion of those people will end up buying. Great, I’ve got my orders. Now let’s suppose I have a new service that I’m going to promote. Maybe it is Shopify. Now Shopify pays me 40 bucks every time somebody signs up to set up a store with Shopify. Instead of advertising to the general internet I might say, hey you know what, I already know some people who are business minded, who have already clicked over to a Grasshopper ad. So they might be more likely to buy a Shopify account then the general population. I would only advertise to them.

Or if Grasshopper has a new pro service that they pay me 20 bucks for signing people up to, I don’t want to advertise that to the general population. I would advertise that only to people who clicked on my ad and then signed up for Grasshopper resulting in originally 40 bucks for me.

Max: It’s harder to place a retargeting pixel on their actual order confirmation page if you don’t own the product. And then also you need to control all the page, so either you have to have them place it on their page or you have to create a landing page in front of it if you’re an affiliate. But yeah, that’s the basics of it.

Andrew: Okay. What services do your recommend for putting the pixels on customers when they click one of the ads?

Max: Yeah, for WhatRunsWhere.com and our product, we use Site Scout.

Andrew: Use Site Scout.

Max: SiteScout.com, because they’re a real time buying platform and they have inventory across five or six different exchanges. And we’ve got pretty good reach with them. But you know, Google with AdWords has a retargeting pixel that you can place. And then there are a bunch of niche retargeting programs like Retargeter.com. And a lot of the media buy networks also have them. But I recommend going with something simple like Google or SiteScout.

Andrew: All right, perfect. Any last words?

Max: That’s about it.

Andrew: That’s it. Let me tell you this guys. If you use this, come back and let me know and of course reach out to Max, WhatRunsWhere.com and let him know that you’ve used this tip. Thanks Max.

Max: No problem.

Andrew: There it is. If you want more from Max, check out WhatRunsWhere.com or his Mixergy interview and of course there’s a great course that he put together for us.

What’s next?

Try one of Max’s two Mixergy programs:

November’s Most Popular Interviewee Teaches How To Buy Customers

Burnt-Out At 20, Making $20K A Day – with Max Teitelbaum

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