7 Targeting Practices You Can Implement Today

August 10, 2020

We’ve covered seven 15-minute strategies for setting up hyper-profitable campaigns — whether retargeting or not — plus some bonus material! Find the recording below.

#1. Retargeting is a must for all advertisers.

Remarketing is a tactic that shows ads to users who have visited your website. Since the users have already expressed interest in the product or service you are offering, Remarketing is a cost-effective way to drive conversions, and should be leveraged as an ‘always on’ tactic.

#2. Always. Be. Prospecting.

What experts consider the most important metrics to track (backed by original research fielded in May 2020 by In conjunction with Remarketing to users who have shown interest, you should always be Prospecting, aka finding new customers. Some of our favorite, cost-effective prospecting tools are as follows: Native Ads, Smart Audience, Lookalike Audience.

#3. Performance advertising is not a short-term investment.

As a rule of thumb, a campaign needs to run between 2-8 weeks to become a positive investment. Why, you ask? Algorithms learn over time to only serves ads to users likely to convert. While this may be frustrating, it is true for all platforms like Google and Facebook. Essentially the algorithms need to “learn” their way into finding good users to serve ads to. They learn from “events” such as clicks or purchases.

#4. Use whitelists

This is a simple, yet effective strategy.

By creating a site list relevant to your target audience, you can reach users who are more likely to be interested in your product.

#5. Use creatives that make sense for your KPI’s.

If Viewability is an important metric for you, run smaller creatives, as they tend to have higher Viewability. Native Ads also tend to have very high viewability. Remember, per IAB guidelines, an ad is considered Viewable if 50% of the pixels are in-view for 1 second or more.

#6. Target your prospect lists with Dynamic Email Integration.

If you have CRM data on your audience, upload your emails and leverage Dynamic Email Integration to target those users across the Web, Mobile and Facebook.

#7. Strike a balance between a narrow targeting pool and scalability.

Appropriate targeting will help make your campaign stronger. However, keep in mind, if the targeted pool is too small, your campaign will not have enough scale and will not be as strong. Try to strike a balance.

Bonus Tips!

Watch the recording or check out the slides below for additional tactics you can start using today to target your audience more effectively!

Transcription:

00:04

Hi everybody, welcome and thanks for joining us today for our Seven Targeting Best Practices That You Can Implement Today. I’m Kathleen from the marketing team here at SharpSpring Ads and we’re just seeing some people signing on still, so we’re gunna give it a second and then we’ll go ahead and get started. Alrighty well, welcome again to everybody who’s just joining us. I’m Kathleen from the SharpSpring Ads team and thanks for joining us today. Before we begin I’m going to introduce our speakers for today. So first we have Eric Stockton. He’s our general manager here at SharpSpring Ads and Eric’s done quite a bit of other work in other businesses building their sales teams and a lot of experience in publishing and online media. And next up we have Jalali Hartman, he is our AI lab director here at SharpSpring Ads, but he’s also the founder of Roboto. So he is very experienced in the field of innovation and new technology. And he is a great asset to us here at SharpSpring Ads. So we’re excited to have him on today. And then last but not least, we have Todd Lebo, who’s the CEO of Ascend2, and he’s worked with Ascend2 for a couple different research projects so John is a great asset to our team as well. And he is super experienced in marketing technology firms and agencies drive demand to their products and services. So thank you all for being here with us. And without further ado we’re going to get started.

2:05

So our premise for today is the seven best things you can do for targeting, and I’m gunna hand this over to Eric to get us started on why retargeting is a must for all advertisers.

2:16

Thanks Kathleen. Yeah so we were sitting just to give you some premise behind this, we were sitting in a meeting working remotely like I’m sure everybody is, this is probably about two weeks ago, and we were looking through some of the questions from the previous webinar that we had done, and we were getting a lot of questions around topics that we felt like would form a good set of, these are your core principles that you want to apply for a successful advertising campaign. So we put seven, we selected seven of them. There are more, and if you actually, at the end of this webinar when you get the recording, and you also can have the slides, we’ll circulate those at the very end, we put together some bonus material for you with some extra tips and things that we couldn’t fir into the core content. So, but we’re going to start with a seven and then we can talk through some of those.

3:18

So we all sort of know that retargeting is the low-hanging fruit of advertising. It’s the most quality traffic. It is the highest performing in terms of click-through rate and allows you to be able to show your ads to visitors that have already experienced your brand, had come in contact and had a good experience with your products or services and more likely than not is going to be one of your most cost effective ways to drive conversions and leads. So what we really wanted to do is sort of start off with that and kind of walk people through what that looks like. And make sure you know, if I was probably, what we would have had here on the slide was a funnel graphic right, and in that funnel graphic if you think about retargeting and where it fits in the funnel, it fits at the very bottom of the funnel right? It is right there where your most qualified traffic is as they are coming to your site, and you know experiencing experience in your brand. So super targeted. And allows you to be able to drive higher ROIs than you typically would with other advertising methods. So that’s sort of point number one and then going into point number two, which is going to be, oh I think we’re having some technical difficulties here hang on just a second. I think we may have lost Kathleen. We did. But I’m sure we can check, you can keep going on. I’ll work on moving the slides for you. Yeah I appreciate that.

5:08

So I have a hard time throwing two things at one time so I’m just going to help you out. I really do, exactly right. So if I’m looking at number two, which we’ll get the slides to catch up with us, but it’s all around prospecting. There’s a sale if you’re in sales, there’s always that classic sales terminology, you’re saying it’s like always be closing. If you sort of translate that into advertising, it’s really always be prospecting. So what’s happening, especially in an environment like we’re in right now with Covid and you know, budgets have been rolled back in certain areas, what you have is a, and what we are seeing over you know, the last couple of months especially is people had pulled back their ad budgets back in March when things were very uncertain like most people did. And now what they’re seeing is the drying up of their funnel right? And where they pulled back and they’d stop bringing new blood into the pipeline. So really you know, even all, really especially in this kind of environment, not letting the funnel dry up, so always adding new prospects. Always bringing more people in at the top of the funnel. And we, I sort of just picked three methods, there are more than this, but just for the purposes of this discussion, I really just kind of looked at three of them, native ads which are within a particular publisher’s content. That is that floating ad that’s in the middle on the text side, what we call smart audience, which is augmented audience, that allows you to be able to find based on your site content, your domain. Allowing you to be able to focus on, or select an audience that matches both of those. And that is different than a lookalike audience. A lookalike audience applies machine learning and AI, you know Google, Facebook, SharpSpring Ads, we all have our own sort of flavors of that, where you know we will match based on, in some cases, tens of thousands, thousands of data points to be able to come up with your perfect prospect based on who has been converting historically.

7:44

And you know, we’ll talk a little bit more about this in some of the other slides but essentially giving you more, sort of the more data the better right? That’s how algorithms tend to work. If you feed them more, the better they get on the other end and maybe we’ll let Jalali talk a little bit about some of that. And then the third item, and by the way these are not actually necessarily in sequential order, we are picking these because they all sort of rise to the top. I would probably start with number one, but then subsequent to that, you can, based on your case, you’d find that there are certain tactics that are gunna work better than others. The third one that we are talking about is really, it’s more of a tactic or a strategy around sort of expectations, what, and the reason why we threw this in here to build this as one of our seven, is we know from experience working with you know, tens of thousands of these types of campaigns that performance advertising and retargeting is a subset of that, is really, it’s an iterative process right? You’re testing, you’re iterating and also the algorithms themselves, again Google’s, Facebook’s, ours, really need a lot of data in order to be able to learn quote-unquote, you know, based on click behavior, purchase behavior, purchase activity in order to optimize to the fullest extent. And typically what we advise is somewhere in the neighborhood of six to eight weeks of time where, and by the way this is completely a function of your traffic and clicks and conversions. So if you have a higher volume of clicks and conversions you know, the more you have the faster the algorithm can learn. And maybe you don’t need a full eight weeks and there, you know, but there are a vast majority of campaigns that are really sort of in that, a smaller subset of traffic. Especially things like startups, you know groups like that there are websites like that that don’t have tremendous amounts of traffic. So it takes a little bit longer to be able to gather that data, that click behavior and purchase behavior to be able to get the algorithm to learn. So it’s not a short-term thing. it can give you good results along the way. It’s not like you start at zero and you have to wait eight weeks and hope right? So there’s, you know, what you’ll see and if. you think about it in terms of like a graph, you know, what you’ll see is a chart that sort of works its way up and to the right. If you think about performance being the top right of the corner of the graph and that is sort of an expectation point, where I see mistakes in campaigns is really where we have an advertiser who is coming in and they’re saying hey, I really want to dial this in. I’m really excited you know, I’ve got this new product I’m ready to launch, you know, how fast can I turn this thing around and you can sort of pre-train the algorithm in some cases by getting the tag installed and having the algorithm learn and build your audience.

11:45

That’s one, you know, it’s one sort of piece of it, but when subsequent to that, it’s really the rest of it. So. you know, having that kind of, I think you can see my screen here is that right? Yes, we can. Yes you can great. So really you know, allowing people to be able to, I’m trying to talk and share screens and sorry I’m not very talented I guess in that front. But you know, allowing me, you can sort of pre-train it and get yourself in a position where up front the algorithm learns and then you can again, subsequent to that and allow you to be able to grab those clicks and purchase conversions in order to finish out. But it’s typically the 6-8 week mark and then you can see my next slide right, this is white lists, odds are we just see your desktop or it might still be Kathleen’s desktop. Yeah those of you just joining us, Kathleen’s in Gainsville, Florida. If you’ve ever been there in the summer, she was getting hit with a thunderstorm. She is, oh she’ll be back in a second. Yeah, so I’ll keep going and then again, what we can do is we can, well see Eric as you were saying, something that you were saying, something that really struck a cord with me as you’re getting the slides up you know, I just, you’re talking about kind of like testing up to those improved performances and I think there’s this element and actually Eric and I had worked together at a testing lab for many years in Jalali too, that’s how we first met each other. I think there’s this element of kind of having a DNA of testing that becomes part of what you do to you know, best practices kind of give you the starting point of you know, where do I start, where do I start at you know, what should I be, what are things that other marketers are doing successfully because that’s a great place to start. But then you’re just constantly having that DNA of testing to kind of get up to the point where you’re being successful. And I think as we talked about this topic, my background research and I was going through some of the research that we’ve conducted and seen on, you know, like why retargeting and I was just, if I could share a couple of those, you know, one is that we have found that 41% of marketers, 41% of the budget paid, ad budget that marketers have is going toward retargeting. So they’re kind of allocating and moving some of that you know, 41% of that budget to retargeting. And one of the reasons is because, and we’ll see some other stats of how successful it is, but I also think it, by getting a higher rate of return on your retargeting, it kind of helps your overall ROI of the program.

15:01

So yeah. It allows them to get a overall higher or ROI of the program invest more into keeping that top of the funnel working. So you know, that’s one of the stats that I looked at and you know, also the retargeting really addresses that 98% of people who come to your site but never make a purchase that first time. So they’re coming, you’re investing into making them come to your site whether it be paid media or SEO. Even like building content and having a magnet to draw people to your site. So you have all these people but 80-98% go somewhere else. And so this retargeting is kind of acknowledgement of, they have interest for some reason in you. They’ve come to you once but how can you keep re-engaging with them and so that’s really like some of the initial data that we had, that really kind of like reinforced kind of this best practices conversation today.

16:04

Yeah I think that 98% is such a big number and you know, it’s been passed around across the web in different research reports and I think it’s easy to overlook how powerful that number really is. We look at 98% and we see a it a lot, and it’s easy to miss that there’s a real frustration factor. I mean, I’ve, everybody on this call in some form or fashion has probably been running businesses or, you know, has been the person pulling, running the budget and the thing that as a business owner myself and in my past life, was always frustrating to me was, I would pour lots of money in the top of the funnel through PPC and other areas and then what would happen would be, I would get in a position where I would spend, I’m making this number up, but let’s say it’s a hundred thousand dollars a month, and PPC, and what you know, on the other end I’m getting maybe you know 2,000 conversions out of that or something. And that’s just always this constant like iterative process of ROI in the campaigns. And you know, if I had, if I flipped it a little bit and I said okay, well 2% of my people are conversion, 98% of them are leaving. Two percent of them are converting. if I got that to 3% it doesn’t seem like it’s a big number, but 3% goes from 2,000 sales to 3,000. That’s a huge number right? That’s the difference between me maybe breaking even on an ad campaign and making real money. And especially if I’m a small business owner right? So there’s lots of that kind of thing that you have in this kind of process where you want to see more of these little tweaks that you can make in order to get big gains and drive real revenue. So the fourth topic is really, your tactic, it’s really a white list, excuse me white lists, we like a lot because it allows you to be able to dial in your particular target focus right?

18:31

So where you’re in a particular campaign you’re running, that campaign you’re retargeting. But maybe you know, you only want to show up on certain publishers websites. There are certain platforms that allow you to do this. SharpSpring Ads one of them where you can basically dial in a certain audience that you want to target. You can also target certain, and pinpoint certain advertise, or publishers that you wanna show up on. I’m gunna use the New York Times as an example and maybe your type of product, your type of service, your, the ads that you are running would do, would succeed better click-through rates, conversion rates on different types of publishers, inventory, and not to get politically leaning one way or the other, but you know I kind of think about certain types of products are going to appeal to a particular audience and those audiences are all important.

19:43

So being able to take, let’s say it’s a conservative type of conservative learning type of product, I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but you know, let’s say it is then maybe you know, that particular one is going to do better in more conservative type publishers that deal, that attract more conservative viewers and audiences. So those kinds of things I think are super important to be able to look at. And again, by the way it’s you know, you can target and white list audiences. So you know, there’s another scenario here that would be a good example. You know, people who visited your checkout page, and those are people that are higher qualified than people who just visited your homepage. And you know, people that make it all the way through out of product, or you know, or are looking at a particular service, getting all the way to the checkout page is an indicator of how qualified that individual is and how important or how valuable that person is to you. So having those kinds of little tweaks that you can make really does give you that campaign performance. And maybe does get you from 2% to 3% right? So those kinds of things are super important. Another one is that I’ll just kind of keep going real quick, is the use of creatives. And we’ve actually done a pretty extensive webinar on this I want to say about a month ago now, talking about how, and we had a campaign that we were running that we used as an example or for our case study and basically we had, we were able to, using multiple ad sizes, allowed us to be able to get better CPMs or better costs for certain types of ads. Maybe smaller ads were less expensive and that when you sort of looked at it in terms of your campaign, you look back at all, across all of the ad creatives that you were running the more expensive ones which would be like your leaderboard ads or you know, your less expensive ones that would be you know, smaller ones.

22:15

When you sort of average them all out, what you got was a 27, well let’s see what it was, I’m doing this from memory, I have to, want to go back and look at the number but the case study was, we were able to get an increase of around 30% more inventory or more reach more people you know that we can get in front of at a 27% or so cost decrease which is sort of counter-intuitive right? I mean you’re thinking about it. You’re saying okay, well I’m sending my ads out more to a larger audience, you would think that you know, it would cost. you more and really what was happening is the lower cost ads were actually driving down my overall spend so those kinds of again, little tweaks really are the difference between a successful campaign and maybe an unsuccessful campaign. Number six on our list is how you can target your prospect list with what we call dynamic email and basically what that is is if you have a CRM, let’s say you’re using something like Sharp Spring or you know, Clavio or Marketo or something like that, the CRM that holds all of your email data, you can actually integrate where SharpSpring Ads specifically will take that data and then match it up against the sort of the whole graph of cookie users that allows us to be able to create an audience around and serve ads against that particular group.

24:00

So a good example of this would be, let’s say it’s somebody who’s coming in and they are building an email list of people who have opted in for a particular newsletter. I’m making that up. So you have a list, and you know, maybe that list is around ten thousand people. We will actually take that list and actually in addition to your newsletters, your campaigns that you’re sending out through your service provider, you know, email to the inbox, we are able to come alongside that will ads across the web. So we actually were able to give you two or three, give your prospect or your customer, two difference views of the same type of content. So, you know, and maybe, and a good example of this would be, and maybe this is how you signed up for this webinar, we run our own ads for SharpSpring Ads, for our webinars. So you know, if you signed up for a webinar and you saw our ad that was across the web, and maybe you were on CNN.com and you were looking at the news and you saw our ad and clicked through on it, that might very well coincide with the exact same email that you got in your inbox from us earlier that day that says hey, we’ve got this webinar that’s on the seven best practices. And the power of being able to see it in multiple locations like that, it really reinforces your brand, reinforces the, you know, the offer that you were trying to get in front of your prospect. So super powerful option there as well.

25:50

And then number seven is really sort of a general principle that I think is super important. And this is where I think a lot of advertisers get frustrated, where you’ll see people on the back end of a campaign, say that are you k now, they are interested in a particular product or getting their product. Maybe they’re launching a new product line. Let’s just use that as an example. They launch a new product line and in that product line the, maybe you know it’s an audience size of around 2,000 people or something that, what happens is you know, if you only have an audience size of 2,000 people, you are very limited in the amount of ads or reach that you can get in front of these prospects, so. you can get in front of that particular prospect group and that’s super important. But then there’s also the power of being able to sort of expand that into a larger audience and if we think about that in terms of a Venn Diagram for example, the Venn Diagram you know, you got sort of picture two big circles and then there’s a sort of a circle within the circle. It’s sort of your sweet spot right. So super hyper focused targeting pinpointed targeting combined with the reach and the scale is what really gives you the balance of a successful campaign.

27:45

And that sort of also ties back to number, point number two that we were talking about when we were talking a little bit about prospecting and bringing people into the top of the funnel. So what’s happening is you know, that larger audience you know, may not have had an experience with. your brand yet, but combined with your higher performance or retargeting ads gives you sort of a blended rate of better ad performance and better overall campaign performance. So super valuable to be able to know how to dial both of those in. And if you think about them sort of like in terms of dials right on a dashboard or something you know, you’re tweaking one a little bit over here and you’re tweaking the other one over here. What you end up with is the proper balance of a successful campaign. So that was number, that was sort of the number seven. And I feel like I have been doing this immense amount of talking and there’s a ton of people on this webinar that have come in and are probably not seeing my slides. Again, please forgive us. What we’ll do is, we’ll actually give you the slides after the fact. Make sure that you have those in your hands as soon as we get done with this webinar, but because there are so many people on here, I really was interested in seeing if we could get some questions from people. And. you know, if I just looked here real quick, one of the questions that we got, and I’m gunna maybe defer to the panel a little bit on this. I’ll sort of play moderator and you know defer to some others.

29:42

So jalali and Todd, here’s a great question from Todd. He’s saying is there a minimum number of visitors per month on the website before retargeting really makes sense? And Todd looks like he works for a B2B small business market company. He’s got a little bit less then 6,000 or so visitors. Jalali you want to take that one?

30:15

Yes that’s a good question. So when we’re talking about targeting versus retargeting, just to define it, so the retargeting is we’re trying to identify who that person was and give them a message back. And I think we’re all familiar, a lot of you probably grew up doing email marketing right? So it’s kind of a similar thing, except in this case we know who they are because they’ve come to the website and we put a cookie on them right? That’s kind of how this platform works. So the question is, is there a minimum amount that makes sense? And the answer is absolutely not. In fact, I’ve, I did a campaign. The first day I launched it the person got a tag to a visitor remarketed to that visitor got a lead right? So it doesn’t have to be a large volume of people, it was just that that gentleman that the user thad seen the company before they came over they saw it again and again. And in fact, in the lead they commented, hey I just saw this on some website, like that’s amazing you guys were able to kind of do that. So you don’t need a large volume. However when you kind of zoom out and look at the math of what’s going on, you’re trying to serve ads to people that have already seen your site. So if you’re out there trying to serve ads and. you’ve only had 50 people see the site, there’s just a limited amount of times you can show them those 50 people that ad. So it makes a lot of sense to grow that audience either via your email list that you can then target to, or just let a lot of people see your site right? So put the pixel on your website, that’ll start day one kind of tracking, but no it’s just an incredibly effective way.

34:46

in fact, there’s this weird effect that we see where someone comes in, you could have a very small business, someone comes in but what happens is that users start seeing you on their favorite news sites right above like the featured news on like a Fox or a CNN or you know, it’s like they’re then, they go over to their Facebook, they see you there. Right. Wow, who is this company is just everywhere right? It’s amazing how they do that. And I think there’s something to be said to that. Especially when you’re small right? It’s like you want to be hitting those people through you’ve probably spent a ton to get that visitor initially right? So to be able to follow them around and again, this is not like tooting the SharpSpring Ads horn, it’s just in this day and age especially, it’s really important to just capitalize on those people that have already visited. You forget what you looked at, you’re like that happens to be a lot. It’s like you’re trying to remember this company and then you see the ad, so that’s a great question.

32:44

And if I could add a little bit more to that one. Of course I love stats and one stat here I have is B2B retargeting outperforms B2C retargeting by over 400% in conversions per impression. Which is pretty impressive right? So i think that kind of aligns. Generally what you’re talking about from the standpoint even if you have a smaller universe of potential, those people are probably also much more targeted right? So they you know, it’s a manufacturing company you know. And that person who came to your site is looking for a specific implementation, you know. They’re also very targeted. So once they go and leave, there’s a benefit of keeping engaged with them. And a much higher percentage of conversion opportunity, I would say the second point that I see from the research that we’ve done at Ascend2 is like, there’s this overall umbrella of strategy that you have to consider. So for example today, we’re talking about retargeting and paid media, but that also plays into SEO strategy and your content strategy. So you’re using your SEO and content strategy to attract people to your site. So you’re investing in that, but you’re also wanting to take some of that budget and invest in paid media.

34:14

I was just recently talking with a marketer and he was saying like, I’m trying to invest in SEO and my SEO and my content, the leadership team just says we’ll just do paid media. And I’m like, I need both but he’s trying to explain to them like I need both of them to maximize my program. So I think when you start thinking about your overall strategy and how retargeting fits in, it’s not just an isolated tactic. I think it’s kind of, is part of your overall plan. Yeah I think the balance that you achieve you know, by the right mix is super important right? I mean there isn’t, there’s sort of this, you know my mom always used to tell me everything in moderation right? And it’s sort of the same thing here right? There’s a moderate approach that gives your the right balance on the light, the right blend. So let’s see, let’s go through one more here. This is from Armin. He says, we work for a digital marketing agency. Serving customers is amongst others like banking insurance, medical, et cetra. And the question really is, you know, can a solution, I mean he specifically mentions SharpSpring Ads, you know in general, will retargeting work for things like programmatic display on behalf of your clients right? So you know, can you use something like PA for, to be able to serve ads to your clients.

36:12

And I guess I can take that one. But so yeah, I mean we do, we have lots of agencies that fit that exact same model and really, you know some of our more successful advertisers are agencies that are managing their clients budgets and so we will typically, I mean I can’t speak for other platforms or anything, but for PA we have the ability to be able to create sub-accounts. Each client gets their own account and also, their own login if you wanted to give that to your client so they can see their reporting, they can see their dashboard. We see a lot of people actually a lot of agencies really like that capability because they’re able to, like there’s this complete transparency right? When the client, and you as the agency you know, or the account manager are looking at the data together under the same, you know, the same roof and you’re seeing, and you’re sort of building a strategy around that there are other advantages as well. But you know, that’s one that comes to mind. You guys want to add anything to that?

37:34

Yeah so just, see you’ve been going through a lot of stuff here and some people have been coming on. Yeah this slide, so this is about targeting and specifically retargeting. And I think that the common thing that I keep seeing, especially any kind of size advertiser you’re trying to talk to, there’s so many different things you can be doing now. Like when I, for example, my granddad had a small insurance company. I remember him sitting and looking at his business cards and his rolodex and literally like handwriting little notes and sending desktop calendars at the end of the year. Like that was his retargeting. And that was pretty effective right? It’s like that person he met at a meet-up one morning. And he now sends him a little note and then we got into okay, well let’s get into this about our emails right here. I’ll build these email lists and get them. Then we got good at segmenting the email list and sending emails and now we’re in this age where literally you have to have data and machines and computers running and trying to figure out who came to your site. Who was this customer? What did they do? What was their interest level? You know, I don’t know about you, some of the people on the call, but deal with just massive amounts of customers and so trying to remember who did what and so you need this platform. You need a platform to kind of run it and I think it’s easy to get lost in. I need to have this Facebook thing, this Instagram thing, and all these difference things running. What you really need to do is drill down, okay, who are your segments?

39:01

They’re either not a customer yet or they are a customer. Or maybe they’re a certain type of customer. Then you need to break it down into okay, this person needs to see this message. This person needs to see that message. And really kind of start there before you go into channels and all the different tools that you need. Like what does that map look like? Who are these people? And I think Eric’s even doing a thing like down to the persona. Like who are they really? What do they, what are their needs you know? Like us, our small business customers need something much different than say, an agency. Some of you guys are probably agencies right? So you don’t always want to have the same message going everybody. But if you can get that kind of nailed and start to use automation and really dig into your analytics about who you’re looking at, who you’re talking to. I mean the difference is just tremendous. You know, I imagine like if my granddad had that kind of software back then he would have been growing a lot bigger. So it’s, it can be very overwhelming. It’s definitely not something you can do manually anymore you know. You have to have some kind of automation that does this, that sorts these people. But it can make a huge difference. Like it just, it really can. And it’s worth taking the time to drill down on who your segments are and what messages they need. Start with that and then kind of deploy the campaign.

40:22

Yeah, there’s a, and you say this a lot Jalali right? It’s not computers and algorithms and AI and machine learning you know off on its own and it’s just doing its thing. And it’s also not, you know, experts and gurus and specialties. We really as users of, and advertisers today have so much more power than we ever did in the past. Because you know, we can come in and we can manage our own campaigns right? And if we’re an agency we can manage campaigns for our clients in it like much more effectively and allows us to be able to grown our businesses, drive more leads, get more sales, than you know, we were able to do in the past. It’s just, it’s you know, it’s what’s the old adage. It’s you know, sort of like one plus one equals three you know? That example and it really is right? I mean you do have to have algorithms and machine learning and those kinds of things you can’t survive you know sort of in this day and age without that. But you also have to know which dials to turn and which things to be able to focus on and we spend lots and lots of hours with advertisers all the time you know, talking about you know, what their strategy is. How to make campaigns more effective, how do they improve those? And then we share a lot of that, a lot of those learnings actually on these webinars and in these little roundtable sessions that we do, you know, once every week or two. So you know, I think just pulling all of that together, it makes for a pretty exciting time right now.

42:30

I have another question actually from Christy. Maybe this will be the last question we do. There’s a ton of questions in here so what we may, what we might do is actually do another follow-up like FAQ session or something on Monday and you know, handle some of the other ones. But just for the sake of time right now, the last one is from Christy. She said how do you incorporate retargeting, specifically as a tactic into your overall campaign strategy. So that’s a good question. I have a couple of thoughts on that, but you know, toss it out to you guys. I mean, the absolute easiest way to do that is to install our pixel or a retargeting pixel from a competitor and just let the software start doing it. So all that means is basically you’re putting a little snippet of code on your website that allows another platform to track who that person is and serve them the appropriate ad. And so that’s as easy as it is to kind of get up and just copy and paste some code into your bottom here if you were trying to segment and do that yourself. You never could, but that’s really and I kind of feel like you should be doing that before you’re doing the other campaigns, just so that you start to build an audience right? Like even if you’re not actively spending a ton in retargeting, you should still be tracking and segmenting and organizing those visitors the same way you would an email list.

44:07

Honestly yes, people that came to certain sections of your site, they made, that’s incredibly valuable data to have and the ability to go back and then say, okay, and we do a lot of that. Like, let’s build up and build up a bunch of people then let’s hit them back with a certain ad of a certain type. Launch some product that maybe would be interesting to them. So yeah, it’s, it sounds overwhelming. It’s actually not hard to do at all. So I think if you already have a campaign and this you know Christy, I would say you have a, let’s say you’re running a PPC campaign and an email campaign, and you’ve got some other things going, PR or something, that’s driving a reasonable amount of traffic to your website, this is one of those things where it’s not an either or proposition. And I think you posed the question right. You said, how do you incorporate it right? So how do you feather that in? How do you bring it alongside of your existing campaign strategy? All retargeting does is makes it every other form of your advertising better. That’s really what it boils down to. So if you, on a very practical level, you take an audience that you were building up, that you’re able to come in and you’re able to target, you’re bringing lots of people in the top of the funnel let’s say with your PPC or your email campaigns, what we are able to do in a platform like SharpSpring Ads for example, would you be able to bring those people back at a much lower cost?

45:55

So right now, if you’re paying three dollars a click, I’m making that number up, but let’s say you’re paying three dollars a click for your particular ad campaign, you’re paying a fraction of that in retargeting and if you think about it, it’s even more qualified than the original. Well it’s as qualified as the original click, you’re just paying a fraction of the original click price. So that user cost you, or that visitor cost you three dollars the first time, and it costs you, again pennies compared to that to bring them back. So that’s sort of the power of it. So when you’re talking about, how do you incorporate it on a practical level, it’s super simple just to install the tag and start building that audience. And then layering in that more effective advertising that makes the rest of your overall campaigns just work better. So, and it doesn’t have to be a large budget. I think that’s an important component too. Like you can start small and build as you get results.

47:10

Yeah I mean, actually that’s what we recommend is you know, we all come from testing and experiment backgrounds right? So one of the things that you want to do is come in and look at these campaigns holistically and sort of walk before you run right? You set up your campaign, you get, especially if you don’t have experience with it, or you know, it’s a brand new campaign you know. You start small, your budget doesn’t have to be massive and what you do is as you get data and as you get success you start building that up and ratcheting things up and it’s sort of a function of the amount of traffic that you run through to your website on how fast you can scale up. So but yeah, good points. And again I think maybe what we’ll do is a follow up series you know, 10-15 minutes where we answer some of the rest of these questions because there’s a bunch of them here. But I think we’ll kind of move on. This is is more Jalali’s area so I’ll let him talk real quick about kind of what we’re doing. Jalali do you want to talk about this?

48:26

Yeah so this is actually a lot simpler than it sounds. So I’ve been working on a, I guess a program that within SharpSpring Ads where we can apply actually very advanced technology, put very high level experts kind of on advertising data to do one thing and that’s just drive more conversions. So I don’t want you guys, but I do try a lot of marketing stuff. I try a lot of programs, I spend a lot of advertising dollars through this lab in different places. And at the end of the day all I want is really a sale or a lead. Like I’m interested in the tactic behind it, whether it was retargeting prospecting social media SEO, but the other day I just want to see, I spent some money and on the other end I got results and that’s what this, the AI lab is at SharpSpring Ads. So not something we charge for, it is unless something that is invite only in terms of you have to have certain things in place, conversations happening, an understanding of your basic funnel. So you understand kind of what’s going on now and then the ability to drive some conversions. So there’s no budget limit or anything like that. But we do need to kind of have data coming out of it and what we do is just work alongside you to just optimize. So you set up the campaigns normally, but then we kind of come alongside and say okay, well how can we get more gains out of this.

49:47

If you have a ten dollar per lead goal, what do you really care when it comes from and kind of how it works and that’s kind of the goal. So we’re going to take our platform that we understand intimately, we’re going to take a whole bunch of data from other campaigns and other kind of sources and just help you to do more with it. So it’s a good opportunity, especially going into the e-commerce season here if some of you guys are e-commerce folks. Eric share an amazing thing and I was trying to find it but it was the amount that e-commerce has grown during the pandemic. It was ten years worth of growth in one year or something like that. It’s incredible. Three months. So yeah, so there’s a lot of bad and there’s a lot of scary stuff and somebody, the other one thing that is clear, online is not going away. In fact, it’s even more important so as you guys are getting ready kind of closing out the summer here, definitely if you have clients or you have yourself, like maybe a funnel that is working or could scale or where you just need to maybe get a little bit more fruit out of it. That’s kind of where we can help and so how do they actually fund out more of that about that Eric on this?

51:01

We’ll be sending a follow-up email. We also have the address AI@perfectaudience.com if you want more from, but yeah just a great program Eric’s extending, giving us some ad budget to work with, to get people up and going, team of experts that will just take your campaigns and really try to get them tuned here going into the fourth quarter. Yeah, and that’s actually interesting like that’s, it’s good for brands and agencies alike right? Yeah. In fact it doesn’t matter if you’re directly around the campaign that’s great. If you’re an agency even better. We can take some of your top customers and apply some of this stuff and really get going. And I can tell you it’s the future. You need this type of engine kind of running against your campaigns. So take advantage of it.

51:57

Yup. And on the other, just sort of a bit of like shameless promo here. Frankly we, one of the reasons why we do this is because we find that a lot of people just you know, they’re excited about getting started and where they fall short is like, just creating their first set of ads and so you know, they’ll come in and you know, they’ll sign up for an account and then they’ll sort of get stuck in how do I get the right ad? How do I get the right branding in my ad and my color schemes and it’s you know, if you don’t have a designer on staff it can be kind of a hassle. And it just sort of takes the wind out of your sails. And everybody that we talk to is super excited about being able to do something after they hear like, oh wow, that’s exactly what I need and I need to you know, so you need to sort of dive into that. And then I talked to him like a week later and it’s like yeah, I really want to do it but I’m using Fiverr to get my ad guy to help me get my creatives built and they’re having all sorts of trouble around that or they just don’t come back right or whatever. So what we’re doing is just a free ad set offer. This is for the first 20 advertisers that launch a campaign with SharpSpring Ads this month.

53:23

And so what we’ll do is we’ll build a whole set of creatives around that and you know, allows you to be able to work with our experts who know how to optimize for things like click-through rate and make ads really pop and work and allows us to be able to build those for you and so the way you can do that is you can just go to perfectaudience.com/match and that allows you to be able to apply to do that. Or you can email in at ads@sharpspring.com. We can actually help you there too. But the first 20 advertisers that launch a campaign, kind of sort of limit it because we don’t have infinite amounts of design help and frankly, I might, i sort of like, we dropped this in last minute, we might freak out a couple of our internal designers. Let’s see we’re doing this. But we’ve got some really talented people on staff and we can help you out with that. Design sets, we offered this I think two weeks ago. Yeah just some of the banner sets that come out of it, it’s great. Like that’s a really good resource.

54:35

That’s awesome yeah. Makes the difference yeah. And then so follow-up, we as I was saying earlier, we do these once every week or two, there’s certainly no shortage of topics and things that we can cover, that we can go through. But the next one is some, I don’t know when we were talking about this, maybe a week or so ago, we were talking about like what’s the next sort of topic that people are writing in about, having questions about. And typically and some of the questions that jus came in you know during this particular webinar are actually, for it can be answered by this one that we’re doing in two weeks on August 20th. We titled it How to Stop Killing You Campaign. So a lot of times what will happen is we’ll find people that are just super excited and they try to do too much at once. And they’ll just try to turn all the dials and knobs and flip all the switches and what ends up happening is the data gets really muddy and the algorithm doesn’t learn as quickly as it should. And maybe they’re trying to, like a good example this is, you’ve got three call to actions on the same landing page or you’re trying to sell too much in an ad and it just sort of diffuses or waters down your message and you get a really bad click-through rate. Things like that. So we’re going to talk a lot about those kinds of things.

56:14

Super exciting topic that we have a lot of fun with because we’re going to show you screenshots and examples and different types of websites that are in campaigns that are actually running and live where you can see what other people are doing and we can learn together with those things. So yeah August 20th, we do it at the same time every Thursday. Feel free to sign up for that. You can actually do that now so you don’t forget if you’re like me. I’m super busy, I’m going to hangup and I’m going to go and run off to 16 other things and I’ll forget. So you can do that by just going to perfectaudience.com/event and you’ll be able to register for the upcoming event. I think with that we’re going to close. Yep. Oh yeah, so these are the bonus things I was telling you about at the end. We’ll include these in the slide deck as we circulate it around. But there’s lots of different types of things, tips and tricks and things like that that we refer to that we couldn’t cover in in this particular hour that we were spending. But yeah, with that we’ll let everybody go. Thanks for joining us. Super appreciate spending the time. I know it’s valuable and we’ll see you next time.

Eric Stockton

Eric Stockton

General Manager - Perfect Audience: A pioneer and innovator in the areas of internet marketing, eCommerce, lead generation, publishing, and online media, Eric has directly led $3MM+ ad budgets and $70M+ top-line sales organizations. Eric has been a keynote speaker at MarketingSherpa events, eCommerce Retail Executive Summit, Email Summit, B2B Demand Generation Summit, ContentBiz, and Affiliate Summit.
Post categories: Webinars
Post tagged with: A.I., Eric Stockton, Jalali Hartman, Webinars

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