Event Marketing
April 1, 2015 • by Jane Carter
How to Retarget for Your Event
Take a look at your Facebook right now. Begin scrolling through your News Feed. Nestled between baby pictures and political arguments, you’ll see the occasional sponsored post. A sponsored post is a native Facebook ad. Keep scrolling. Start taking note of all the ads from sites you have visited recently. There’s probably a lot. If you browse the Internet, you’ll find that these sites seem to follow you everywhere. Congratulations, you’re being retargeted.
What is retargeting?
Retargeting is when you serve ads to people who have previously been on your website. The logical assumption is if someone visits your website, they’re expressing some interest in whatever your’e selling. Retargeting allows you to stay top of mind and boost awareness to these visitors. The ultimate goal is to herd these visitors towards becoming customers. For events in particular, this means pushing visitors to completing their ticket purchase.
The magic behind retargeting works like this. When someone visits your website, a cookie is added to that person’s browser. This stores the site visit so when they leave, you’ll be able to serve them ads on other sites that they browse.
…more than 90% of visitors visit and leave without converting or buying. – Noah KaganThis post will show you how to setup retargeting for your event. We’ll go over what retargeting tools to use, types of ads, and smart tactics that’ll help you sell more tickets. Read on to learn how to successfully retarget potential attendees.
Retargeting Tools
We’ll focus on 3 big players in the retargeting space. These companies don’t require massive budgets to get started. We’ll briefly go over each tool and then move into the types of ads you can make.1. Perfect Audience
“Retarget lost visitors everywhere from one simple dashboard.”
Perfect Audience is a good choice for jumping in and getting started in minutes. They boast a number of retargeting options including Facebook, Twitter, and various websites. A giant network of ad exchanges is at your fingertips so you’ll have many opportunities to retarget lost attendees.
Cost: Charge on a CPM basis. They charge per one thousand views.
2. ReTargeter
“ReTargeter optimizes your ad spend with highly targeted, real time digital advertising solutions and the best account management in the industry.”
This tool touts itself as a full-service platform that offers a suite of solutions for your retargeting needs. They also allow you to retarget on the same channels as Perfect Audience. It feels a bit more geared towards the seasoned marketing professional.
Cost: Sliding scale based on monthly unique visitors. $500 for every 10,000 visitors.
3. Adroll
“The global leader in retargeting.”
Adroll was one of the first remarketing tools out there and it shows. They’ve built a robust platform that is in parody with the other 2 on this short list. Their customer base is impressive with many of companies across many verticals.
Cost: Pay as you go CPM Pricing. You get a 2 week trial to start.
Types of Retargeting Ads for Events
Let’s get the creative juices flowing. Here’s 2 ad types we suggest: 1. Direct Ticket Purchase: Clicking goes right back to your ticketing page. Most popular choice here. 2. Demand Generation: Clicking the ad can go to a promo video, your speaker lineup, or just any piece of content that will help convince your attendees to buy tickets. We recommend testing out campaigns for these 3 ad options below: 1. Facebook News Feed
2. Web Image Ad
3. Twitter Feed
There’s some other options available but from our experience, these are the 3 we’ve seen success with.
Setting up Your 1st Campaign
Before setup, take a moment to think about the ROI you’d like to achieve from retargeting. For selling tickets in particular, start with your ticket prices and work from there. A good benchmark is to try doubling your spend. Let’s say you’re selling general admission tickets for $50 a pop. Ideally, you’d want to shoot for spending $25 for every ticket sold through retargeting. The economics differ for each event so go through this exercise to force yourself to think about your goals. For this example campaign, we’ll be using Adroll to create a Facebook News Feed Ad.Step 1: Placing the Smart Pixel on your website
After creating an Adroll account, place the Smart Pixel tag across all pages on your site. By doing this, Adroll will track all your page views and you can segment your retargeting campaigns. This is super important!
Step 2: Create New Campaign
Step 3: Choose where you want to retarget
Here, you’ll see all the options Adroll has to offer. We’re choosing the Desktop News Feed.
Step 4: Campaign Settings
We recommend starting with about $100-200 a week. You can adjust this amount at anytime. Be smart about your campaign names, here’s a great post on how to do this.
Step 5: Target Visitors
This is where you tell Adroll what visitor segments you want to target. You can target specific pages and set the amount of time the visitor is targeted for.
For your first campaign, start broad. Create a segment that targets all visitors by adding a * for the URL rule. This ensures that all your site visitors are retargeted.
Additionally, create another segment specifically for your ticket confirmation page. Insert the URL for this segment and click ‘Count this as a conversion’. After creating this segment, toggle the segment to be excluded. Now Adroll will track your conversions and not show ads to visitors who have already purchased tickets. Campaign optimization for the win!
Step 6: Add Ads
At this point, you’ll want to consult with your design team to build out some image assets. Your ad images could highlight a speaker, your festival lineup, or action shots from past events. It all depends on your event.
After uploading an image, Adroll will prompt you to write your ad copy. Create a clear call to action and a gripping headline. Your only goal is to get your visitors to click. Also take in consideration that this ad is appearing in your target audience’s Facebook feed. Envision how it’ll look in the News Feed. The more native it is to Facebook, the better.
We highly recommend creating multiple ads so you can test the engagement.
Step 7: Launch & Test!
Adroll takes up to 48 hours to approve your campaign. After approval, your retargeting ads will begin serving. Your work is far from done though. After launching, you’ll want to keep tabs on your dashboard to watch engagement. Adroll gives you all the charts and data you need. See what ads work the best and make adjustments when needed.
Thanks for sticking around to read through the post. Retargeting has a bit of a learning curve but can pay dividends if you put the time into it. You’re now ready to test out this marketing channel for your event!
We know that there’s a lot of details when it comes to creating a retargeting campaign. Leave a comment below if any questions come up. We’re happy to help out.
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