Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Ad Gab: Search Retargeting

Episode Date: February 3, 2021

Today's Ad Gab topic is all about search retargeting. Host Ryan Alford and co-host Josh hill dissect what search retargeting is and the best ways to utilize it in your strategy. In this bonus episode on The Radcast, Ryan and Josh first address what search retargeting is and why it's worth your time. They also share the benefits of having relevant keywords and ensuring your creative matches the overall brand.If you enjoyed this bonus episode of Ad Gab, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe and share the word if you love The Radcast, so we can keep giving you the strategies to achieve radical marketing results! You can follow us on Instagram @the.rad.cast | @radical_results | @ryanalford | @joshchill We'll talk to you soon! #theradcast #radicalmarketingresults  If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. 

you're listening to the radcast if it's radical we cover it here's your host ryan alford hey guys what's up welcome to the latest edition of the radcast ad gab edition i am joined as always by our digital media manager here at radicalical, Josh Hill. What's up, Josh? How's it going? I'm good. I always feel like it's a mouthful. Yeah. Your title, you know, just call me the founder or whatever. You're like, you have like 17 acronyms, you know, digital marketing guy, numbers, reporting analyst. I'm like going through my head. All right. Okay.

No, but good to have you, man. And I'm kind of excited about today's topic. Me too. This is some techie stuff. I know it's techie. And it's always been at the front of my mind as far as the wonderful nature of digital marketing and its potential. The wonderful nature of digital marketing and its potential,

I always thought the holy grail of marketing and the beauty of digital marketing has always been the ability to target versus mass media. Mass media, you throw up a billboard, you throw up a TV spot. Yeah, with cable, you can sort of target interest, but the fundamental wondery of digital media has been the targeting ability, especially as social media platforms have come along. You have platforms you can target, interest, likes, all those things.

But the holy grail of it has always been search because you've got people that are raising their hand. And so, but that search data has always been a little bit behind the, the, the largest of wall gardens, be it a Google, Yahoo, wherever. And let's be honest here. Google's the big player. So, uh, I have always been fascinated by how you leverage the hand raisers. And so I think that that's what's got me excited about our topic today search retargeting yes absolutely it's so hard to find get the cross-channel stuff is just so hard and getting out of those sandboxes of google's playground exactly and so you know the

search retargeting sounds potentially complicated, depending on where you are with your marketing and digital marketing language. It's like, what exactly does that mean? But on its surface, though, the challenge with digital marketing and any marketing is you want, when you spend your ad dollars, to target people that are in market. Yes. And that is always, and there's been, there's certainly things as the DM,

data management platforms, and not to use every acronym in the digital marketing playbook, but there's been ways at getting at some of that intent that's been some of those signals that are out there and then build those so you've got intent audiences but the highest intent the most sure intent is always like when someone identifies themselves as being in market so for instance uh a car let's keep it down that you know we don't really do car advertising here uh we don't work with dealerships or anything but if you do a google

search for ford mustangs for sale yeah there's a good chance you're in market for a fun mustang or someone you know is yeah maybe it's your daughter or son you know if it's 1990 i'm not sure if ford mustangs are still cool like they were when I was growing up. But again, that you get that signal because someone's going and they're conducting a behavior beyond just an interest based behavior. They're right. They're signaling that they're in market. Yeah. And reaching those people, it's so difficult because it's hard to differentiate yourself from people who are just big ford fans versus like people who might work at a ford dealership and they're not going to buy a car they're they're working there so they're researching ford keeping up the day on news and stuff like so they're just thrown into the audience and it's not clean yeah exactly and so to date though there's really only been two ways.

There's been other things and other things that have marketed themselves this way. But I think historically, though, two ways. SEO. Yes. Working on your content on your site so that you rank higher. And let's just stick to Google here. I'm sorry, Yahoo. I'm sorry, Bing.

But let's just use Google for the blanket. When it covers 75 to 90% of the market, we're just going to call it Googling and just admit that they've become the band-aid of search. But when you own, there's been two ways, getting your SEO in order with content so that you rank on those keywords so that when people do those searches and they raise their hand, you are at the top of the organic listing. Yes. And then two, pay-per-click. Yes. Which is?

The search ads, you're paying to be up there. And that's, it gets expensive, like really fast. And then it's not always effective because you might, just depending on how your campaigns are set up, you might be paying over and over for someone to go somewhere else and buy it. Exactly. And people have historically been, you know, they still say half, you know, I see a different data figure all the time. But universally, it's somewhere around 50% of people won't kind of know it's an ad yeah it says ad next to it google's gotten pretty good about hiding it you know like if you're just in a hurry you might can jump on it or if you just like screw it i'll you know some people just do it

because they know that people are paying for it but somewhere around half the people won't click the ad yeah so they're skimming over that to go to the organic listing. So historically, you've had those two ways to get the hand raisers. You pay the fee with Google, which is keyword pay-per-click listings, ads so that you get to the top. It gets expensive. It's highly competitive. Or SEO.

In SEO practice, we're not poo-pooing that. We still think that's a great practice from digital marketing. You should be building up your SEO, getting that organic listing as fast as you can, but it takes time. And so thus, if you're a new company or you're in a highly competitive field, that's just always a moving target. So today you've had those two ways with which to go after those high intent audiences. And what we've introduced here, working with some data partners that we have, is an ability to do search retargeting. I think you're going to start to see more and more as you get out there. But this is definitely, I would say in the last 12 to 18 months become definitely not mainstream, but you're starting to see a few players in this

with the ability with which to target people. And so Josh, let's explain to everyone kind of at its core what search retargeting means. Yeah. So what you start off with is similar to the SEM where you build your keyword list. And from there, we collect searches from those keywords. So people who are searching on Google, people are searching on websites, people who are searching for a specific brand, either on a search engine or like a search widget on a site, those people are going to be like kind of targeted with these if they matched up the keywords with this audience.

So that enables you to reach that data through social media, programmatic display, some OTT stuff like this kind of expands you to use visuals for targeting those people as opposed to strictly words where people know they're just trying to like they know it's a search ad and again they're not going to click on it exactly so you've got they've done a search for let's go back to the ford mustang for sale they've done a search for that and instead of potentially paying for pay-per-click ad if you run this these campaigns through us or another partner, you can retarget people that have done that hand-raising. Real-time might be the wrong word, but same day sometimes, depending on the campaign,

we can get data same day for those searches so that you're serving, and this is back to you're at least serving relevant content to someone yes so you're not you know sending someone uh who's searching for a ford mustang you're sending them jet skis you know like you know like yeah they might be interested into it but they have it's at least a relevant ad to something they've searched for and so that when they're scrolling through their facebook feed scrolling through espn.com or wherever they may have a display ad yeah they're getting that same content with which they have searched for within a relative short period of time correct yeah and then it helps you it definitely helps you like not waste money just annoying people who are

researching but not in market um because we all know what that's like where we're like i'm just i'm just looking and yep um it's like, where we're like, I'm just looking. It's like the virtual store assistant, be like, can I help you buy anything? Exactly. And so you've got a more, instead of just a single channel of a pay-per-click ad, you kind of get, which we like,

what we call with our clients, kind of that wall of sound, so that you're serving up relevant advertising to something they're already shopping for. They've raised their hand. And really that's always been kind of the, again, the holy grail of what you want as a digital marketer. You want someone that's interested in a product or service that you have. someone that's that's interested in a product or service that you have but the biggest and best thing is knowing that they have high intent and are in market now yes and again with this with this data and being able to reach multiple channels is most decisions being made at that

lower funnel like they're going to need probably multiple touch points before they actually get there that's kind of why we talk about frequency so often and over and over again because we need the frequency for you guys to get kind of like get it ingrained of like they have all kinds of research out there like maybe like a t-shirt online someone will need to look at it three times before they actually purchase it but like a car it can be in the hundreds of times they need to look at that car and look at it, the listing on the dealership website or something, probably like 50 times before they actually call them up and even show up to

test drive it. Yup. Um, so being able to get out of those gardens and kind of reach across the different playgrounds, it's, um, way more effective and way more effective at getting like the reach and also kind

of reaching those people and saying hey like we've got the product and service you're looking for like i know you're looking at other places but like please consider us and you know as far as the application goes i mean think about it if you're you know we work with a lot of banking clients we work with trying to work with textiles and fabric. We've both got D to C and B to B. But when you think about the application, you think if someone's searching for a car loan, if someone's searching for an insurance provider, again, you've got real intent. You've got a specific product or service that you might be offering. real intent you've got a specific product or service that you might be offering and to be able to hit those those hand raisers it really has dynamic capability across a lot of industries

because search is used for b2b b2c e-commerce like almost every industry almost every um it has application for just about anything yeah and. And it's so cool because you can almost retarget other people's retargeting. So they might not even see your service, but like you might be the perfect service for what they're looking for, but they might never find you on the search engines. But if you catch them in the audience, like that's the perfect opportunity for you to finally make that connection and establish that relationship any best practices in the creative or nuance that you would recommend

when building or thinking about the creative that would support this type of a campaign approach definitely i think if you're kind of like a product-based person you want to be pushing the product get let them know like how fast you work, how quickly with the messaging of the ad, this is, you're getting these low funnel people and they might not have heard of you before, but this is not the time to get your Superbowl branding commercial targeted with them. You need to be going after the kind of lower intent messaging of like, we can provide this within this timeframe or we can get this to you at this price

or like our product's better than competitors because of this or our service is better. That's when you really want to go in for that sale. And you know, everyone listening, you've been dying, you know, and we preach all the time to our clients, patience, that, hey, you got to build the funnel. You've got to build the awareness.

Talk about like some less things and just talk about the problem that you're solving all that. Well, this is your opportunity. We've got them down at the, we're bringing them in at the bottom of the, or the middle to the bottom of the funnel. This is the time to put all, to move all the chips in. This is when you can be short and sweet. Just get to the point. Yeah. They're already looking for it. So, you know, they're looking for those boots. You just got to tell them why your boots right now. You're not sitting and sipping coffee in the morning. You're taking the shot of espresso and moving on.

Exactly. So again, to kind of recap, tremendous opportunity here with search retargeting, building keyword lists, much like you would do for SEM or SEO, where you're building keywords that are relevant to your product or service for just about any industry. And you want to get those high search term, but high intent keywords. So, you know, if it's something that you want, like something like if someone's looking for an online store that would like you know online store for uh insert product here that's usually a high intent type keyword because they're looking for someone to shop and that's what we want or other things you want to really base it on those keywords and optimizing what those are and what we'll do with the campaign

is then optimize accordingly uh based on which ones are driving the most behavior. Yeah. And so, again, keyword lists and then having the right creative that really aligns with driving action immediately for why by today. Exactly. You're getting the direct intent with with the keywords direct message kind of takes care of itself there it's like one of the it's it's like complex but so simple at the same time exactly and in our business we kind of uh we're always looking for what's new and latest and greatest and the ability and in some ways things change quickly but the opportunities for

new platforms and new ways of targeting aren't necessarily overnight so when something like this comes along we thought it was a key that we bring it up any other final thoughts josh i think we covered everything i've got cool well there's your 15 minute ad gab on search retargeting if we can help you with that we you know where to find us, radical.company, or just ping us through the Radcast, and we'll see you next time. Thanks, Josh. Yo, guys. What's up? Ryan Alford here.

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