Ad Gab: Search Retargeting

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. Add Gav Edition. I am joined as always by our digital media manager here at Radical. Josh 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 don't know, 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. I always thought, you know, the holy grail of marketing and the beauty of digital marketing has always been the ability to target, you know, versus mass media. You know, mass media, you throw up a little board, you throw up a TV spot. You know, yeah, cable, you can sort of target interests, but digital media has been the fundamental wonder of digital media has been the targeting abilities, especially social media platforms has come along. Yeah, platforms, you can target interest likes, all those things. But the holy grail of it has always been search. Yeah. Because you've got people that are raising their hand. And so, but that that search data has always been a little bit behind the, the largest of wall gardens, be it a Google Yahoo or ever. And let's be honest

here, Google's the big player. So I have always been fascinated by how you leverage the hand raisers. And so I think that's what's got me excited about our topic today. Search retargeting. Yes, absolutely. It's so hard to find. 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 is sounds potentially complicated, depending on where you are with your marketing and digital marketing language. It's like, what does that mean? But what 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, you

know, not to use every acronym in the in the digital marketing playbook, but there's been ways at giving it 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, a car, let's keep it down that, you know, we don't really do car advertising here. We don't work with dealerships or anything. But if you do a Google search for Ford Mustangs for sale, there's a good chance you're in market for a Ford 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 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 out of Ford dealership and they're not going to buy a car. They're working there. So they're researching Ford, keeping up the day on news and stuff like so they're just thrown into that 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, I'm sorry being, 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 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 were at the top of the organic listing. Yes. And then two, paper click, which is the search as 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, you just depending on how your

campaigns are set up and you might be paying over and over for someone to go somewhere else and buy it, like 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 more. 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 paper click listings ad so that you get to the top, it gets expensive. It's highly competitive or SEO. In SEO practice, we're not pooping 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 everyone kind of at its core what search retargeting means. Yeah. So what you start off with is someone at 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 who 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

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 know, you're at least serving relevant content to someone. So you're not, you know, sending someone who's searching for Ford Mustang, you're sending them jet skis. You know, like, you know, like, yeah, they might be interested in do it, but they have, it's at least a relevant ad to something they've searched for. And so that when they're going through their Facebook feed, scrolling through ESPN.com or wherever they may have a display ad, 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

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 kind of like get 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

again, you've got real intent, you've got a specific product or service that you might be offering and to be able to hit those, those handraisers, it really has dynamic capability across a lot of industries because searches use for B to B, B to C, e-commerce, like almost every industry, almost every, it has application for just about anything. Yeah, 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

you've been dying and we preach all the time to our clients, patients, that hey, you got to build the funnel, you 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 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 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 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 direction intent 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, we're always looking for what's new and latest and greatest in the ability and it's 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 know where to find us, radical.com. Or just ping us through the, the radcast and we'll see you next time. Thanks Josh. Yo guys, what's up? Ryan offered here. Thanks so much for listening. Really appreciative. Do us a favor. If you've been enjoying the radcast, you need to share the word with a friend or anyone else. We'd really appreciate it and go leave us a review at Apple or Spotify. Do us a solid tell more people, leave us some reviews and hey, here's the best news of all. If you want to work with me directly, if you want to get your business kicking ass and you want radical or

myself involved, you can text me directly at 864. 729-3680. Don't wait another minute. Let's get your business going. 864-729-3680. We'll see you next time.