Remar­ket­ing gets a lot of flak for being “creepy” and, as a result, many online mar­keters avoid it like the plague. I don’t buy the hype. In the wise words of 3LW, “haters gonna hate.” But, despite their bad rep­u­ta­tion, data shows that peo­ple actu­al­ly respond to remar­ket­ing ads pos­i­tive­ly. Yep, those “haters” are actu­al­ly click­ing on remar­ket­ing ads!

In fact, our data shows that peo­ple are 76 per­cent more like­ly to click on a remar­ket­ing ad than a non-remar­ket­ing dis­play ad.tcale

This data was com­piled by Mark Irvine of Word­Stream. It is based on a sam­ple size of 85 Word­Stream client accounts, rep­re­sent­ing U.S.-based SMBs of all ver­ti­cals. The data is from June 2014 and was tak­en from the Google Dis­play Net­work.

It makes sense. Peo­ple react favor­ably towards remar­ket­ing ads because they’re super-cus­tomized to them. Rather than a stan­dard old dis­play ad, which is served based on gen­er­al, assump­tive cri­te­ria like your gen­der, loca­tion or “inter­ests”, remar­ket­ing ads fea­ture con­tent that the view­er has already expressed an inter­est in. Because of this, remar­ket­ing ads are incred­i­bly pow­er­ful. Here are the top three rea­sons remar­ket­ing can work won­ders for your bot­tom line.

1. Remarketing Is One of the Best Lead Nurturing Programs Money Can Buy

It’s extreme­ly rare that any­one con­verts the first time they land on your web­site. In some cas­es, buy­ers sim­ply get dis­tract­ed or have a case of cold feet before whip­ping out their cred­it cards. In oth­er cas­es, espe­cial­ly for prod­ucts with longer buy­ing cycles, this lag time is expect­ed. Shop­pers may need time to eval­u­ate their pur­chase, do some com­par­i­son shop­ping, or get to know your brand bet­ter.

Either way, most of us have imple­ment­ed email mar­ket­ing pro­grams to nudge prospects down the path to con­ver­sion. Rather than pum­mel­ing their inbox­es with emails, which are eas­i­ly avoid­ed, why not use remar­ket­ing to boost your brand aware­ness and push peo­ple to con­vert? Remar­ket­ing ads are great because they’re not intru­sive, they can be hyper-cus­tomized to the recip­i­ents’ inter­ests and peo­ple don’t tire of them quick­ly. In fact, our data shows that peo­ple are more like­ly to con­vert after see­ing a remar­ket­ing ad six times!

The rea­sons remar­ket­ing ads are so com­pelling is because they often fea­ture some­thing you actu­al­ly want and they’re tough to ignore. For exam­ple, a few years ago, I fell head over heels for a dress that I found online. The only prob­lem with it was its price tag, which prac­ti­cal­ly matched that of my month­ly rent check. I resist­ed the urge to fol­low through with the pur­chase, ditched the site, and con­sid­ered it a done deal. A day or so lat­er, I saw an ad fea­tur­ing that very dress. I ignored it. Hours lat­er, I got anoth­er ad offer­ing me 10 per­cent off my pur­chase. I still held strong. Final­ly, I saw the dress again, broke down, and pulled out my cred­it card. My self-restraint could only last so long. Remar­ket­ing FTW.

2. You Can Squeeze More Out of Your Existing Customers With Remarketing

Just because a prospect con­verts, doesn’t mean your work is done. Instead of exclud­ing these new cus­tomers from your remar­ket­ing efforts, switch-up your strat­e­gy and use remar­ket­ing to upsell or cross-sell them. Imple­men­ta­tion of this tac­tic will dif­fer depend­ing on your busi­ness offer­ings. Here are a few exam­ples that I love:

Pri­or to receiv­ing the ad above, I pur­chased a new phone on BestBuy.com. After mak­ing this pur­chase, the crew at Best Buy knows that it’s unlike­ly that I’ll be pur­chas­ing anoth­er phone, so they put a spin on their ads and start­ed push­ing phone acces­sories for my brand new mod­el. Pret­ty smart, huh? In sit­u­a­tions where cus­tomers are like­ly to make many repeat pur­chas­es through­out the year, use remar­ket­ing to peri­od­i­cal­ly remind them about your band and give them a rea­son to come back to your site.

For exam­ple, this Kate Spade noti­fies the view­er of new arrivals that she has not yet shopped before, in hopes that it will com­pel her to click through to the web­site to view the new col­lec­tion. That tac­tic comes in handy even if you’re not in the e‑commerce space. If your com­pa­ny pro­vides recur­ring ser­vices, try lever­ag­ing remar­ket­ing ads to remind cus­tomers to sched­ule future appoint­ments. For exam­ple, a salon that offers online book­ing for hair col­or­ing appoint­ments could set up a remar­ket­ing cam­paign to dis­play ads remind­ing these cus­tomers to book appoint­ments every few weeks to get their roots touched up. Works like a charm!

3. RLSA Is Like Search Ads On Steroids

Not sold on the idea of dis­play adver­tis­ing? Try lever­ag­ing Remar­ket­ing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) to boost your search per­for­mance. This cam­paign type allows you to apply the genius of remar­ket­ing – pri­or­i­tiz­ing peo­ple who have already demon­strat­ed an inter­est in your site – to the search net­work. In fact, RLSA is one of the only ways you can do iden­ti­ty-based tar­get­ing via search. You know that past site vis­i­tors are top prospects, so you can “up the ante” for this crew.

For exam­ple, imag­ine that you’re adver­tis­ing for a com­pa­ny that sells bas­ket­ball tick­ets online. In your stan­dard search cam­paigns, you’re prob­a­bly avoid­ing gener­ic terms like “bas­ket­ball game tonight.” The intent behind a super-broad term like that is unclear. Is the searcher try­ing to fig­ure out what time the game starts? Do they want to stream it online? How­ev­er, if some­one who has already been to your web­site does this search, it’s a dif­fer­ent sto­ry. You know he’s think­ing of going to a game – he’s been perus­ing tick­ets! You def­i­nite­ly want your ad to show for him.

With RLSA cam­paigns, you can bid on spe­cif­ic sets of key­words that are only eli­gi­ble to trig­ger ads for past site vis­i­tors — a safe way to bid on those broad, gener­ic terms. You can also boost bids for past vis­i­tors who match to your reg­u­lar search key­words to pri­or­i­tize your vis­i­bil­i­ty for these prospects. Using RLSAs, not only do you know that your audi­ence vis­it­ed your site, you also know which pages they viewed. Imag­ine that some­one vis­it­ed your tick­et­ing site, viewed Celtics tick­ets, added them to his shop­ping cart and nev­er com­plet­ed the pur­chase. Let’s say he comes to the SERP an hour lat­er and search­es “bas­ket­ball game tonight.” With your stan­dard search cam­paign, you’d prob­a­bly serve him an ad tout­ing “bas­ket­ball tick­ets.” How­ev­er, because your remar­ket­ing cook­ies detect­ed that added Celtics tick­ets to his shop­ping cart, you can use RLSA to serve him an ad fea­tur­ing exact­ly what he’s look­ing for, “Celtics tick­ets.”

Ready to give it a roll? You can learn more about RLSA imple­men­ta­tion here!