Automating acquisition for fun and profit - hero

AUTOMATING ACQUISITION FOR FUN AND PROFIT – PART 1: TAG-BASED CONTENT REMARKETING.

Content marketing has, in the last few years, become the ideal way to attract new customers and leads.

But not only that, in the same timespan we’ve also seen a shift from SEA to paid social channels. However! To reach new prospects SEA is often the best option to immediately target the correct people based on their search queries.

Remarketing audiences ensure higher engagement and reduce cost

We use a combination of:

  • SEA to drive initial traffic to pieces of content(which are very specifically written to handle information around those queries which results in an improved KW-score and a reduced average CPC.
  • Interest based remarketing lists (which might be a combination of GDN (or Google Display Network) or paid social channels to retarget previous visitors (ideally combined with some intent based variable)

Reducing the cost of new acquisition campaigns

And if you segment them correctly you’ll be able to provide those specific converted & non-converted contacts with highly targeted information and gain the possibility of pushing your prospects deeper down your content marketing funnel at a heavily reduced cost in comparison with regular acquisition campaigns.

That’s where tag based content remarketing comes in.

By injecting the tags you use into that posts data layer and grabbing those tags you can easily create and add new content without having to maintain those pesky url based audiences.

Step 1:
Implement DuracellTomi’s Google Tag Manager for WordPress

The plugin offers some nice features but the most important one of all is that it gives you the possibility to inject certain basics into the datalayer of your posts and pages.

Automating acquisition for fun and profit - duracelltomi

By injecting this data into the datalayer we’ll enable other tools (like tag managers) to grab that data and to pass it along to other interesting services (like Google Adwords).

For this usecase here we’ll use GTM to grab the tags a populate dynamic remarketing audiences.

Step 2:
Creating User-defined variables in Google Tag Manager

 

Go to your google tag manager and create a new User-Defined variable under variables. Google Adwords accepts up to 3 dynamic variables you could use to define new custom audiences.

Automating acquisition for fun and profit - gtm variable

The image shows you how to define a custom JavaScript Macro. You should create one of these for each custom variable you want to populate within Adwords

A little tip: in the ‘return pageAttributes[0]’, [0] defines the part of the string that gets pushed into the new variable (as the plugin tends to concatenate all of the tags into one string).

I created a new custom variable (I’ll name them {{PageAttribute 1}}, {{PageAttribute 2}} & {{PageAttribute 3}}) and defined them by using [0], [1] & [2] respectively.

STEP 3:
Creating a new Adwords remarketing tag

 

All that remains for this part is to push these new variables into Adwords so that we can begin populating our new custom audiences.

Create a new tag and ad the conversion label – under custom parameters you can add keys.

Automating acquisition for fun and profit - Adwords

I’ve associated
Tag1 with {{pageAttribute 1}}
Tag2 with {{pageAttribute 2}}
etc.

Set the tag to fire on all PageViews and deploy the new changeset from your GTM environment!

STEP 4:
Creating your audiences

Automating acquisition for fun and profit - Adwords Remarketing

Go to the shared library: audience management and select “create a new audience based on website visitors”.

In the drop down menu you’ll now find the parameters you previously defined: tag1, tag2 and tag 3.

Adwords will only allow you to populate 3 values dynamically. But you’ll be able to merge lists and thus include and/or exclude multiple lists between one another.

The maximum audience lifetime is 540 days, which is a relatively long time to retain an audience.

But looking back at the original thought (remarketing content) you’ll easily be able to exclude convertors and make sure you keep pulling in all the people who didn’t convert on their previous visits.

Populating tags and pushing them into the datalayer using GTM is by far the easiest way to collate multiple pages into an interest based remarketing audience. A lot could be added in relation to pushing these audience into Social remarketing audiences as the effectiveness of remarketing content via paid social is often cheaper AND more effective. But that’s for another time, another guide!

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