For my next PPC myth, I’m going to bust the myth that remarketing images should follow the same best practices as regular Display images.

People just clump these together. Images ads are image ads, right? Wrong! The difference is in who you’re targeting. For standard Display image ads, you’re targeting people who you’re hoping are interested in your goods or services, but probably have never been to your site. With remarketing, you’re targeting people who have been to your site and therefore have some degree of familiarity with your product. For the most part, they’re people who didn’t convert or at least people you think need to convert again, like a subscription based service around the time their subscription is about to expire.

Building images that are super brand heavy will, subconsciously or consciously, begin to build brand recognition with that person. They’ll think about your service more, and that will lead to more conversions. You do this by building remarketing ads that match your site. Same colors, same design element, and heavy on your branded logo.

We recently had a client that decided to test some standard Display ads for remarketing. They had very branded ads that were performing well, but they wanted to test some other ads that had their logo much smaller and didn’t match the site at all. The performance tanked with the new ads, so we talked them into letting us make new ads, but ones that were more brand heavy. We saw a conversion rate on the regular Display ads of .90% and a cost/conversion of $109.38. With the new branded ads, we saw a conversion rate of 1.62% with a $52.47 cost/conversion. The new branded ads also brought 40% more conversion than the regular Display ads.

The data speaks for itself, but I’ve seen similar results with branded vs. regular display best practices ads in other accounts as well!