PODCAST EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Why You Should Be “Pixeling” Your Blog Visitors – Immediately

Enter the world of retargeting. Retargeting is the absolute easiest way to get started in paid traffic. It is also very cheap and very easy to get a VERY good ROI with it. It also just so happens to short-circuit the entire problem of bounce rate.

Episode #89 | Episode Date: June 13, 2015


All blogs have an inherent inefficiency in how they deal with traffic, and we see it show up in the form of our bounce rate. A certain percentage of people – often upwards of 80% – will visit a single page on your blog and then simply leave. And no matter what things you do to decrease that bounce rate, you can only fight it so much.

Enter the world of retargeting… Retargeting is the absolute easiest way to get started in paid traffic. It is also very cheap and very easy to get a VERY good ROI with it. It also just so happens to short-circuit the entire problem of bounce rate.

By “pixeling” every single person who comes to your blog, you are building what I call your “second list”. It is a real asset almost as important as your email list. And in this episode of Coffee Break Blogging, I’ll show you exactly how it radically improves the efficiency of your blog as a marketing platform.

You need to act on this information right away. As ad rates increase, it could become cost prohibitive to advertise at all, UNLESS you have a retargeting audience built. So, this episode is very important… and timely.

If you back up one Episode, go back to the previous episode, we did a smackdown between free traffic and paid traffic. We did talk about the benefits of paid traffic and how you really do need to mix it in with your “free” traffic.

Now when it comes to the paid traffic side of things, it just so happens that retargeting is one of the easiest ways to get started with this. It is really cheap and very, very effective. So that is what we are going to be talking about in this episode.

An Inherent Inefficiency

The first reason, and I want you to understand why this is so important and this will be quick… Because we talked about the idea of bounce rate in the past; what it comes down to is that all blogs and in fact all websites have an inherent inefficiency. And that inefficiency is the fact that it doesn’t exercise good control over people who come. And that is seen in the idea of bounce rate. The fact that you will have a 60 to 70 to 80%; sometimes even higher than that, of your overall traffic are simply going to come to the site and pretty quickly just bounce right off without visiting any other thing. So that is a pretty big inefficiency when you have got 80% of people that come into your digital doorway and just immediately back off and go. That sucks, you know? We are sitting here and trying to grow our business and we have that going on.

Well, there are ways around that. At the end of the day these people who are bouncing off your blog and they might have found the blog post useful but they still left without seeing some of your best stuff or without looking at those things that will actually help grow your business. For example, getting on to your list by getting a lead magnet, maybe signing up for a webinar, maybe subscribing to a podcast so they’ll have a long term connection with you… Those things that basically you want people to do, most people are going to leave your site without doing those things and it is not because they do not find your blog good or useful; some are definitely in that category but others, they probably did find value on that blog post but they are just in a big darn hurry. Everybody seems to be in a big hurry, they starve for attention; I mean you have done this probably many, many times where you go to somebody’s site.

You are Googling something, you find the answer on somebody’s blog and you’re like, “Wow, that is something useful.” It’s nothing personal, you didn’t hate their blog but you didn’t sign up for their email list, did you? Chances are you didn’t! That happens all the time. And it doesn’t mean that you content sucks or anything like that. This is just the way things work. It’s kind of like gravity. People are stark for attention, they are always in a hurry, they are going around like they’ve got the whole ADD going on which is kind of a dumb label but that is my personal opinion. And it is just what it is.

Retargeting – What It Is And How

So how can we short circuit this problem? How can we get around it? Well, we can do retargeting. It is the second list. I have said before, many, many times… In fact, we spent many podcast episodes talking about building up your email list with lead magnets and things like that. That is your first list and it is the most important. But the second list that you should be building is your retargeting list. It is the second priority of your blog.

So first; before we go too much deeper into this: What the hell it is? What is retargeting, if you are not familiar with the topic. Retargeting simply means that when you go to a site, that site is connected up with a supplier of ad inventory. Now this could be Facebook, this could be some banner ad network, whatever… So what is going to happen is a little cookie gets placed on your computer that basically just shows that you have been to that website before. That is all it is doing. There is no personally identifiable information in there, it is completely and totally anonymous but it just connects you or more accurately; it connects your web browser to the fact that you arrived on this particular site. And what that does is that it allows that site to put paid advertising in front of you for them when you are in other people’s sites.

So let’s say somebody comes to the Blog Marketing Academy. They have been there and they were in one of those high percentages of people; I don’t know what my bounce rate is off the top of my head, but the average blog tends to be in the 60-70% range so I am probably right up in there… So you were in one of those 60%, 70% who just came to the Blog Marketing Academy, checked out one of the blog posts and then left. Okay. Alright, fine. Now, you were cookied.

You got a cookie placed inside your browser which means that you could be sitting on some news website somewhere; let’s just say Yahoo News and you might see my banner add show up. It isn’t because I have got some fancy relationship with Yahoo but it is because you have a retargeting pixel on your browser which allows me to put my ads in front of you regardless of where you are. And it’s the same thing with Facebook; as you can get retargeted on Facebook as well. You show on somebody’s blog site, whatever kind of site it might be and all of a sudden you are seeing their ad as a sponsored post inside of Facebook or maybe in the right column on Facebook. That is retargeting. You know you are being retargeted when you visit somebody’s page and then it seems like they are stalking on you. That is retargeting. A lot of this is going on and in fact, it is one of the major drivers of banner ad inventory on the internet today. Huge thing.

Now, you, if you integrate this into your blog, it drastically increases the efficiency of the blog because every single visitor of your blog is going to be set up with a retargeting pixel. And that means you have the ability to reach out to them using paid advertising and bring them back in, at any point.

Pixeling

Now why do we call it pixel? What is this idea of pixeling? Well, pixeling is basically the idea of how that cookie gets put on their machine in the first place. So essentially what is happening is when you set up for retargeting, the network is going to give you a little blurb of code. Just a little bit of a java script code and you are going to go and you are going to set that up in your blog. And essentially what is that doing is setting up a little one by one, practically invisible image file and it puts it into the website. So that image gets pulled up in your visitors’ browser and behind the scenes, what is happening with that image is that it’s got some code in there that actually puts the cookie on their machine.

So that is what it means when pixeling somebody, essentially means that you are putting a cookie on their machine. You are dropping this pixel in their browser, kind of like any other image that might be on your website, it is just that this is something that is actually got a script behind it that installs the cookie.

Now if this is something that freaks you out, seriously, stop freaking out because in the internet you are being cookied all the time. Unless you are absolutely paranoid, you got to block up all these stuff; it is just the way it works. If you go to forum, and when you go back to the forum the next day and it remembers who you are, you have been cookied. If you go to Facebook and you don’t have to log in every single time, you are being cookied. You probably have several hundred cookies installed inside your browser right now. Now you can go and clear them out anytime you want, but they are there. And this is just the way the internet works! It actually makes the internet far less annoying because the stuff will remember who you are and it reacts accordingly. It actually improves the visitor experience. So that is how that works. When you drop a pixel, you are installing the retargeting cookie. Okay?

Now with this retargeting traffic, you can put banner ads in front of people on other people’s sites. So let’s say you are in Yahoo News, you see an ad for the Blog Marketing Academy. Great. That is retargeting. It is not because I have some special relationship with Yahoo, it is just retargeting inventory. Now what I can do and what I do “do” is that I direct that ad into something that actually helps grow my business such as… I brought them into trial offers before, I have sent them into my webinar… these are the types of things that I would do whereas, it deals with that inefficiency of the blog and that 70% plus of people are probably going to come and just immediately leave.

The other 30% who do not immediately leave, they might click around but it doesn’t mean that they are going to go in my registration page and get on to my webinar or it doesn’t mean they are going to subscribe to my podcast or do any of that stuff. They are just kind of click around and read some more. And so, with retargeting, the fact that I can go out there and meet them where they are at and bring them back in, I send that retargeting banner traffic directly in to one of the things that grows the business. So that; I actually direct the person into what I want; not let them do a free-for-all on the public blog.

Highly Effective Strategy

And so, I hope you can see how this really, really adds a major level of efficiency to your blog. And in fact, if you are running a blog today and you don’t have a retargeting pixel set up on it, you need to do that ASAP. Do it right away because you could be building up that list. You could be building up that retargeting list. And even if you don’t pay to reach anybody right now, you can still be building that asset. And it most definitely is an asset. It is not quite as valuable as your email list, but it is pretty darn up there. Because the other things is; I want to give you some numbers here, but not only this retargeting paid traffic very, very cheap because you are only paying to reach a limited pool of people; we are only talking about people who have been to your site, okay?

So you don’t have to worry about all these complicated targeting options and stuff like that… It’s just merely the fact that they have been to your site, okay? So because of the limitation there, it is cheap. You are not paying to reach the entire world. The other thing is that retargeting traffic is typically highly effective. The ROI is many, many times. I think right now, off the top of my head, I got a pretty limited retargeting campaign going on right now; but just to put it in perspective of what I’m paying, about 15 bucks a month in retargeting traffic. It is about to go up because I am changing the campaign around but this is not expensive stuff. And I do tract the conversions and it is not difficult. Not difficult at all to see a 6x, 7x, sometimes higher ROI from this because we are not talking about much investment at all. And you got to basically have a pretty crumby offer to not make that money back. Okay?

So it is highly effective and it just makes sense. It just makes sense to build this as an asset.

Drive Traffic From Facebook

Now here is another thing that you can do, and some companies are now doing that… And I’m probably be getting in the game soon but at least as of this recording I’m not doing it; and that is run paid traffic from the likes of Facebook into actual blog content. Now that seems counter intuitive because a typical blog post is not usually going to make you money directly. But here’s the thing… What you can do is; because Facebook loves content, they would much rather you put content in front of their people on a paid basis than a sales letter. Okay? So you are paying Facebook to drive traffic to a highly valuable blog post. Now there are two things: One is, you put a call to action inside that blog post and you do turn it into a marketing piece just not hitting them over the head with it; but the other thing that you are doing is you are dropping a retargeting pixel on every single person who comes over.

So what you are doing is you are actually investing in the domain authority of your blog by getting more shares on your site because you are paying to send people directly into your content but you are building that retargeting list, you are building that asset because then you can turn around using the retargeting list and funnel these people into things that grow your business. So it is a little bit less direct but the people that I have talked to about this say that it is very effective because it is cheaper to advertise to content on Facebook than it is to advertise directly to sales letters and stuff like that.

And so you get much cheaper traffic. But then because you get them into the retargeting list, it is much cheaper to drive traffic into things like your squeeze page and your webinars or what have you. I don’t know how the whole thing works out in the net expense basis but I have heard really good things in terms of overall marketing results and you are getting that domain authority because incoming links and shares and stuff like that all counts toward the authority of your domain name.

So if you are putting money into actually distributing and enhancing content rather than sales messages, you are going to get more people sharing that stuff because it is content. And you will get cheaper traffic into the site.

So hopefully you get the idea of just how effective this can be. I definitely recommend that you get started with this. If you go to Facebook you can set up a retargeting audience directly; I am not going to get in to the “how to” right here but it such like you are setting up a website custom audience and you can say “Anybody who has visited my site” or you can even narrow down to “people who have visited URLs on your site” and you can retarget them.

Inside The Lab

Now to get into the technicals on this and how it all kind of clicks together, the best place that I have to send you would be to run into the Blog Monetizaton Lab and the most recent Office Hours Call which is all there in recording; was how to set up your retargeting plan for your blog and how to get it set up on your blog. I actually show it in video format. So that is the best thing that I have got at this point. I am going to be repurposing some of that into an Action Plan, but again, all that will be found inside The Blog Monetization Lab.

Hopefully you found this one enlightening; I surely hope you did because retargeting, pixeling your traffic is just one of those no brainer things you really, really should be doing. You should be doing this right now. I will also say it before we end off… It is going to get potentially a lot tougher to do paid traffic as more and more people get into the game. There are going to be more people trying to buy the limited inventory. So it really comes down to the fact that if you do not have a retargeting audience set up then it could get to a point where it can become cost prohibited to run paid traffic unless you have that retargeting audience, okay? So I really, really recommend that you think ahead and start pixeling people as soon as you possibly can.

Thank you and I will see you on the next episode of Coffee Break Blogging! 😉