The Power of Remarketing for Nonprofit Organisations

What is Remarketing?

The basic idea of Remarketing (also called “retargeting”) is to show ads to people who already interacted with your organisation, for example, by visiting your website or engaging with your social media posts or profiles.

The benefit of targeting this audience is that they already showed an interest in your Nonprofit organisation. Rather than trying to reach a ‘cold’, new audience, you can reconnect with previous visitors and get them to pick up where they left off. Remarketing audiences are typically more likely to convert (for example, make a donation, sign up to your mailing list or submit a lead form) as they are already further down the conversion funnel.

There are various formats of retargeting ads available but the most popular ones are image ads across the web (via the Google Display Network) and image or video ads on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram or YouTube.

Setting up a Remarketing audience is fairly straightforward: as long as you have basic tracking tags like Google Analytics or the Meta Pixel on your website, all website visitors are tracked. Google Analytics 4 automatically creates an ‘All Visitors’ audience and Meta lets you easily create it in the Audience Manager.

What Options do Nonprofits have for Remarketing?

The bad news first: sadly the Google Grant account that most Charities have, doesn’t include any Remarketing option. That doesn’t mean you have to do without the benefits of Remarketing though, you can simply create a standard Google Ads account in addition to your Grant account.

There are three options for Remarketing via Google Ads:

Display Remarketing

This is one of the most common options for Remarketing: image ads that follow you across the web once you’ve left a website. They can appear on any website that opted in to allow advertising, for example, blogs, online newspapers, mobile apps and more. A popular option for Ecommerce is Dynamic Remarketing where people see exactly the products in the ads that they viewed previously on your website. If your Charity sells products online, this could be a good option for you.

Video Remarketing

Video ads follow people on YouTube and can show before, during and after another video. They are a great option if you have high-quality video assets and prefer to tell a story through one or multiple video ads.

Search Remarketing

The third Remarketing option in Google is less frequently used than Display and Video but can still work well. Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) target previous website visitors with customised text ads once they start a search on Google again.

Social Media Remarketing

Remarketing on Social Media follows the same principles as the Google options above with the only difference that ads are shown on the respective Social Media platform instead of all across the web. Both image and video ad formats are available and they can appear in various placements, for example, the news feed, Messenger, Stories, Instagram Reels, Facebook Marketplace and more.

Best Practices for Using Remarketing

Remarketing is a powerful tool to re-engage with existing audiences. It is easy to set up but requires a few things to keep in mind to maximise its potential. Here are our top five best practices for Remarketing:

1) Use Remarketing in combination with your Prospecting campaigns.

You worked so hard to get that first click and bring visitors to your website or social profiles via Prospecting campaigns (= targeting new audiences), now don’t let them go. A comprehensive digital marketing strategy should include campaigns to target people in all stages of the conversion funnel and Remarketing is a great tool to engage with mid- to lower-funnel audiences.

2) Set a Frequency Cap

We want to remind people of your Nonprofit organisation and gently nudge them to get back to your website. Spamming people nonstop often has the opposite effect, so we recommend setting an impression cap and use your Remarketing campaign’s budget to control how often these ads are shown to your audience.

3) Exclude Converters

Exclude everyone from your Remarketing campaign who already completed what you want them to do. You can do that by creating an audience for Converters and adding it as an excluded audience to your Remarketing campaign. For example, people who just made a donation or registered for an event don’t need to be followed up right now as they already completed a conversion. Instead, you could continue the conversation via your mailing list or automated email sequences since by that time you already have the person’s contact information.

4) Customise the Ad Creatives for your Remarketing Audience

Since these people already “met” you, they know by now what your organisation does. Avoid generic messages and instead make the ad copy more goal-oriented to get them back to your website and complete a specific action.

5) Test different Landing Pages

The same principle as for the ad copy applies to the landing pages used for your Remarketing ads. Instead of sending them to a more generic overview page about your Nonprofit organisation, you can experiment with sending them straight to a signup form, donation page or similar. Chances are they are more likely to convert since they already know what your Charity is all about.

Conclusion

As with all things Digital Marketing and strategy planning, there is no one-size-fits-all approach for Remarketing. Don’t be afraid to test different channel options and evaluate not only the campaign’s performance but also its impact on your overall digital marketing strategy.