Unless you are concerned that Google has become too powerful a force in Internet services, you’ll probably want to know about “remarketing,” a new function that is offered as part of their Adwords service. If you are conducting sales via a website, or even have a trackable conversion, such as the downloading of a free PDF, this program can help you target and maximize your results with what has been, up until now, a highly valuable target-market that was being lost. This article by Ryan Bardo spells it out in detail. –Bob G
What is Google Remarketing?
Google remarketing is a technology that allows an advertiser to show an ad to a user who previously visited the advertiser’s website. The goal of Google remarketing is to two-fold, branding and increasing conversions. The latter is accomplished by being able to “retarget” visitors who, for example:
- Abandoned a shopping cart
- Didn’t convert
- Converted
- Signed up for a trial
- Subscribed to a newsletter
The audience in a remarketing campaign is more valuable than other audiences because retargeted audiences are more likely to convert into a sale or lead due to their known prior interest (they were on your website or a specific web page).
Google remarketing is a perfect solution for staying in front of your target audience, especially those who need to visit your site more than once to make a decision. In this white paper you’ll learn:
1. The basic set up of a Google remarketing campaign
2. Remarketing best practices
Setting up a Google Remarketing Campaign
Google remarketing campaigns are set up and managed within Google Adwords. The basic steps of setting up a remarketing campaign are as follows:
1. Define your audience
2. Retrieve code script and install it on corresponding web page(s)
3. Create an ad group with your defined audience that you wish to remarket
Define Your Audience
With regard to a Google remarketing campaign, defining your audience means determining to whom you want to show online ads, e.g. you want to show online ads to visitors who abandoned your shopping cart. Other types of common audiences are:
- converted users
- Non-converted visitors
- Current subscribers
- By shopping category
- By product
Install Code Script
To receive the code script, click on the tag for the audience that you’ve created. Once you click on the tag it will display a box with the code you need to install on your web page. Copy and paste the code in between the body tags on your web page. Once the code is installed visitors will be included in the Adwords audience that you specified. You can also specify the duration of retargeting. For instance, if you specify a 30 days your ad will show to that user for 30 days.
Create an Ad Group and Add Your Audience
The final step of building your remarketing campaign is to create your ad group and add your defined audience to that ad group. Make sure that the display network is turned on in your campaign settings; otherwise the remarketing will not work. If you are just starting out it is best to let Adwords automatically manage your placements. Once you get used to the campaigns and see which sites are performing you can start managing your placements manually.
Start out simple with one audience per ad group until you get the hang of it. Bidding and management gets very complex with all these elements added to an ad group. So start out small until you get your bearings. Ad groups should correspond to the audience you are adding. For example: If you are trying to retarget shopping cart abandoners your ad group should be labeled “shopping cart abandoners.” Identify the keywords used by your “abandoners” and add them to this ad group. Once again, keep things simple.
Remarketing Best Practices
Both building and managing a remarketing campaign can be complex. In this section you’ll learn some tips on how to successfully build and manage your remarketing campaigns.
1. Plan and organize your campaigns in an excel spreadsheet.
2. Use image/video ads as much as possible. Also have text ads created in every ad group for the websites that doesn’t support image/video ads.
3. Create various remarketing ad groups to show different ads to different audience lists.
4. Customize ad groups around the ad creative that will be displayed.
5. Rank ad groups in terms of qualification, this is the qualification level. For example: Non-engaged users are less qualified than shopping cart abandoners. Therefore, do not invest too much into the non-engaged user’s ad group.
6. The retargeting duration is directly influenced by qualification level of the ad group, i.e. the higher the qualification level, the longer you want to remarket to that ad group.
7. Google retargeting organizes visitors who match an audience definition into lists. An audience will not become active until that list reaches 500 unique visitors. In other words, until a certain audience consists of 500 visitors, your ad group won’t serve ads. All that said, don’t define your audiences too strictly or your audience will never become active.
Remarketing helps advertisers stay in front of their users. There are as many applications of this technology as there are types of convertible web pages. Remarketing can help increase the number of times per month those pages convert.
