Remarketing is a term used in Google AdWords, where you target a set of static images, animated images, video, responsive ads, and text ads by placing them on the Google Display and Google Search Network. The difference is in terms of the targeting. If you are wondering how you can start using Remarketing with Google Adwords, then you have come to the right place. Read on further.
Using Remarketing with Google Adwords
In remarketing, you are targeting the user, who has already come to your website and does some specific actions. Remarketing consists of using a special tracking code to place cookies on the browsers of people visiting your website, and then serving ads to those with that cookie, specifically, on the Display and Search network. It can be a very powerful component of a targeted PPC campaign.
The main point with using Google Adwords for retargeting is that you want to find those people who have shown enough interest in your products or services to visit your website. These people are more likely to perform whatever activity you’re considering as a conversion than people who have not at all been to your website yet.
There are a variety of strategies for how to best target this category of people, which website visitors to target, how to make the most of your remarketing ads, and how to optimize these remarketing campaigns. In this post, we will talk a bit about these topics and give best practices based on our own experience and Google recommendations. Google Search or Display ads – what is better for lead generation
AdWords Remarketing Options
- Standard remarketing – This AdWords feature allows you to show ads to your past visitors as they browse websites and apps on the Display Network.
- Dynamic remarketing – A feature of AdWords that lets you show ads to past visitors that have shown interest in any products or services they viewed on your site.
- Remarketing for mobile apps – If someone used your mobile app or mobile website, AdWords will let you show ads to them when they use other mobile apps or are on other mobile websites.
- Remarketing lists for search ads – This AdWords feature is also known as RLSA. It enables you to target past visitors on the Search Network. You can target and customize search ads for these past visitors while they search on Google and Google’s Search partner sites.
- Video Remarketing – AdWords will allow you to serve ads to people who have interacted with your YouTube channel or other videos. You can serve them ads on YouTube or through Display Network videos and websites.
- Email list remarketing – Also known as customer match, if you have a list of emails of your customers, you can upload them to AdWords. This feature enables you to serve ads to them if they are signed in to Google Search, Gmail, or YouTube.
Selecting Your Audiences
The very first step to remarketing, like most things in paid search, is to analyze your data and develop a strategy. You’ll need to decide which visitors to your site you’d like to target ads to. These groups, the ones you want to target separately and the ones you don’t want to target at all, are audiences. There are an infinite number of ways to target these audiences, including:
Based on the product/service page visited
- Based on visiting a certain page in your checkout process
- Time on site
- Number of pages visited
- Demographic targeting
- Geographic targeting
You can target any audience based on URLs. If you have a thank you page after people submit their email address for signing up to get more information or register to see a special deal, you could use the URL of that thank you page for a remarketing list.
Remarketing Code set up
The first step in building your remarketing campaign is to generate and place the special code you’ll need to place cookies in your website visitors’ computers. This code can be generated within Google Analytics or within AdWords. It involves the placement of a single code on every page (called a run of site code). This is the same one that Analytics already uses to monitor traffic on your site with a slight modification. Simply place this code on every page of your site and use URLs to build custom combinations and audiences.
If you have a Google Analytics account, you can find your remarketing code here. If you don’t have one, we suggest you get one but we’ll describe how you can still generate a code in AdWords . The reason you want a remarketing code from Analytics is the cool feature of being able to set-up remarketing lists based on goals instead of just pages visited. You could set one up for people who have visited at least 4 pages, spent at least 5 minutes on your site, etc.
Hope this post was able to get you started on using Remarketing with Google Adwords. We will be able to cover some more detailed topics related to this subject soon. Watch out this space for more details.