Remarketing With Google Adwords

What Is Remarketing?

Remarketing is a form of advertising that allows an organisation to target an audience, over the Google Display Network, where the audience has previously shown an interest in a particular product/service after visiting your website.

Why would you use Remarketing?

Remarketing, when used correctly can be a very powerful advertising campaign as it is all about targeting the right audience with the right message. Remarketing allows you to specifically target an audience that has visited key pages on your website and allows targeted ads of your choice to be displayed to your audience when they are browsing websites across the Google Display Network.

How Does It Work?

We all know that the internet is made up of 10’s of billions of codes, well, Remarketing is no different. After creating your Remarketing campaign(s), Google Adwords will provide a remarketing tag or code that will need to be implemented on your website (more about this later). When a user visits your website, the Google Remarketing code will then drop a cookie on the user’s machine. When that user is browsing websites associated with the Google Display Network, ads will be delivered to this user, either in text or image form depending on what you want to use.

Optimisation for Success

Remarketing is all about delivering the right message to the right audience.

When starting a Remarketing campaign, you will need to create a list/audience that you want to target with Remarketing. Each list/audience that you create will provide a specific remarketing tag or code to be imbedded on your website.

Creating different audiences and tags / codes allows you to target different messages to users who may be at different stages of your conversion funnel. As I mentioned, remarketing is all about aligning the right audience with the right message. An example can be seen below:

• User A: User viewed homepage – Displayed Ad X
• User B: User viewed specific product — Displayed Ad Y
• User C: User viewed conversion page (Did Not Convert) — Displayed Ad Z
• User D: User converted on the website — Different options

Bidding on Remarketing

Remarketing campaigns are still a CPC based, where advertisers have to bid for positions. It is best to consider the value of each conversion and what it’s worth in the long run for your business.  Using the above example, placing a higher bid on campaigns directed at Users B and C will more likely have the customer convert further down the line, as we have better targeted ads to these users. We can then set a lower bid for User A to get them back to the website and move through the products to shift them into a different audience for remarketing.

Ad Formats

Remarketing campaigns have option to use both image (banner) and text ads. I would recommend using both and continually optimising the creatives during your Remarketing campaign. If you’re worried about the head hours involved in creating multiple image (banner) ads for your campaign – don’t be. You don’t have to have to be a Photoshop expert! Google’s display ad builder tool has come on leaps and bounds over the years. The tool provides customisable templates for any business to create whichever type of message they want to deliver to users. Nice touch is that the tool also formats the ad to fit into all 8 ad format sizes to use on the Google Display Network.

Exclusions

Just like we use negative keywords for search campaigns, there is the option to exclude ads from displaying on websites that you may not want associated with your brand. This is always a great idea. A quick simple example:  if I am running a Remarketing campaign for an airline, I would not want my ad to be displayed anywhere near a website that may talk about plane crashes. It does take a fair bit of optimisation but it is worth it in the long run.

Summary

The targeting a brand can achieve through Remarketing has never been achieved before. Remarketing allows you to target users who have already shown an interest in your products or services. Coupled with the use of targeted messages based on their specific stage of the conversions funnel, it’s a level of targeting which has never been achieved before. I would highly recommend anyone running a PPC search campaign to start experimenting with remarketing on the Google Display Network.

For more info on how to set up remarketing campaigns, go to Google’s Remarketing Setup Guide.

Tags: google display network, google remarketing, remarketing, retargeting