Things You Need to Know About Google Ads Remarketing

What is remarketing, anyway?

Basically, remarketing consists of personalizing a message to the target user about whom we know that they have performed certain actions online. For example, people who have already viewed the website – therefore have shown some interest in the offer, but did not ultimately convert; i.e. they installed an app or watched the YouTube video. And this is merely a drop in the ocean of marketing possibilities yielded by this feature. Each day most of us experience remarketing activities. Every time we view a website or browse an e-commerce offer, but then move on to another site, where we’re displayed ads of the page we were previously on – that is most probably a remarketing-driven message. That’s why sometimes they’re called tracking ads. If you are considering this method of customer reachout, think about these crucial points first.

Why are remarketing campaigns worth investing in?

Google Ads remarketing is a thrill for both marketers and their clients – and for a reason. It allows quite a precision in target group specification, leading to personalization in displaying content, and, eventually, a sales increase, user loyalty and brand awareness building. On top of that, remarketing yields a wide advertising coverage due to remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) tailored to your business goals.

Remarketing allows first and foremost to re-attract the users that visited a URL a certain time ago, who either converted or not, leaving the site without performing the desired action, e.g. purchasing, booking, registering, asking for contact, etc. A tailored, behaviour-dependent message displayed any times we want is then used to convince the user to come back and – this time – convert.

Frequency capping for every person mentioned in remarketing list is crucial here. A well-capped campaign will not overwhelm the users with ads, at the same time being well-balanced cost-wise.

10 reasons why YOU should be investing in remarketing

Remarketing allows you to, above all, target your advertising, which comes in handy in many ways, depending on your business goals, but here are 10 things you can have, using it:

1. Visible impact – attainable quickly and at low cost;
2. Sales increase;
3. Wide advertising range;
4. Increasing the number of users;
5. User loyalty building;
6. Personalized advertising message and user-tailored content;
7. Lists matching your up-to-date marketing goals;
8. Reaching those most willing to buy;
9. Brand awareness and corporate image building;
10. Integrating social media and multimedia marketing activities.

The mechanism behind remarketing & things to keep in mind

Wondering how it works, that individual users receive an advertising message, tailored to them, based on their online behaviour? It’s actually quite simple. For users viewing a business website, a safe assumption is that they’re probably interested in a specific service or product. At the time of such visit, some cookie files are saved in a browser for future use. There’s a certain script, a code block, that needs to be implemented on a page in order to write such cookies files in the user’s browser. Those files let us know how the user behaved – what pages or products were viewed during the session. These information will allow us to create remarketing lists (RLSAs) and, ultimately, behaviour-driven user-targeted online ads.

Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSAs) have their validity period ranging from 1 day to 540 days, allowing to target users based on the time they visited our website. In order to create a list of recipients, go through your overall offer and the relevant landing pages in order to identify specific customer groups and your offer for each of them. Keep in mind that a person who converted on your website 100 days ago may require a different message than someone who abandoned their cart 2 days ago.

Types of Google Ads remarketing:

• Standard remarketing

It’s based on displaying advertising banners to users. Uses standard advertising as in the Google Display Network (see our “Google Ads Image Ads Specification” entry)

• Dynamic remarketing

A more advanced remarketing; displays products and services to the users that previously viewed them on a website or in an app. Needs a dynamic remarketing java script and a Google Merchant Center account on (see the “Google Merchant Center Product Feed Specification” entry).

• RLSA – remarketing in a search engine

These ads are displayed to people included in remarketing lists for search ads. We can customize this feature in order to target only people in our remarketing lists, set the bids, or change the message with IF function.

• Video remarketing

Ads targeting to those who interacted with YouTube channel or videos, active during their YouTube session or when browsing websites or apps from the Display Network. Before launching this type of campaign, it’s crucial to integrate YouTube and Ads accounts before.

• Customer Match remarketing

Feature allowing to upload a list with clients’ contact details: e-mail addresses, telephone numbers or physical address. When logged in Google, those users will have your ads displayed to them in Google services, e.g. in Gmail or YouTube.

• Remarketing to app users

Directs advertising to app users or mobile website visitors; active using other apps or browsing other mobile sites from the Google Display Network. Advanced in-app events customization features increase user involvement and encourages recurring.

Creating remarketing list with Google Ads

First, check if the Google Ads remarketing script works as it should. You may use the Tag Assistant plugin to check for errors and verify if recipient lists are gathered in the Google Ads dashboard. If so, then you can create your first remarketing lists. Let’s create a remarketing list of all users who visited our online shop in the last 30 days. Both Google Analytics and Google Ads are equipped with a necessary feature. Here’s what you need to do in order to create a list of remarketing audiences in Google Ads :

• Log in to the Google Ads dashboard;
• Find “Tools” tab in the upper right corner of the panel;
• Click “Audience manager”;
• In the remarketing tab, click +;
• A settings window pops out;
  
• Choose “Website visitors”;
• Then move on to creating an audience group in the dialog box that appears;
• Set name of the group;
• Choose the members of the “Website visitors” group;
• In the respective menu, select the “contains” button and enter your website URL;
• You can create a list by including users from the last 30 days or launch an empty list that will include the users that come since its creation;
• Specify the number of days over which users will be included in the audience list. In the list we’ve just created, it’s 30 days;
• You can add a short comment to the list, but it is not required;
  
• Click “Create audience”

You can see a ready list of recipients in the “Audience manager”
There’s a minimum remarketing list size required. To target the listed users, a certain number of active users in a defined time is required: in this case it’s 100 users active in 30 consecutive days in the Display Network and 1 000 in the Search Network. Google Ads also sets a cap on the number remarketing lists, and while for most accounts it’s impossible to reach the limit, it’s…

– 20 000 items that can be targeted by ad groups (such as keywords, target places or audience lists),

– 5 million items total per an account that can be targeted with ad groups (such as keywords, target places, or audience lists). Mind that Google Ads offers many possibilities in audience lists creation, but still there’s more to gain if using Google Analytics. There is a cap of 2 000 recipient lists per service in Google Analytics. After this limit is exceeded, all you need to do is to create a new service.

Custom combination lists for remarketing

Custom combination lists allow creating advanced lists from the ones created previously. The custom combinations are made by combining remarketing lists with statements: AND OR, NOT.

Example:

Suppose you run a store with laptops and relevant accessories. Your target customer base that you’d love to reach is people who visited both the landing pages with laptops and with sleeve bags and offer them a deal: laptop + sleeve bag, cheaper together. To achieve that, you need to create one remarketing list – “Users who visited the laptops landing page” – and another one “Users who visited the accessories landing page”, or – with a custom combination – create a single list with all users who visited the laptop lading page AND the accessories page.

Battle-proven remarketing applications

• Users who visited our site in particular periods of time
  It’s an absolute remarketing must-have – a foundation, upon which all more complex custom remarketing lists will be created. Examples of those: separate remarketing lists for people who visited our site exactly 1 day ago, exactly 3, 7, 30 days ago, etc. reaching up to 540 days maximum.
  
• Filtering out random traffic
  When creating audience lists, mind the strays – and filter them out; those are the users that viewed your site by accident. Identifying and excluding them will significantly reduce the cost of advertising. A smart way to do it – exclude from remarketing actions all users who stayed on the website for less than 5 seconds.
• Focusing on users who converted
  These users know our brand first-handedly: they’ve used our services, made a purchase or registered. In their case the focus is reinforcing their loyalty and securing the recurrence, preferably on a regular basis (e.g. 30 or 180 days). Coming up with a theory on how often a customer may need your products or services again, helps too. For instance, shortly after the main purchase occurred, offering related products or services might work, e.g. bicycle accessories to a person that bought a bicycle lately.
• … or cart-or-conversion-abandoners
  With them, you came close to a crucial business event, like a purchase, but they for some reason backed down. Such remarketing list will have users who saw the website, chose and added products to their cart, but never placed an order.
• … YouTube channel audience
  Such lists can be created after integrating the YouTube channel with a Google Ads account. This step allows creating conditional audience lists with fresh channel subscribers or those who have watched a specific video or “liked” any video featured in the channel. Targeting ads to users who are already aware of your channel or have watched a video increases the ROI probability.
• … and social media users
  Loyal users, social media brand followers. To create such a list, simply enable the collection of a remarketing group from Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Thanks to these data, including lots of personal traits and attributes, a next-level personalization is now possible – strengthen the bond with your brand with uncanny tailoring of the advertising message.

Summary

Remarketing is a highly effective online advertising technique, turning users into customers, and first-time customers into recurring ones, as if it’s magic. Google Ads remarketing, before it works miracles, should be, obviously integrated with overall business goals and founded on a thorough knowledge of your audiences. Well-prepared and carefully optimized remarketing mechanism will increase your conversion rate, thereby bringing profit.