Whichever marketing activities you currently use to bring prospects to your site – SEO, pay per click, banner, email marketing, offline promotion or even a blog – you can increase the value of these activities using remarketing.
Remarketing lets you reach people who have previously visited your site, and show them relevant ads across the web.
Say you run an online store, and a visitor has come through Google, they are in research mode, viewed a product page, and left without purchasing. Without remarketing in place, you have no way to reach out to this visitor to try and get them to convert.
With remarketing in place, this visitor has been added to your remarketing list, so that you can reach out to them later as they browse other websites or search on Google. They might see your ad on YouTube, the SMH.com.au or even while they are in their Gmail.
This visitor might be prompted by your remarketing ads to return to your store and complete purchase. The more targeted your ads are, the more likely this is to happen, especially if you tailor incentives to them.
Remarket in Search Results
Until recently, remarketing audiences could only be targeted on the content network. Since June, however, you are now able to target your remarketing audiences in the search results as well.
This product is called Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) and targets people based on two criteria – firstly they have to be searching for a term you bid on, and secondly they need to be on your remarketing list.
Why would you use remarketing in search? People who have already visited your site are more likely to convert, and therefore you can afford to bid more on these qualified audiences.
You also have more information about these audiences compared to other users, which means you can target your ads more specifically to them.
It is also more likely that you can afford to target very expensive, or broad, keywords, for your remarketing audiences, since those prospects are already partially pre-qualified.
Dynamic Remarketing
Note that if you have an online store with listings in Google Merchant Center, you are able to create dynamic remarketing ads to show customised ads depending on what a visitor viewed in your store. Dynamic ads can include product images and prices.
More Value From Every Visitor
Remarketing increases the value of your current marketing activities, because it means any visitor to your site can be easily reached out to again. This keeps your brand in the forefront of your prospects mind, allowing you to target them with tailored incentives, and, if you’re a smaller business, can result in your visitors subconsciously thinking your business is bigger than it is.
Remarketing also helps you upsell and cross sell to your customers. If a customer buys a particular kind of product, you can then show them ads for accessories or similar products.
Easy Ways to Start
First note that you do not need to be running any other Google ads campaigns to make remarketing work.
There are two ways to create remarketing lists, but both will require making changes to your website (if you use Google tag manager (LINK), both of these changes can easily be done in there, without getting your web developers involved).
Adwords Remarketing
Placing a sitewide Adwords remarketing pixel on your website will enable you to start growing your remarketing audience.
Go to the ‘Shared Library’ section, choose ‘Audiences’ then create a new audience.
You will be given a remarketing pixel to place site-wide.
Once that pixel is in place you can start creating groups within the audiences, based on URL. For example, you can exclude people who have already seen your thank you purchase page. You can make special remarketing campaigns for people who saw certain products. You can create unique remarketing campaigns for people who have put things in their cart but not purchased.
Analytics Remarketing
The second way of setting up remarketing is to get the code from Google Analytics.
There is a pro and a con to using the Analytics remarketing.
Pro: You can use goals as identifiers for your audiences. So, for example, you can create audiences based on a video watched, or a document downloaded.
Con: Currently, RLSA is only available for remarketing audiences created in Adwords, not in Analytics.
In Analytics, you can go to the Admin tab, then choose Remarketing, to start your setup. This will require you to make changes to your current analytics code.
Note that if you use remarketing, you will need to update your privacy policy.
Bonuses from using Remarketing
Some other benefits from implementing remarketing include:
- If you run another website where the audience would be very relevant for your business, you can place the pixel on that site to remarket your business to their audiences. You can also do this with businesses or content sites you have partnerships with.
- Google provides a feature called ‘similar audiences’, which are audiences who have similar attributes/interests to the people in your remarketing audience. You can create new campaigns to target people who are similar to your customers.
- You can see estimates of the gender/age demographic of people in your remarketing list, which could also be an indicator of the gender/age demographic of people visiting your site.
- You can see the placements where your ads were shown (other sites your prospects are visiting), which can give you ideas for future advertising placements..
Remarketing campaigns can be simple, or complex, depending how much time and expertise you have available. If you need help setting up a remarketing campaign for your site, feel free to get in touch.
