WHAT IS GOOGLE REMARKETING
Google Remarketing is a way for businesses to display ads to people who have already visited their website. It’s an excellent marketing strategy because it allows companies to re-engage with potential customers and generate new sales by creating highly targeted advertising campaigns. In this blog post, we will discuss the following: what is Google Remarketing? What are the benefits of remarketing? What are best practices for remarketing optimization? How can you use the downsides of Google remarketing as your advantage and tips on how to optimize your campaign.
Remarketing in Google Ads consists of static and animated images, video ads, responsive ads that are all placed on the Google Display Network. What makes remarketing different from standard search advertising is how it targets people who visit your website. To use this feature you must have a special tracking code to place cookies on each visitor’s browser so they can be targeted later with these specific types of ad formats across both the Search and Display networks when searching for relevant keywords related to their previous behaviour. It has been shown as an effective tool especially combined with other components such as SEO or PPC campaigns overall.
Thanks to remarketing, marketers are able to reach people who have visited their website before and may be interested in whatever activity they’re considering a conversion. Because these visitors were already familiar with the company’s products or services, they tend to convert more often than those that haven’t been on the site yet.
GOOGLE ADS REMARKETING OPTIONS
- Standard remarketing – This lets you show ads to your past visitors on other websites and mobile apps. Google Remarketing is an effective way of reaching potential customers who have previously visited your website or used one of the Google Ads features that let advertisers place their adverts in relevant places across Display Network sites. By doing so, it’s possible for business owners to improve conversions by re-engaging with users based on previous activity (i.e., site visits), interest categories through search history, and more specific targeting options like demographics as well as the geographic location where available.
- Remarketing for mobile apps -This gives you the opportunity to show ads to people who have already interacted with your brand. For example, if someone used your app or website once before, they may be more likely than a random person on their smartphone browser to convert into an actual user of that product in the future.
- Remarketing list for search ads – Remarketing lists are an effective Google Ads feature that can increase your ROI by targeting past visitors on the Search Network. You can target and customize search ads for these individuals while they continue to look for related information.
- Video Remarketing – Google Ads can help you serve ads to people who have already visited your website or YouTube channel. You could show them an ad on a video through the Display Network, and it will be more likely that they’ll click since they’ve been there before.
HOW TO SET UP YOUR FIRST REMARKETING CAMPAIGN
We all know that a Google Ads remarketing campaign is one of the best tools to use in order to attract more customers. Yet, there are some steps we need to take before creating and launching our google ads campaigns successfully – here they are!
Google Ads Remarketing is a great way to get your brand in front of people again. Google Ads campaigns are the best for leveraging remarketing because they’re easy to set up and effective if you have specific goals like getting more conversions or leads, etc. Below I’ll share five crucial steps that will ensure an amazing campaign:
Beyond these important factors, there’s one other thing which makes this marketing strategy special: unlike standard retargeting where ads follow website visitors around wherever they go on the internet until their interest wanes and/or budget runs out; with remarketed audiences (people who’ve already visited our site), we can serve them new messages tuned specifically towards whatever stage of the buyer journey!
1. Get Your Proper Tags In Place
A website’s remarketing efforts are only effective if the proper tracking is on the site. There are two main sources of tracking: Google Analytics and Google Ads. These should be used to ensure these marketing efforts aren’t going unnoticed by users.
Google Ads Tag
If your Google Ads account is starting from scratch, a Global Site Tag will need to be implemented.
To find this specific to your account, navigate to Tools & Settings > Audience Manager > Audience Sources.
Based on your relationship with the account, select one of these three options for setting up tags. The most important factor in this step is where you place it.
Google suggests that the tag be placed between <head></head> tags on every webpage of your website.
Google Analytics Tag
Google Analytics tracking is a necessary requirement for creating remarketing lists in Google Ads.
To find the tracking code, navigate to Admin > Property View > Tracking Info. There you will see a box with your unique tracking number so that you can track all of your website performance metrics and analytics data in Google Analytics.
Checking for Tag Implementation
By downloading the Tag Assistant Chrome extension, it is easy to check if tags are implemented properly.
To use the Tag Assistant, navigate to your website and click on “Tag” in Chrome’s menu bar. Clicking this option will bring up a page that looks similar to what is below with information about how well each tag has been implemented.
To see more results for specific tags or errors, you can check out Google’s developer documentation.
Now run the Tag Assistant on your website. If implemented well, it should look like this:
The green happy face means that everything is correct and taggers can start tagging.
2. Create Intentional Remarketing Lists For Your Google Ads
To get the best results from smarter remarketing, you need to have a strategy in place. Create intentional lists by targeting visitors who are likely to convert based on their past actions and interests rather than just “All Visitors” that visited your website.
Google Analytics and Google Ads provide a wide range of options to segment your site viewers. You can choose any level of granularity you want, but make sure that the list is large enough, or else it won’t be able to serve visitors well. The key is finding a balance between audience size and their intent.
Google Analytics Lists
My favourite way to create a remarketing list is with Google Analytics. The lists are automatically created when you have onsite behaviour data – this gives more options for qualification, which in turn makes the audience relevant and useful for your business. To get started creating an audience via GA, go into Admin > Property View > Audience Definitions > Audiences.
Now, it’s time to let yourself get creative.
The key is to create multiple remarketing lists based on different categories of your website.
To begin, you can create a remarketing list portfolio by considering the following starter ideas:
– Add lists of your most valuable customers. You’ll want to keep these people in mind when creating new ads and custom audiences.
– Include any recent website visitors who haven’t converted on an offer yet or abandoned their shopping cart; this lets marketers reach out specifically to those users with more relevant messaging since they’ve already shown interest before.
– Don’t forget about past buyers as well! If someone has purchased from you once, there’s a good chance that person is interested enough for another transaction (even if it wasn’t necessarily at full price). After all, many consumers use coupons and discounts even after receiving promotions during checkout through email marketing campaigns.
Google Ads Lists
To create lists in Google Ads, navigate to the Tools & Settings menu where you’ll find a list of settings and options. In this section, click on Audience Manager. This will show the main List Area.
There are five different types of remarketing lists available to create:
- Website Visitors
- App users
- YouTube users
- Customer list
- Custom combinations
One benefit of Google Ads remarketing lists is that they give the option to pre-populate them with users from the previous 30 days. This means you don’t have to spend time waiting for a user’s behaviour and demographics in order for it to appear on your list. For instance, if you want 500 males who are 18 years old or older but haven’t visited your site yet, then create such a list using Google Analytics website data as well as past ad views so long as each view has occurred within an individual timeframe (e.g., last 30 days).
3. Create Your Assets
The most popular Google Ads remarketing campaign type is the Google Display Network. However, there are also Remarketing Search campaigns that provide a more effective way to reach your customers and increase conversions.
To begin creating the proper assets, ask these questions first:
- What is the user being prompted for?
- What should the message be?
- Do both the landing page message and the ad messaging match?
In order to create effective remarketing ads, there are several key aspects that need to be considered. Some of these components include:
- Static images
- Responsive images
- Headlines and descriptions (if using responsive format ad)
- Landing page experience
4. Create A Remarketing Campaign
To build a remarketing campaign in Google Ads, you can use either the interface or Ads Editor.
Begin with the campaign name, its budget, and desired settings. For multiple campaigns, keep organized by using the audience name for each campaign.
Campaign settings are an important part of performance management. When they’re not properly managed or maintained, you can expect some volatility in your campaign’s results. These can include:
- “Observation vs. Target” settings
- Bid Strategy settings
- Targeting Expansion settings
- Location settings
- Frequency Cap settings
When adding audiences to a google ads remarketing campaign, choose the “Targeting” setting instead of “Observation.” By keeping it in “Observation” mode, audience targeting is not narrowed.
When deciding which bid strategy to use, be sure it aligns with your overall business goals.
As an example, If you were to set the “Target CPA” too low, Google would throttle impressions and your campaign could potentially fail.
Lastly, make sure to compete with bids as your targeted audiences have already been introduced to their brands.
The next setting, “Targeting Expansion,” is one that Google has conveniently hidden within the Ad Group settings. It’s probably not a coincidence that this feature gets buried under other options and isn’t listed on its own tab because it allows you to expand your targeting without having to create additional keywords or ad groups each time—a perfect way for marketers who are trying keep costs down while continuing an aggressive campaign expansion strategy.
Be sure to always set this to zero in a remarketing campaign.
If you targeted people who have bought a particular product, why would Google want to expand the campaign and target new users?
Google’s default setting is “People in, or who show interest, in your targeted locations.”
In my opinion, I recommend changing the setting to “in or regularly in the targeted location.” This is because by keeping it on default settings then you will get more general results that are not as effective for marketing purposes.
Lastly, frequency cap settings are still important because seeing the same ad multiple times per day creates a poor user experience.
Moderation is key when setting frequency caps. Set them at a level that gives users enough access to the content they want, but also prevents data and bandwidth overages by limiting activity too much on the site.
5. Analyze, Refine & Optimize Your Campaign
Congratulations! You’ve officially launched your first remarketing campaign!
That’s it you’re good to go right?
Not quite.
In the early days of a remarketing campaign, there are several key items to keep an eye on. For example:
- Make sure that your audience size is large enough to get impressions.
- Ad Placements (where ads are showing).
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
A remarketing campaign needs all of the following areas to work together in order for it to be successful: technology, audiences, messaging, and settings.
Without any one of these areas, a campaign cannot live up to its full potential.
BEST PRACTICES FOR REMARKETING
Google is one of the most popular online advertising platforms used by advertisers. Google Remarketing (also known as retargeting) launched in 2010, and since then it has improved a lot with new features like building lists through Analytics or Dynamic Remarketing. This section contains some best practices to improve your campaign’s performance which will help you get the maximum out of these campaigns from the Google Ads platform.
BEFORE YOU TRY TO GET STARTED WITH REMARKETING, HERE ARE SOME POINTS THAT WILL HELP YOU OUT.
Before you start creating your remarketing lists and campaigns, consider these tips…
Set Specific Goals For Success. These Will Also Help Manage Your Client’s Expectations.
When you’re using remarketing, it’s important to ensure that your client knows what kind of results they can expect from their google ads account. If the only marketing campaign this person has ever done is PPC and their expectations are too high for standard ads, there will be a lot of disappointment down the line when nothing happens overnight.
Make it clear to your client that remarketing isn’t a magic bullet that will turn every user into a buyer in one click. However, it is great for reminding users who have already visited your site of the products they were looking at and helping to increase potential conversions by reinforcing brand awareness. It’s something worth trying if you find yourself struggling with low traffic levels or conversion rates on ads targeted towards generic keywords like ‘sofa sets’ where there are thousands of other advertisers promoting their own sofa offerings as well.
Have A Clear Remarketing Strategy
To be successful, you should spend most of your time planning for remarketing and creating a strategy.
A big chunk of the time spent on this project will depend greatly upon how well-planned it is.
Your objectives are what matters to make sure that you create lists in order to accomplish them successfully – so don’t rush!
Update Your Privacy Policy
Before you add the remarketing code to your website and start building lists, it’s a good idea to update your Privacy Policy so that it declares how you’re using the DoubleClick cookie. Here’s an example:
“Why do we use Google Analytics remarketing codes to log when users view specific pages or take action on a website? This allows us to provide targeted advertising in the future. If you don’t want this type of ad, you can opt-out using DoubleClick’s opt-out page or the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) Opt-Out Page.”
THE BENEFITS OF GOOGLE REMARKETING
We’ve all been there: you’re browsing online, stumble upon something interesting and decide to save it for later… But then life happens. Next thing you know, that one viral video that kept popping up on your social media newsfeed is still at the top of your mind but so are a bunch of other things from last week—meaning shopping cart abandonments have become an epidemic with e-commerce marketers everywhere!
It’s exactly this type of scenario where remarketing campaigns come in handy – using Google Ads or Facebook Ads Manager (or even both!), brands can target users based on their previous behaviour within specific channels by creating ads tailored specifically towards them when they visit any number of different websites across the web.
Main Benefits
1. It’s Measurable
This is first on the list because it’s so crucial for any business in today’s modern age of advertising and marketing. Knowing which part of your marketing is working and which isn’t working will provide you with invaluable information that a director can use to improve their campaigns.
The Google ads platform provides an immense amount of data, but all this great data comes down to one thing: conversions! Whether it’s sales or form-fills, knowing when/where these take place is worth more than gold.
You can also tell Google what your average sale is worth on their dashboard, and they’ll calculate ROI for you directly.
HubSpot has created an add-on to integrate with Google ads. This allows you to pull data directly from your ad account into Hubspot and easily track the performance of your accounts, including how many times they are clicked on, total spend over time, or compare past campaigns together in one place! You will be able to set up a revenue goal for each campaign and the tool works out whether that was achieved based on either pulling data via our CRM tools (such as sales made) or by entering the average sale price/closing ratio. The ROI is automatically calculated using all spend within the advertising platform compared against customers generated through those efforts – super helpful!!
Instead of showing conversions as Google Ads does, this tool will show you contacts who clicked an ad before converting. It also shows those contacts that were contacted because they clicked on the same ad or even if it was after becoming a contact! This is truly powerful information to have about your database and now with just one tool at our disposal, we can easily get all of these insights in Excel too.
2. Relatively Inexpensive To Use
Getting started with Google Ads is quick and cheap (for the most part). Every keyword has an average cost per click (CPC) associated with it. You can spend as much or as little as you’d like, so you can scale your budget up if/when things are going well for your business.
The industry in which a company operates will affect their CPCs—some industries have astronomical costs! Therefore, make sure to set aside enough cash when starting out at 3x – 4x what’s considered average according to each campaign’s performance history on Google Ads.
Useful Tip: Don’t use a shared budget across all campaigns. It’s an easy way to manage spend but it does not prioritize where Google places the budget by default and could leave you with underperforming or outperforming ads that get more money. Instead, give each campaign their own budgets which allows for better management of how much is spent on what ad groups/keywords as well as giving them priority over one another if necessary.
3. Level Playing Field
Google Ads helps to level the playing field for advertisers of all sizes. As long as your ads and landing pages are most relevant, you have a good chance at showing up on Google searches no matter if you have a large or small budget. To determine an ad’s position (if any) and how much they will pay per click in their search results, Google uses Ad Rank which is basically “a value that determines an ad’s position”.
4. You Buy Your Way To The Top
Google Ads allows you to buy your way into the top of Google search results. This is a great tactic if you’re just starting out with SEO because it gives an added boost until organic rankings are built up enough on their own; however, once they do become more developed, paid ads can be used in conjunction with other forms of optimization and give some extra momentum by targeting new terms that aren’t yet ranking well organically.
5. Targeting & Remarketing Capabilities
You can target pretty much anything, on any device, in any location down to a one-mile radius around your business. If you’re a small shop who only services a very tight area (e.g., city), you can target your ads to the cities that are covered by this service and even Geo-target so anyone within range of these locations will see them.
You can adjust your bids by location and mobile device. For example, if you’re looking to maximize conversions from the area where most of yours are coming in, tell Google to bid higher on relevant searches for your product or service when it appears on a smartphone.
6. Protect Your Brand Keyword
One of the little-known benefits of using Google Ads is that you can buy your own business name. If you’re in a highly competitive industry, then having both organic listings and paid ads will be beneficial for keeping competitors off your back when someone searches by name. Furthermore, buying your brand’s top spot on search engines would also prove to be cheap at just a small price!
An often overlooked benefit of using Google Ads is that you can purchase your own business name. In highly competitive industries, this may be the best way to keep competitors off your back when people try searching for you by name. Not only will having both organic and paid listings help with SEO but a click on our brand should also cost much less than it would if someone were clicking through from another source or website entirely!
FINAL THOUGHTS ON GOOGLE ADS TO MARKET YOUR BUSINESS
Google Ads is a powerful tool for marketing and advertising. If in the hands of an experienced user, it can be deadly to your competition.
There are many benefits that come with using Google Ads: you’ll attract more customers than ever before by tapping into new demographics; increase revenue through pay-per-click charges on targeted keywords; make use of geo-targeting so only those who live near your business will see ad results.
If you are struggling with any of these settings, contact Move Ahead Media for assistance from our experts. Good luck with your Google Ads endeavours!
