Ultimate Guide To Google Ads Remarketing

To start collecting the appropriate data, you will need to make a minor adjustment to your current Analytics code that you’ve already placed on your website.

After you’ve made the changes to your Analytics code, you will also need to take care of a few additional items.

• Have at least one active Google AdWords account that is linked to your Analytics account (admin access required).
• Agree to the Google Analytics Terms of Service.
• Agree to the Google Analytics for Display Advertisers Policy.
• Update your privacy policy and include an appropriate description of your use of remarketing in online advertising.

Now, if you don’t have Analytics for some strange reason, don’t have admin access to it, and/or don’t want to agree to the terms of service, you can still create and manage remarketing lists directly in AdWords.

Create Remarketing Lists Directly In AdWords

To do this, you’ll want to go to the “shared library” in your AdWords account. Click “Audiences”.

Click “remarketing list”.

How To Choose Your Membership Duration

The membership duration is how long you’d like to store a cookie in someone’s browser. There are many different strategies to selecting membership duration. You want to think about your business and your goals when selecting membership duration. They can last up to 540 days.

• Do you have an ecommerce site that people only buy from once every three months? You should extend your membership duration to 90 days.
• Do you have a service that requires people to sign up again after 30 days? Try a 60-day membership so you know they’re getting heavily targeted if they forget to renew directly after 30 days.

Another item to keep in mind is that you are always at risk of annoying people if you show them your ad too much.

Frequency Capping

Another feature in a similar vein to membership duration is frequency capping.

This feature allows you to decide how often you’d like each individual user to see your ad during a specified period. Keep in mind that if you show your ad too often to users, there is a possibility that you will cross the line and they will become annoyed by your product or service.

A classic example of this is the story about a group of successful, upper class wives that were being remarketed to by Prada. They would get served Prada ads all day, on every site, all over the Internet. It started to become obvious that they were being targeted, and it came off as creepy. Resentment toward the brand began to build, which is exactly the opposite of what they were trying to accomplish.

You don’t want this to happen with your ads and your remarketing audiences, so pick a frequency cap that seems appropriate for your goals. If your customers have a long average time between conversions, you’ll need fewer impressions to gently remind them of your brand again from time to time.

If your business is built for repeat customers, you may want to focus on impressing as much as possible. For instance, restaurants like Jimmy John’s ideally want people to order their sandwiches every single day. They’re not going to care about burning someone out, as it’s feasible that someone could order from them multiple times in a week. Repeat business is important to them, so they show ads to users constantly.

The main point is to pick something that makes sense for your business goals.

How To Set-Up Custom Combinations

You can set-up custom combinations in the “Shared Library” tab in your AdWords account in the exact same place where you set up your AdWords-based remarketing.

Create a new audience, but this time it will be a custom combination.

If you want to target users who hit the first page of your checkout process without reaching your order confirmation page, then you would want to set up a custom combination.

Select the remarketing audience you’ve set up for people who hit the first page of your checkout process. You can do this by creating a new remarketing audience and using the URL of that page. Then, select “none of this audience” and select the remarketing audience you set up for people who have hit the thank you page. You can also select anyone who has converted. Save this, and then select this custom combination as your audience in the ad group you’ve created for this audience.

You can interlace interest categories with remarketing audience for custom combinations as well.

Perhaps you’d like to create an internet category marketing campaign that will be focused purely on trying to get your brand out to as many people who have never heard of your website as possible. You could create a custom combination audience targeting whichever interest category you’re interested in targeting and by using a remarketing tag for your homepage URL, “all site visitors” perhaps, as a negative audience. This custom combination would target your interest category without impressing ads to anyone who has been to your website within the amount of time you set your membership duration to.

You don’t have to only use one positive and one negative audience, either. You could choose to target only people who have been to a certain URL on your site, perhaps a product page, that are also interested in certain interest categories. Let’s say your website sells dog beds and your company has hard data that shows people that Google has marked as being interested in dogs are 65% more likely to convert than people Google has not marked as interested in dogs. Then, you could create a custom combination targeting your dog bed product page and the interest category “dogs.”

The main take-away is to think about what could work for your website and test all viable options!

When Custom Combinations And Membership Duration Meet

One strategy that can work well for advertisers is what’s called delayed targeting.

We’ll start with an example. This is a client that is a subscription-based service. Some members select to pay on a month-to-month basis. So, we decided to make an audience that targets people who have converted with member duration of 30 days. We made another identical audience, but for 90 days. We then made a custom combination by making the 90-day member duration our target, and excluded the audience for 30 days. This means we’re targeting people who have converted, 30-90 days after converting.

Membership duration will also intersect with the messaging in your ads. If you have offers that give users a seven-day free trial, you could target converters starting seven days after their initial conversion.

You know your sales cycle better than anyone, so think of creative ways you can make the most of the high level of targeting that remarketing affords you. Users think of your brand 30, 90 or even 180 days after being introduced to it initially. Adjust your messaging accordingly.

How To Optimize Remarketing Campaigns

Optimization in remarketing comes in a few different forms:

• Ad testing
  • Strong branding may work well in your ads. Start here as a control, but experiment with other messages. Treat remarketing ads similarly to how you would treat other ads, just keep your audience in mind. These users are already familiar with your brand, so you may need to go a bit further to win them back to your site. Experiment with different offers, calls to action, images and everything else you can think of.
• Custom combination testing
  • We mentioned earlier that you may find different results when combining interest categories with previous site visitors. Keep testing and find what works best for your account. Experiment with different combinations of cookie lengths. Messaging for visitors that visited between 7 and 30 days ago may very well end up not working for users who visited between 30 and 60 days ago.
• Frequency cap testing
  • You don’t want to be too annoying, but you also want to maximize the number of interested visitors to your site. Monitor your audience size in combination with the number of impressions your remarketing ad groups get. Maybe your cap is too high and you aren’t limiting anything at all. Maybe you’re setting it way too low and you’re severely limiting your ads’ exposure.
• Bid testing
  • Impression share is something worth monitoring in a remarketing campaign. You’re following users and not sites, so if you get to 100% IS you may be annoying some of those users. Monitor your bids both for cost effectiveness and return on investment, but also for impression share.
• Landing page testing
  • The user that you’re bringing back to your site already has a certain level of familiarity. You should experiment landing them on the same page and somewhere completely new. Is your messaging catered to someone who’s been there before? Are you asking questions on the landing page that a previous site visitor would already know the answer to? Test to find out which type of content connects most strongly to previous visitors.

While your results may vary, we’ve found the most success with remarketing ads when they are brand focused. This is because the people you’re targeting are familiar with your website. They might not pay any mind to a random creative advertisement, but they may be much more likely to notice an ad that’s touting a brand they’re familiar with. This is especially true if you plan on testing special offers for remarketing visitors. They may not notice a discount or sale if they don’t notice that it’s for a site they’re familiar with. Our best advice is to start with ads that match your website and your brand as a control set of ads and test from there.

For the most part, you can probably direct remarketing visitors back to wherever they came from. If they got a remarketing cookie from a product page, it’s probably safe to land them back on that product page. However, if you’re planning on offering specials to them, you’ll want to create a custom landing page that reflects that deal. If they come back to the site and don’t see anything about the deal they were promised in the ad, they’re likely to bounce.

It’s a bit tricky to do placement exclusions for remarketing. If you’re not familiar with what we mean, placement exclusions happen when you download a placement report and decide which sites your ads are performing poorly on that you should block from showing your ads. This is a very easy task when you’re dealing with topics or contextual marketing on the Display Network. Then, you can look at performance and relevancy at face value. However, with audience targeting, such as remarketing or interest category marketing, then you’re targeting the person who happens to be on that website. Content relevancy of the page itself may not be as important in a remarketing campaign as it will be in other Display campaigns.

So, what do you do? You’ll still have websites that perform poorly, and you should still exclude them. Even though we’re targeting the people visiting the site, some sites attract bad people (i.e. people who don’t want to give you money) more than other sites, display your ads in such a way that invite accidental clicks, etc. We recommend being more tolerant with your remarketing placement performance. Give those sites as much tolerance as you can within your goal margins.

Remarketing is a powerful targeting method on the Google Display Network. By tailoring your ad copy and bids to the highly specific audience you’re going after, it can show a tremendous return in your accounts.