How to use remarketing in Google Ads

Re-marketing means getting in touch with people who have previously  visited your website or mobile app. It’s a powerful form of online advertising which allows you to present ads to people that are familiar with your company, whilst they’re browsing the web. This is a smart and strategic way of inviting customers to come back to your website and cuts costs, boost conversions and strengthen your brand.

How to use Remarketing for Google Ads

You need to have an advertisement on Google Ads, to begin with, and when launching your first re-marketing campaign, you want to start out by targeting everyone who has been visiting your website. To start using re-marketing, you just insert re-marketing tag snippets to your website so that visitors can get added to your re-marketing audiences through browser cookies. Those re-marketing tag snippets are simply small units of code that you get when you tag your site for re-marketing in audience sources.

If you want to learn more about marketing with Google Ads check out: How to customize your marketing with Google Ads.

Read more about tag implementation.

Remarketing for Google Display Ads

One common way remarketing for display is used, is through banner ads. These remarketing campaigns are generally concentrated on displaying ads to customers that are early in the buying process, and have visited your site before. These ads are not shown on search engine results pages, but on other websites. So for instance, if you are looking at a dress on a clothing company and later see that exact dress in an ad on the sidebar at another website - that’s display re-targeting for you!

A nice feature is that you can be very broad in your targeting. You can choose to tag -

• Everyone that is visiting your website
• Anybody that has seen the product 
•  Just the people who have put actual items in their baskets.

People have a lot of stuff going on, and they tend to forget things – so sometimes they just need a reminder that they still have some things in their basket, which they forgot to check out.

And it's important to remove the ads for people that actually already purchased the product. If you have a customer that recently bought a phone from you, you don’t want that same customer to see that online ad for the phone again, right?

You can also run a display campaign in another way, by targeting display ads based on popular search terms people use on search engines. First, you make a list of keywords for your display re-targeting from search campaigns; then when someone searches for one of those keywords they are qualified to see one of your ads. This can prove to be very successful since you can show your ads to people even if they’ve never visited your webpage. These ads are also cheaper than paid search ads.

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Remarketing for Google Ads Search

Remarketing for Google Ads search is usually used to display ads on a search engine’s results page right when the consumers need something. The companies that bid on specific keywords will have their ads displayed when someone searches for that exact keyword, and it will usually be at the top of the page.

So let’s say that a potential customer is just browsing through various websites, yours included, but aren’t yet ready to make a purchase – then you still want them to remember the name of your company when they decide to continue their search. Re-targeting lists from search ads (RLSA) is a method of targeting people who leave your site without converting, using a re-targeting tag that is placed on each page of your site. You are then able to re-target that audience list on the search engine results page with custom text ads and specific messaging. Remember: returning visitors are five times as valuable as new customers.

Why your company should use remarketing

Google Ads remarketing is a great way to increase sales and registrations and to send out the word of your company. The danger is very limited since you only target existing users. But it can be risky if you overexpose the ad since this could result in negative brand building.

Re-marketing is exceedingly valuable to companies that have customers that shop for around 100€ or less. It can be businesses that employ repeatable purchases, like make-up and other beauty products, where the products are pretty cheap and it’s thereby easier to convince customers.

Some final notes to remember

1. Exclude existing customers - if someone has made a purchase, remember to remove that specific ad so they don’t have to see it again.
2. Frequency capping - an important term which means you restrict the frequency a single visitor is shown a particular ad on your site. Don’t show the ad too often.
3. Every customer is unique - you don’t want the same bid for every customer, so set it according to the visitors. Structure in terms of ROI for your company.

 Are you interested to improve your remarketing setup and improve your ROI? Get in touch with us!