What Is Google Remarketing And How Does It Work?

In the complex world of digital advertising, remarketing takes a special spot. Instead of building brand awareness, it helps you stay top of mind for an audience you already know to be interested in what you have to say. As Search Engine Journal puts it, remarketing is “one of the strongest conversion tactics in digital marketing today.”

In other words, it’s an opportunity you don’t want to miss. In this post, we’ll touch on the basic definition of remarketing, its advantages, and how to set up a campaign to better promote your business and drive conversions.

Heads up: this guide will focus on the ins and outs of Google remarketing. We’ll cover similar advertising opportunities on platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook in a future post.

What Is Remarketing?

Let’s begin with a basic definition. Put simply, remarketing means showing ads to members of your target audience who have recently interacted with your online presence. According to Google:

“Remarketing is a way to connect with people who previously interacted with your website or mobile app. It allows you to strategically position your ads in front of these audiences as they browse Google or its partner websites, thus helping you increase your brand awareness or remind those audiences to make a purchase.”

When you add remarketing to your ad portfolio, the user journey might look something like this:

• Your digital marketing efforts, from SEO to SEM and other outreach ads, drive your target audience to your website.
• Once on your website, they’ll read about your business and products, but probably won’t become customers immediately.
• Through remarketing, you continue to make your case to an audience that now knows about you already.
• When they’re ready to buy, your audience is more likely to remember your business.

4 Core Benefits Of Google Remarketing

The definition and potential user journey itself suggests the advantages of using remarketing as part of your strategy. Let’s break those benefits down a bit more specifically.

1. Focused targeting. Remarketing ads show only to an audience you already know to be interested, maximising budget effectiveness.
2. Customer Journey Alignment. We know that about 96% of your website visitors are not yet ready to buy. With remarketing, you’ll stay top of mind as they slowly move in that direction.
3. Considerable ROI. According to one study, click-through rates are up to 10 times that of outreach ads, and users clicking through remarketing ads become 70% more likely to convert.
4. Reduced Ad Fatigue. In other words, you can show your ads for longer without users getting annoyed. According to one study, remarketing ads fatigue at half the rate of outreach ads.

Put simply, remarketing offers a good value in ensuring a follow-up with your website and mobile app users. Adding it into your advertising strategy tends to increase the return on your marketing budget significantly.

Where Will Your Remarketing Ads Appear?

Within Google’s ad manager setup, your remarketing ads can actually show up in one of two locations: as banner ads on Google’s Display Network or as search results page ads. Let’s break each of them down in more detail.

Display Remarketing Ads

These are the most common type of this strategy. They’re static or dynamic (animated) banner ads that appear on up to 2 million websites that are part of Google’s Display Network. The Display Network, which reaches 90% of global internet users, includes anything from news sites to Google-owned properties such as YouTube. 

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)

These are a relatively new but increasingly relevant type of Google Ads. It’s a complex topic but in short, the RLSA feature allows you to show and customize search ads for any Google user who has recently visited your website. That increases messaging relevance and helps you customize your bidding for an audience group you know to be interested.

How To Set Up Remarketing On Your Website

The website-level setup for Google remarketing ads is surprisingly simple. You only have to add a so-called remarketing tag snippet, a small line of code, into the pages of the site whose visitors you want to reach with further ads.

You can accomplish that in one of two ways. The first is to simply grab the code from the Audience Setup tab in your Google Ads manager, and add either the event snippet to individual pages on your website, or add the global site tag for every page of your site. 

The other option is to use Google Tag Manager, which essentially acts as a container to manage more than just one tag. Place it once on your site, and you can insert code like the remarketing tag snippet, Google Analytics tag, and others on either all or specific pages on your site. It’s a more centralised and less intrusive way to accomplish the same result.

Next is to create remarketing lists. This can be achieved through Google Analytics. If you go to Admin > Audience Definitions > Audiences. Here you can create audiences based on specific page views of your site among other options, and set the audience destination to Google Ads, so you can access it from your Ads account.

For example, if you want to remarket to people who have visited certain product pages on your site, you can create an audience of just people who have viewed those specific pages. Then you can create your ads targeted to those products.

How To Set Up Your First Google Remarketing Campaign

With your tag placed, it’s time to start thinking about your ad setup. As mentioned above, that happens in the Google Ads manager, where you begin the setup as you would any other Google campaign:

1. Click Campaigns on the page menu, and click the Plus sign to create a new campaign.
2. Choose your campaign goal.
3. Select your campaign type, most likely Display. 
4. Select your campaign variables, including your bidding model and budget, as you would for other campaigns.
5. Targeting is where remarketing nuances come into play. You can pick standard remarketing or dynamic remarketing, which customizes ads based on which products or services people have viewed on your website. Other options include video remarketing off your YouTube videos instead of your website, and customer list remarketing if you want to show ads only to a list of audiences from your CRM.
6. Create or upload your ads, and click Create Campaign to start.

Google’s remarketing setup tutorial can walk you through those steps in more detail. Before you know it, you’re beginning to optimise your campaigns and driving more revenue through your remarketing channels.

You don’t have to go through it alone, either. Get in touch if you need help adding the remarketing code to your website, setting yourself up for short-term and long-term success in the process.