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Done right, Google remarketing is a core piece of your advertising and conversion efforts. In this post, we’ll cover both the basic concept, its benefits, and the steps you can take to set up your own remarketing campaign.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Within Google’s Ad your remarketing ads can actually serve across several locations: as banner ads on Google’s Display Network, as customised search results page ads, and as video ads on Youtube. Google Ads’ interface increasingly refers to remarketing lists as ‘audience segements’ or ‘your data’ rather than a standalone remarketing menu, but the underlying mechanisms are unchanged since I first wrote this post. Let’s break each of them down in more detail.
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 (RSLA) let you show and customise search ads for any Google user who has recently visited your website. That increases messaging relevance and helps you customise your bidding for an audience group you know to be interested. It is one of the more underused features in Google Ads, considering how effective it can be, as you;re combining the intent signal or an active search with the fact that this person already knows who you are. ou’ll sometimes see this labelled as
You can also serve video ads to people who have previously visited your website, interacted with your business, or engaged with your YouTube channel. This works well for warming up an audience with a short explainer video or testimonial before they see a search or display ad later in the journey.
Customer Match lets you upload a list of customer email addresses directly to Google Ads to build a remarketing audience, so no tag or cookie is needed. It is useful to sit alongside traditional tag based remarketing, particularly as browser level cookie restrictions continue to limit how much of your traffic can be tracked and retargeted automatically.
It is worth understanding a limitation that didn’t exist when remarketing first took off. Not every visitor to your site can be added to a remarketing list anymore. With various browser based cookie restrictions, and users selections when interacting with your CMP, your tag based remarketing lists will always undercount your true audience. Customer Match and first-party data collected through your own CRM or email lists aren’t affected by this in the same way, which is why it is good to sue both approaches together, rather than relying on just tag based lists.
The website-level setup for Google remarketing ads is surprisingly simple.
You don’t need a separate remarketing tag anymore, and if your website already has a Google tag installed, for example, through GA4, you don’t need to add a second one either. In Google Ads, go to Tools > Data Manager, then click Manage under the Google tag section. If you’re starting from scratch, this gives you a new tag to install (it’ll have an AW- prefix). If you already have a Google tag on your site through GA4 or elsewhere, you can instead add your Google Ads account as a destination of that existing tag, so the same snippet handles remarketing, conversions, and Analytics together.
If you’re using Google Tag Manager and already have separate tags for GA4 and Google Ads, that’s fine, they’ll both work independently. You can optionally combine them into a single Google tag with multiple destinations from within Tag Manager, but it’s not required for remarketing to function.
Next is to create you remarketing audiences. This can be achieved through Google Analytics. If you go to Admin > Audiences within your GA4 property, you can select New Audience. Here you can build a custom audience based on specific page views, events, or use one of GA4’s suggested audience templates.
Once your audience is created, make sure your GA4 property is linked to your Google Ads account (Admin > Product Links > Google Ads Links). Once linked any audiences you build in GA4 will auto sync with Google Ads and appear in Audience Manager (usually within 24-48 hours).
For example, if you want to remarket to people who have visited certain product pages on your site, you can create a GA4 audience filtered to just people who have viewed those specific pages. Then you can create your Google Ads campaign targeting that audience.
One thing to be aware of (which I already alluded to above) is that your remarketing audience will only include visitors who’ve granted consent for ad-related tracking (ad_storage). If your consent banner is ambiguous or set up incorrectly, otherwise-eligible visitors won’t be added to your list, even though they visited the page.
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:
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.
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