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 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 are the most common type in this strategy. They’re static or dynamic (animated) banner ads that appear in 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) 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.
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 centralized 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.
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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