Remarketing, Remember Me?

We’ve all been there — you’re on your favorite website, and suddenly you end up with a bunch of items in your shopping cart. If you manage to stop yourself before you enter in your credit card information, you might notice those concert tickets, jeans, or sandals following you around as you read the news, check your Facebook, or surf the web.

Welcome to Remarketing, where advertisers can target potential customers who have visited their websites. Talk about qualified traffic — this is a sneaky way to incorporate the powers of brand recognition and online visibility into a campaign that doesn’t waste money on uninterested buyers.

Why Remarket?

Stats tell us that Remarketing is worth the extra effort. Aitan Weinburg, Senior Project Manager for Google Remarketing, wrote in 2011 (one year after releasing the platform) that the Yankee Candle Company improved their conversion rate by 600% after incorporating Remarketing — while cutting the cost-per-conversion in half.

What’s more, he writes, is that Remarketing ads show to around 84% of the people on the list, creating a higher chance for efficacy than other types of advertising.

The Google Display Network is constantly expanding, which means that as the network grows, your ads will have a further reach and be able to show on more host websites as time goes on.

Setting Up Remarketing Ads For Your Site

In order to set up Remarketing ads, you need to place a tag on your website. This is a piece of code that you can embed into the HTML of your website on different pages.

The idea is that the tag drops a cookie on the browser of visitors who get to this URL on your site and for a set amount of time, your custom Display ads will show up to them whenever they visit partner websites.

Once you have collected a list of over 100 IP addresses on this tag, your Remarketing campaign will kick in, pulling ads that you have uploaded into your AdWords campaign and using them to remind these visitors that they liked your product.

Get Specific With Ad Design & Content

When designing your ads, shoot for brand recognition. Build your ads around your logo, but also make them interesting to the viewer by incorporating photos, special offers and details about what you offer.

Your ads can build in complexity, from ads that offer one generic message, to ads that remarket each individual product. Placing a tag on different pages of your websites allows you to segment your visitors based on their level of interest in different products. For instance, you can track users who get all the way to the Shopping cart page and users who visit specific product pages separately, creating ads for each product and type of customer.

Dynamic Remarketing Ads are the next step in the process of marketing individual products and are ideal for e-commerce and retail websites. If you are already using Google Merchant Center to run Product Listing Ads, you already have images and prices uploaded for your products. Google simply uses this information to remarket using specific product information for users who have shown interest in these products.

Remarketing On The Search Network

Remarketing lists are a great tool for targeting clients via the Display Network, but you can also use them to segment Search Network traffic as well. Advertisers have successfully used this mostly for bid adjustments, bidding higher to show up to searchers who had shown interest in their product in the past, as well as for keyword strategizing and customizing ad text. It’s a great way to highly focus your marketing dollars and improve your ROI.

Learn Now, Grow Later

The fact that we have the technology to target potential customers in such a narrow way is almost old news at this point — rest assured that advertisers, search engine marketing companies and providers will be finding ways to expand the uses of this tool as much as possible in the future. Learn the basics now and be at the forefront later!