Launching a Google Ads Remarketing Campaign Simple and Fast

Are you familiar with the phenomenon of one-time customers? These are people who made a purchase on a site and never returned. You should create a remarketing strategy. Thanks to remarketing, you no longer have to attract new visitors. Instead, you can try to hold onto existing ones. Let’s take a look at what remarketing is and how to implement it through Google tools.

Remarketing: Definition, Benefits, Objectives, Types

Remarketing (or Google Adwords retargeting) are advertisements placed on third-party sites. These ads are visible to all Google users who have visited your site at least once. They are hosted on Display Network sites as well as Google’s own web solutions.

As practice shows, out of ten website visitors, three make a purchase at best. The reasons for this may be different. Someone can be distracted by more pressing matters, someone may not have money at the moment, or someone doubts whether to make a purchase on this site or on another.

Remarketing allows you to return doubting visitors and bring them to the final stages of the sales funnel. This happens by showing visitors advertising banners with products or services that are relevant to their requests.

Working with warm customers is much easier than attracting new ones from scratch and gaining their trust. In general, remarketing can be called one of the most discreet and non-invasive ways to influence potential buyers and encourage them to make a purchase.

Remarketing Goals

The purpose of remarketing is to bring visitors back to the site. Let’s highlight specific goals:

Offer to repurchase (related products from the category of the purchase made).
Inducement to place an order (a visitor viewed the pages of some products and even put them in the basket, but did not place an order).
Notification of special offers and promotions.
limited quantity alert.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Remarketing

Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of remarketing:

Increased trust and awareness. Due to the constant mentions of your online store (tailored to the needs of a specific user), you can achieve greater site recognition. This means that the level of trust in it will be higher than in other sites from the search results.
Personalization of ads. Google Ads takes into account user behavior data within your marketplace. Therefore, the advertising banner that they see will be focused on the history of their search or on the product that they have already put in the basket.
Maximum user coverage. Currently, 97.2% of all sites that use ads use Google Ads capabilities. Imagine how many sites your ad can reach.
Dynamic pricing. Google Ads can be configured so that a potential buyer sees a personalized price (taking into account their personal discount, for example).
Ability to use effective layouts for advertising. Instead of working on the design of the next advertising banner, you can use tested templates that contain all the necessary elements that attract users. They are available in the list of Google Ads layouts.
Automatic collection of statistical data. You will receive statistics to determine the effectiveness of your ad campaign.

Are there any disadvantages to this approach and what is not the advantage of Google Analytics remarketing? The approach has only one drawback, the need for constant optimization. Remarketing does not work on a set-and-forget basis. It is necessary to monitor indicators and adjust the settings depending on the result.

When Is Remarketing a Necessity?

Remarketing is most effective in such situations:

A sharp drop in demand for goods or services. Not all products have year-round demand. Sometimes sellers only have time to replenish their stocks, and sometimes every buyer is on the account. You have to do your best to return those who have been on your site.
The high cost of the product. When it comes to high-value purchases, the vast majority of potential buyers take a long time to decide before placing an order. If the product periodically flickers before your eyes, the chances of selling it will increase significantly.
Cross-selling. Users who have already made purchases on your site may find the related items interesting (for example, if someone bought sneakers, they could offer to buy a bag, jacket, or tracksuit). They can be promoted unobtrusively through banner ads.

Types of Remarketing Available in Google Ads

Let’s look at the main types of remarketing available through Google Ads tools:

Standard remarketing. This type of remarketing is aimed at users who have already visited your online store and are now browsing third-party websites or Google services from the Display Network. Banners simply contain lists of the most relevant products.
Dynamic remarketing. With dynamic remarketing, Google Ads tools use data based on past behavior. They see those products that they have already viewed or put in the cart.
Remarketing for similar products or services. This type of remarketing comes in handy for driving users to repeat purchases. It is used when a search engine searches for goods or services that are identical to those already purchased.
Video remarketing. Suitable for those users who have watched videos on your YouTube channel. In this case, banners will be placed exactly on this site.
Remarketing by email list. If users have left their email, this type of remarketing can be applied. They will receive notifications about your products or services right when they sign in to their Google account.

Four Easy Steps to Launch a Remarketing Campaign

How to implement your own remarketing campaign through Google Ads?

Set Up Tag Assistant

We will assume that you have signed up for Google Ads. Next, configure Tag Assistant. Go to the following chain: Tools & Settings-> Audience Manager-> Audience Sources.

Here you need to select one of the suggested options for setting the tag:

Install the tag yourself.
Email the tag.
Use Google Tag Manager.

The selected tag will be placed in the head tags on every URL of your website.

Now you need to find out the code for automatic tracking in Google Analytics. To find it, go to Admin-> Property View-> Tracking Info-> Tracking Code.

Make sure you did it right. Install the Tag Assistant extension in your Google Chrome browser, go to the promoted site, and launch the extension. If everything is done correctly, you will see the Result of tag analysis tab with green smiling faces.

Form Lists

At this step, you need to create lists of users in order to determine web locations that will participate in banner advertising. This refers to the Google search engine, sites on the Display Network, and Google services and applications.

Specifying all site users to form a single list is not a good Google remarketing strategy. It is better to use segmentation tools built into Google Analytics and Google Ads. They contain all the information about the pages viewed, from which you can create effective campaigns.

To create a list using Google Analytics, follow the chain: Admin-> Property View-> Audience Definitions-> Audiences.

You have to form several audiences to which different strategies of attracting to the site will be applied. Alternatively, you can differentiate the following audiences:

Viewed several pages with products from different categories.
Viewed several pages with products from the same category.
Real buyers.
Those who left the item in the cart.
Those who viewed blog posts.
Those who have viewed a specific landing page on the site for more than 20 seconds.

For example, to assign ads to the latter audience type, you need to follow these steps:

Follow the Advanced-> Conditions chain.
Set values for Page and Session Duration (it is important that the connecting particle AND, not OR).
Specify Destinations for the selected audience.
Import the created list into Google Ads.

When it comes to building lists through Google Ads, you will be able to engage those users who have shown activity on the site in the last 30 days, unlike Google Analytics.

Go to Tools & Settings-> Audience Manager-> Audience Lists.
Choose one of the five available types of remarketing (we wrote about them above).
Create lists, indicating how long this or the user will be in the list (the maximum period is 540 days, then you need to create the list again).

Google remarketing list is ready to go!

Choose the Right Resources (Assets) for Remarketing

What asset is used to build a remarketing list? Before creating a banner, you need to decide on the answers to the questions:

CTA for the banner (what exactly should the user do when they see it)?
What should be included in the banner?
How will the landing page content match the banner content?

For any remarketing ad banner, there is some sort of specifications that have to be outlined as well. These include image formats, header formats, etc. The full list can be found here.

Create a Campaign

Finally, the last step is to create the banner itself for the remarketing campaign. This can be done in both Google Analytics and Google Ads.

The first step is to choose a name for your campaign, determine its budget, and also specify the audience for each type of campaign (if you decide to launch several at once).

Next, you need to decide on the settings. They include:

Observation (or Target).
Bid Strategy (depends on your choice: Observation or Target).
Targeting Expansion (it is better to move this slider to Off).
Location (the default is “People in, or who show interest, in your targeted locations”, but it is better to select the option “People in or regularly in your target locations).
Frequency Cap (it’s better to limit yourself to one show per day).

That’s all! Your campaign is ready to launch.

Assessing the Effectiveness of a Launched Campaign

Do you think that after setting up Google remarketing, you can breathe out and wait for an influx of traffic to your site? Unfortunately, this does not always work. After all, the fundamental factor of remarketing is constant optimization.

It is important to periodically monitor the activity of site users through Google Analytics. The values of parameters such as audience size, locations for displaying banner ads, and the number of clicks on the banner are important. So, the first remarketing strategy can begin to improve as early as the second or third week after the launch of the previous campaign.

Make sure that the chosen strategy is the most profitable for you, and you pay for clicks incomparably less with the volume of new income.

Setting up Adwords remarketing is not that difficult. Do you have your own experience implementing Google retargeting ads? Perhaps some remarketing strategies were more effective than others? Share with us in the comments below.