Promoting your products or services has never been easier thanks to all the different types of online marketing tools and platforms that empower all brands to spread the word about what they have to offer.
Yet, some avenues of digital marketing are still not as widely embraced as they should, such as the idea of remarketing. In any type of marketing effort you’re running, retargeting is essential to getting the conversions you and your business need.
What Is Remarketing?
To understand what remarketing is, let’s consider the following scenario. You are running a Google Ads campaign on the Search Network to increase the sales of a specific group of products.
The ad group performance falls somewhere in the middle. You get lots of clicks on your landing pages, so users have seen the product, but something happened in the process and your sales numbers did not increase almost at all.
Without remarketing, it’s back to the drawing board, right? The ad itself did its job and got you more traffic to the webpage, but for whatever reason people did not buy your product. Of course, it could be something with the product itself, the price, or even the page itself, such as slow loading speed.
But, it could also be something that has nothing to do with you or the product! People can get distracted, hesitate and change their minds at the last second, or simply need more time to convert. One option you have here is to simply wait (and hope) they will return to your site to finish the job on their own, or repeat their Google search to see your ad and try again.
Through remarketing, you don’t have to wait and hope. You can retarget these users and gently nudge them to come back and finish buying your product. And remarketing campaigns work, as the average CTR for retargeting ads is 10 times higher than for regular ads.
So investing in Google remarketing is worth the effort because it increases your odds of scoring a conversion, and helps ensure your budget on your initial ads campaigns were not spent in vain.
How Does Google Remarketing Work?
In a nutshell, when a user visits your site, the remarketing tag installed on your site adds them to a remarketing audience list. You can retarget mobile apps users as well.
These users will be added to specific lists which will be then used in your remarketing campaigns. The default duration a user remains on the list is 30 days, but you can extend it to 540 days maximum.
Google offers a lot of flexibility as to how to leverage this tag, and when and where to target people who have visited your site.
And the most important thing to consider concerns the target audience, specifically the list each website visitor will be added to. Below, let’s go over the main audience types you can use in remarketing campaigns in Google Ads:
● Website visitors – You can retarget people who visited your site regardless of what they did on the page itself. This is usually done in brand awareness campaigns. However, a better strategy is to create rules and retarget people who’ve visited a specific page, or a combination of pages on your site;
● Visitors who took a specific action – You can add people who took a specific action to a new audience list for remarketing. It could be abandoned carts, deleting an item from the cart, or signing up for a newsletter. Or, it could also be people who’ve already converted and bought something from you, if you want to offer them an upsell or complementary product through a remarketing ad;
● List combinations – You can combine different audience lists and run ads to two or more target audiences based on their actions. For instance, if you want to offer people a special offer, you don’t need to create separate ads for each audience list, and instead, combine them to promote the offer to everyone you want;
● Similar audiences – When you gather enough users in your audience list, you can create a similar audience, in which case Google will be showing your ads to users with similar profiles or behaviours to your existing customers. It works just like Facebook’s Lookalike audiences;
● Custom match – You can also target users based on email address, user ID, or even address. These ads can run on Google Search, Display Network, Youtube, and Gmail (for Gmail addresses only).
Google Remarketing Best Practices
Now that you know how Google remarketing and audience lists work, let’s quickly go over some great tips on how to get started with your campaign:
● Start with abandoned carts – Google ads can do lots of things with remarketing, but if you’re just getting started, consider targeting abandoned cart users at first, since they have already expressed an intent to buy. If you’re not selling products, then target the visitors of a page that leads to a conversion, such as a service page;
● Go beyond the Search Network – You can retarget users on the Display Network, Youtube, or Gmail even if they initially came from a search ad. Consider adding more variety to your retargeting campaigns to increase your chances of making an impact and increase your conversion rates;
● Set up a frequency limit – You can establish how many times you want to deliver your remarketing ads to users. Unfortunately, deciding on the number can be tricky. Too many times can frustrate potential customers and even feel intrusive. Not enough times doesn’t help conversions rates either, especially if your product or services usually require more time for consideration before users can make a decision;
● Leverage similar audiences – Go beyond the visitors or shoppers you have and allow new people to discover you and your brand. Similar audiences often get amazing results because the profiles of the new and existing target audiences are so similar in terms of behaviour, preferences, or even demographics.
There are lots more you can achieve with Google Ads remarketing, but if you get started with these best practices first, you will be all set to increase your conversion rates.
Final Thoughts: Ready to Create More Effective Google Ads?
Google Adwords brings lots of exciting opportunities to a brand’s doorstep, but the trick is to know how to properly leverage these opportunities and increase conversion rates. And this can be difficult to do with an advertising system that’s always improving and changing the rules.
If you’re looking to create ads that convert and genuinely help your business grow, Australian Internet Advertising would be happy to assist you. Our Google Adwords Services have helped many Sydney and Australian business owners utilise the PPC system to its true potential.
To find out more about our services and how we can help, we encourage you to reach out to us online or call us at 1300 304 640 now for a chat.
Also, here is a fun example fo how remarketing works:
