Google Remarketing: Research, Analyze and Set Goals

Google Remarketing: As mainstream as Search

As Google suggests “Remarketing allows you to show ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse the Web.”

That simply means that Remarketing gives you the opportunity to address potential customers that have already visited your website and advertise your product/services.

So the answer to the questions stated above is that remarketing is an opportunity, and an opportunity is not good or bad. How you act upon this opportunity and in this case how you use remarketing, is what will define the effectiveness, benefits and profits for your business.

So, let’s put all the doubts and skepticism around the effectiveness of remarketing to rest and let’s focus on how we can utilize the opportunity of advertising to people that have already visited your website to benefit your business.

1. Research, Analyze and Set Goals

To make sure you start on the right foot with remarketing advertising you need to dig into your data and analyze your products and respective audiences to define which product/services (in case you have many) you want to advertise through remarketing and to which target audience.

Tip: Define your target audiences as specifically as possible. If your data allows you to define age, gender, location or possible interests as information it will help you address your audiences with the proper messaging and products while at the same time unfold opportunities of cross and up selling your products or services.

2. Google Remarketing on GDN & RLSA

Now that you have decided who you want to target, it’s time for you to decide how you want to target your audiences. This means that you need to select the channels through which you want to advertise.

Remarketing in GDN

Remarketing in Google Display Network is becoming a common practice on online advertising. Efforts here are focusing on optimizing the creative of the banner ads, meaning using the proper messaging, colors and visuals for the markets targeted.

And while efforts in Remarketing in GDN are focused on optimized performance Google releases a great new feature called Remarketing Lists for Search Ads.

Remarketing in Search Network

The idea here is to target visitors of your website on the search network. A simple idea that can unfold and create possibilities for Search Advertising. Some of those possibilities are:

• Serve ads with more generic keywords, something that could not be done up until now without compromising your campaigns performance and ROI. With RLSA you can advertise to the visitors of your website with more generic keywords and increase your CTRs, Conversion Rates and ultimately your ROI.
• Utilize product targeting by advertising of specific product/service pages of your website to visitors that search for that product on Google.
• Serve your discount or promo ads to visitors that have repeatedly visited your website but did not convert. Repeated visits show intention and with a fair discount you can easily get a conversion.
• Serve ads to visitors that have visited pages of your website and then searched for a competitor’s website on Google.
• Visitors that have recently been at your website have more chances of converting. Increasing the visibility of your ads will increase the possibilities of conversion, especially if the ads are carefully targeted to the product/service the visitor is interested in.

RLSA is a new and thrilling opportunity for Search Advertising and while it is still early to say for sure, Remarketing on Search Network is expected to achieve low CPCs, high CTRs and conversion rates while ultimately lower CPAs and increase the Return on Advertising spend.

3. Structure your remarketing lists wisely.

Since you have decided who you want to target and how – through which channels-, now it’s time to create your remarketing lists.

This is a critical step for the success of your remarketing advertising. Creating your remarketing lists will be based on the page’s URL that your audiences have or haven’t visited. Using the URLs as a criterion for structuring your audiences means that you can create as many rules as you want and narrow or widen your audience as you prefer.
This gives you numerous possibilities of lists that you could create. So, you need to choose wisely to ensure you are targeting your preferable audience while at the same time avoiding creating a more complex structure of your accounts than needed. – If you create too many lists and campaigns, that will increase the management time, make sure it serves your profitability and efficiency.

The first and simplest separation is creating lists of converted and non-converted visitors. Using these lists you can target the non-converted with offers of your website relevant to the pages they have viewed while you can use the converted visitors to upsell products/services. Separating your visitor to converted and non-converted will help you safeguard your brand from negative remarketing by lowering the frequency of ads served to your converted visitors.

If for example you have an ecommerce store for electronics you might want to create your remarketing lists for converted and non converted visitors and then for visitors of the mobile page, the tablet page and the desktop computer page etc.

       

4. Customize your value proposition and messaging according to your target market.

Each remarketing list you have created corresponds to a specific audience with different needs and characteristics. So, in this step you need to ensure that you are addressing each audience with attractive messaging and with an offer that adds value to them.

Using the example above, when creating the messaging and value proposition of the remarketing list of mobile page visitors who haven’t seen the thank you page, you might want to display banners advertising offers for mobile devices. Or for mobile page visitors who have also visited the thank you page, meaning they have purchased a mobile device, you might want to display banners for mobile accessories.

5. Test – Analyze – Optimize – Test

The key to success of every advertising campaign was, is and will be the ongoing testing and optimization. As trends and consumer behaviors change within days and hours on the online world it is crucial to keep testing, analyzing and optimizing your campaigns. And the easiness of Google Advertising along with the tools and reports provided enables you to do just that.

So, go ahead and try it out and don’t forget to test, analyze and optimize!