Remarketing has existed in the online advertising world for a while now. However the feature is fairly new to Google AdWords & still causes a fair bit of confusion among AdWords users.
In its simplest form, it’s a way to show ads to people browsing the web – but only to those people who have already visited a particular page on your website. The benefits are improved ROI & more powerful search marketing strategies for your business.
How does remarketing work?
To use Remarketing in AdWords, you first need to ‘tag’ visitors to your site. Then you’re able to show ads (on Google’s Display Network) to those people & only those people. This gives you a number of strategies.
The type of visitor you tag is entirely up to you. For example you may choose to tag some or all of the following types:
all visitors regardless of which pages on your site they visit
visitors that view a ‘category’ of pages within your site (eg mens, womens & childrens; or, luxury, business & budget)
only visitors that successfully performed an action on your site (eg opted-in, bought, downloaded a pdf etc)
only visitors that placed an item in the shopping cart but then abandoned the cart & left the site without buying
Each type of visitor is then stored in it’s own remarketing list. You’re then able to market to individual lists, or even combine lists for more advanced strategies.
You can even combine your Remarketing lists with other AdWords features such as Geo-targeting, frequency capping, image ads and more.
A popular remarketing strategy
One of the more popular remarketing strategies is targeting users who left your site without purchasing anything. Since one of the most common reasons for not making a purchase is price, why not target these people with a special offer & either add value, offer a better bonus or discount the sale price?
To set this up create two remarketing lists. The first is for all your site’s visitors & the second is for your ‘buyers’. Google will give you two different code snippets – one for each list. Install the code on your site (eg snippet 1 on all pages, snippet 2 only on the thank you page). Now target the ‘audience’ that consists of all visitors but not buyers.
Customise your creative
As with anything in marketing, you’re only as good as your offer. So try different creatives for your remarketing campaigns. You already know which parts of your site they were interested, so try cross-selling or up-selling related products & services.
Once you find an offer that works, you can quickly roll out new text ads with variations on that theme & even add new image ads if your budget allows.
Another great feature is that you have control over the length of time that users see the ads. Google’s default time is 30 days, but you can always adjust this to the timeframe you think is reasonable.
For more information visit http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173945
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