Let’s face it - the internet has changed the world in incredible ways. It has revolutionized the way companies do business, especially when it comes to marketing.
If your company or agency does any marketing, the chances are high that you’re using digital advertising. Google AdWords and Facebook ads are great ways to get your product or service in front of potential customers.
One of the biggest hurdles when it comes to digital marketing is many consumers find ads disruptive and not relevant to their interests.
Advertising with Remarketing
Remarketing allows businesses to place ads in front of people who have previously shown interest in your brand, whether by visiting your website (and being tagged by a remarketing pixel) or by searching for specific terms in Google via Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA). You can even upload company-owned contact lists to many of these services to create lookalike audiences.
And it works!
According to Adobe’s CMO.com, “the average click-thru rate for display ads is 0.07%, and the average click-thru for retargeted ads is about 0.7%. Also, retargeted visitors who see display ads are 70% more likely to convert.”
For now, we’re just going to tackle setting up remarketing in Google AdWords. Once this is setup, you can add remarketing to your ongoing digital marketing strategy.
Disclaimer: if you aren’t reasonably comfortable with editing website code, it’s best to let a developer take care of some of these steps, so you don’t break your website!
- Make sure you, your webmaster, and your agency has access to your site, Google Adwords, and Google Analytics accounts. If you don’t have an AdWords or Analytics account, now is the time to set those up.
- Within AdWords, create an ‘All visitors’ remarketing list. This remarketing list will capture all visitors to your website and keep them on a list for one year.
Personalization and relevance are key to building brand affinity and being an effective marketer.
- Place the AdWords tag in your website’s code. For specific instructions on how to do this properly, check out Google’s step-by-step.
- Login to AdWords and confirm script is tracking visitors.
- Check that you've implemented the tag correctly with Google Tag Assistant, a Chrome extension that verifies Google code snippets and helps you solve errors (available in English only).
Build a Remarketing Campaign
- Choose a campaign name, bid strategy, and budget.
- Under "Choose how to target your ads," click "Interests and remarketing". Next, in the "Select a category" drop-down menu, choose "Remarketing lists."
- Enter an ad group name and bid.
- On the Remarketing lists tab, select the "All visitors" list.
- Increase the range of placements where ads appear by adding text and image ads multiple ad sizes
“AdWords offers several bid strategies tailored to different types of campaigns. Depending on which networks your campaign is targeting, and whether you want to focus on getting clicks, impressions, conversions, or views you can determine which strategy is best for you.”
You might also consider responsive ads - these ads automatically adjust their size, appearance, and format to fit just about any ad space. Responsive ads can increase your reach and impact while also saving time and money.
As you start to see how ads perform, review and adjust bid strategy as necessary. Some important metrics to consider when making ad adjustments are:
- Demographics - how old are your customers? Are they male or female?
- Location - what states or countries are they located?
- Devices - are they using a computer or a mobile phone?
- Days and times - do they view your ads on weekends? Mornings?
In what ways can I adjust my bid strategy?
Generally speaking, best practice is to raise bids by 20% based on top performing metrics such as device, location, demographic, etc. You can base these bid adjustments on what clicks are most valuable to you and your business. A click might be more useful coming from a desktop at a certain time of day, from a particular location.
The higher your bid, the better chance you have of reaching more people on your remarketing lists.
When determining your bid, consider the value of your customers in each list. You can also adjust your bids per list based on recentness of website visits to try to show ads to people while you’re still fresh in their minds.
Automated bidding strategies that use conversion data such as Target CPA, Target ROAS, and enhanced CPC are now available for remarketing lists for search ads. These are great tools that can be used together to improve the number and quality of your conversions.
Getting started with remarketing can seem daunting, but they are extremely valuable if executed properly.
