Google Remarketing
What Is Google Remarketing?
Google Remarketing allows you to define an audience using a piece of javascript placed on a page, you can then target this audience with Google AdSense ads. It’s important to note that the audience includes all visitors to a tagged page, not just those that come through Google AdWords.
How Does It Work?
First up you need to create some Remarketing lists, can be based on a tag or a combination of other Remarketing lists.
A common set of tags might be:
- A visitor tag – using a sitewide script, everyone who has visited your website
- A suspect tag – placing a script on any product pages so visits to these are tagged as a suspect
- A prospect tag – script goes on your thank you page from the contact form.
- A customer tag – script goes on your thank you page after purchase.
These tags can then be used to create Remarketing lists. For example one Remarketing list might be “Suspects for the last 30 days” this would be based on the suspect tag on a 30 day cookie length. Another Remarketing list might be “Customers for the last 30 days” and “Customers for the last 60 days”.
Once you have created some Remarketing lists you can create some Custom Combinations based on the Remarketing lists.
So for example if you want to get customer feedback 30 days after a customer has purchased from you, you can do this by creating a custom combination by including “Customers for the last 60 days” but excluding “Customers for the last 30 days”.
What Are Audiences?
Audiences are essentially Remarketing Lists and Custom Combinations, you need 500 in an audience before you can start showing them ads on the AdWords Content Network. We’ve only just managed to do it on www.davidnaylor.co.uk – so if you’re reading this you may find a few ads following you around the Internet.
Ways To Use It
This isn’t a complete list, just a few things we brainstormed at Bronco:
- Target those who don’t buy with a coupon
- Target all visitors within a 365 day period announcing when a sales promotion is on. This is a great idea for large retailers such as Next and Republic, they can build up a massive audience of customers and visitors over time and then when they decide to have a sale they can target all those customers straight away. Very powerful.
- Tag people who visit the landing pages for Remarketing ads – so you don’t advertise to them again (where applicable)
- Show ads to customers to get feedback
- Show ads to customers to get them to re-purchase
- After someone visits a product on an ecommerce store, send them an ad with that *exact* product.
The list goes on, I’m sure you will all think of some amazing tactics, please let us know (I’ll understand if you don’t though)!
Even if you don’t want to start advertising yet, it’s worthwhile beginning to build up your audience now. Most people will probably opt for 30 days – so that means it will be a minimum of 30 days before you have your full audience – so it might be a good idea beginning to tag your website now.
15 Comments
Michael Gugel - http://www.michaelgugel.com
Wow…I’ve noticed some ads following me around, but I never made the connection with Google Remarketing. Thanks for the heads up!
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Zoran
Great post David. I wonder is it possible to use ‘remarketing’ from my site to 3rd party sites. Lets say I have price comparison engine or products review website and somebody come and read about blue widgets. now I would like to push him blue widgets around the web that he can buy at let’s say Amazon.
David W
@Zoran – I’m not sure, that was something we were talking about, I guess you probably could. Further from this, with people advertising to their audiences with 3rd party products, I would have thought you will eventually be able to release your audience as an asset for AdSense – perhaps you’ll be able to earn money for it.
Another thing was if you can tag 3rd party pages to build you audience… ¬ ¬
Zoran
@David: what about selling ‘tagging’ services to 3rd party… if I have website about widgets and can tag all people that come from google searching for blue widget, red widget, brown widget… or id site is niche for example electric guitars and he visit my site… there is something valuable the fact that guy is interested in electric guitars…
Yep tagging is pretty good especially when google is doing most of the work for us.
Jon
Maybe I’m Just being really thick but I don’t think the post describes Remarketing too well. So I tag a page as a tv page, let’s say. Then people will see Google ads for the that I sell elsewhere on the internet?
How is it linked up?
David W
Hi Jon,
If you have a landing page where people visit from a TV ad, you can tag it with a Remarketing script.
Then you will have these as a Remarketing list in Google AdWords as “TV respondents” you can then base ad campaigns on that Remarketing list as an audience.
So you may decide you want banner ads to show up for that audience that follows on from that TV ad – Remarketing allows you to do this.
To be honest, the best way is to have a try at setting up a campaign and persevere with it.
Jon
For tvs, that should say
Martín Aberastegue - http://www.martinaberastegue.com/
Hi David, I’ve found your blog days ago and I’m really enjoying it. I was actually thinking on a remarketing proposal for one of our clients, and now I this post encouraged me go for it.
I really liked the idea of tagging people coming from traditional media, and use this as a tool for getting some feedback form our clients.
Now I’m thinking and we can use it for email marketing too, e.g: I can use remarketing to target all those people who doesn’t subscribe to the newsletter at the end of the purchase, using a server server-side code I can easily chose whether to show or not the “no newsletter tag” and use this information to target those clients with some ads like “subscribe to our newsletter to receive important discounts” (I know… and it’s almost 2am here (Argentina) and I’m not the most creative guy at this time :P).
That’s just an idea, but we can obviously came up with tons of it.
I’ll let you know how it goes with our client.
David W
Martin,
That’s an awesome idea! I like it. I’m sure there are hundreds of really clever things that can be done 🙂
Richard Huson - http://www.undercliffjersey.com
I am interested but really nervous about committing to something I don’t have a clue about. We have a website for our guest house and I am sure a lot of people are surfing and never coming back to our site. How can we try this without any great financial committment
Richard
David W
Richard,
It’s still on a cost per click basis.
I would setup the tags and start collecting the audience – this is free.
If you don’t get 500 visitors in 30 days, it’s not worth bothering.
Once you’ve got an audience you can opt to send them ads on a cost per click basis.
You should have some way of tracking conversions (e.g. online booking) if you don’t have this I urge you to get it – my parent’s hotel did and it had a big impact on bookings.
David
Peter Brough - http://www.cybernautix.co.uk
Someone asked me about this the other day so I set about looking up more detailed info and arrived at this article.
Thanks. Very useful info.
I had noticed for some time that wherever you go your ads can follow and this is it .. Remarketing.
Rob Burns - http://robburns.net
I think the really interesting issue with this is how to handle the remarketing in a way which is sensitive to the customer.
I’ve had various brands follow me around persistently until I felt a bit stalked (and I’m a marketer!). Too much following around is obviously a put off.
What would almost be ideal, is a method by which you can “ping” your chosen group sporadically to get back to the top of their consciousness so to speak – rather than persistently advertising wherever you go.
I can’t say I’ve found a good way of doing this (other than perhaps restricting the number of impressions of the advert each day?).
Anyway, interesting article, thanks for writing it.
I really like the idea of a 365 day remarketing list to heavily promote a sale each year – it’s given me inspiration.
Rob
Chris Oliver - http://www.shop4carhire.com
We’ve been considering this for some time and finally found a window of time to look at it properly. Thanks to the post above we set up page tags some time ago so these have been populated. The audiences and ad’s have also been set up so its just gone LIVE !!
My question really is how to limit the ad’s being displayed. We tag visitors to our checkout pages and the success page then target the remarketing ad’s at those people who went to the checkout but didn’t buy. If they come back to the site via the remarketing ad and subsequently purchase they will automatically be removed from the audience list (I’m assuming).
But what if they don’t come back and purchase … do the ad’s go on and on until the time period set (usually 30 days) has expired ??
Cheers
Chris