Google Remarketing

Google Remarketing has been released for some time now and it surprises me out how little it is being used – I think the reason behind this fact is that Google haven’t done a great job at explaining how it works and their help section is less than comprehensive.  Hopefully this post will help…

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.