Do you ever get that feeling that someone is watching your every movement? That someone, somewhere, somehow knows exactly what you’ve been shopping for? That sweater you saw the other day? That new bicycle seat cushion you’ve been eyeing all week? Somehow they know exactly what you want — and even have a coupon to offer. How can you be paranoid when a coupon is involved?
This masterful art of virtual stalking, known as remarketing, is a common marketing strategy known to bring customers back to your website. This regularly results in increasing site-wide conversion rates and average order values, as well as decreasing the number of abandoned shopping carts and improving site experiences. Read on to learn how you can take advantage of remarketing!
1. Fast and easy remarketing setup
Installing your remarketing tag is as fast and easy as can be. To get started, navigate to the Shared Library, located on the bottom left of your Google AdWords account.
From here you’ll click Audiences. This section of the Shared Library is where you’ll house different user groups based on site activity. While you don’t have any information collected just yet, the Shared Library will act as a set up guide. Once the campaign is active, you’ll find a wealth of data here.
Follow the prompts guiding you to track Website Visitors. If you see a prompt regarding dynamic ads, be sure to leave that box unchecked. Dynamic remarketing ads require additional pieces of code that we will not be modifying today.
Next, click the blue hyperlink “view AdWords tag for websites” to expand the unique remarketing tag for your website and place the code on your store template just above the closing body tag.
For more advanced remarketing users, consider upgrading to Google Analytics remarketing, which offers more robust remarketing options for granular audience targeting and segmentation.
2. Follow a few of our favorite remarketing lists
Now that your remarketing tag is on your site template, it’s time to set up your remarketing lists. Here is where you’ll want to get creative. How exactly do you want to track and advertise back to your site visitors? Segmentation is key to sending the right message to the right users at the right time. To get started, here are a few of our favorite remarketing lists:
- Homepage – A great way to track all users who have landed on the homepage.
- Order finish – Tag all users who have completed a purchase.
- One page checkout and shopping cart – Track users who have landed on either the one page check out and/or your shopping cart.
- Abandoned shopping cart –A custom combination to include the one page check out and shopping cart list without users who have made it to the order finish.
- Category pages – Consider tagging all category pages individually. As you continue to build out your remarketing lists over time, you may decide to advertise to each category with unique messaging.
- Holiday traffic – Create separate remarketing lists to capture holiday traffic. This includes all holiday related category, subcategory and gift related products. Be sure to extend the cookie length to advertise to this group once the holiday season has come to an end.
3. Prevent ad fatigue with frequency capping
With remarketing, we aim to keep your brand and products top of mind. To do this, we rely on remarketing ads appearing to your site users as they continue to browse the internet. Your ad should always complement your user’s internet experience, not overwhelm them. To prevent ad fatigue, consider adding a frequency cap found under campaign settings. Frequency capping allows advertises to control the maximum number of times a campaign, ad group or ad can appear to a single user in a given day, week or month. This will help keep your brand in a favorable light while continuing to reap the benefits of your remarketing strategy.
4. Use image ads to attract your users
Remarketing ads appear on various websites across the Google Display Network in text, image and video formats. To effectively engage your audience as they browse the internet, we recommend utilizing image based ads. Image ads attract the most attention without requiring an additional action, such as clicking a play button. To get your message in front of the people that matter most, be sure to utilize all ad dimensions available to ensure your ad can trigger for the available ad spaces on any given website.
Don’t have an in-house designer to create your image ads? Not a problem. Google AdWords provides a free and easy to use ad gallery to create professional looking ads in a matter of minutes.
5. Don’t discount indirect conversions
The benefit of online advertising is access to data regarding campaign performance is near real-time. We want to know how your audience interacts with your ads, with the goal of driving more business to your website. With remarketing ads, it’s important to remember the different touch points your ad has with your audience. For example, we don’t always want them to “touch” or click on your ad.In addition to tracking conversions, keep an eye on view thru conversions. This conversion type tracks the number of times your ad has triggered an audience member that lead to a conversion without a click on your ad. This means that rather than clicking on the ad when triggered, the user entered your domain name into the address bar after the viewable impression and finalized a purchase. Free advertising!
6. Update your privacy policy to comply with Google requirements
Before you launch your remarketing strategy with Google AdWords, remember to update your privacy policy to include a few key statements:
- A brief description of how you’re using remarketing to advertise to your customers
- A brief description of how third-party vendor show ads on sites across the internet
- A brief description of how cookies are used to serve ads based on user activity
- Details regarding how they can opt out of cookies by visiting Ad Settings.
With these few tips, you're well on the way to having increased sales through the use of remarketing! Have any questions or comments? Leave them in the box below. Totally lost? Don't worry, we're here to help.