How Digital Marketers Can Win With AdWords Remarketing

Retargeting site visitors based on their online behavior has been shown to increase branded search by more than 1000%, according to a comScore study. Yet its still a widely underused strategy among online marketers.

Here’s how to improve online advertising ROI and brand awareness with AdWords retargeting:

Privacy matters: Inserting the cookie code

Before starting out any AdWords remarketing campaign, you need to be very cautious about consumer privacy issues. Update your website’s privacy policy to alert visitors about the use of cookies to track their behavior on your site.

To set up an AdWords remarketing campaign, you must insert the AdWords or Analytics remarketing code in your website.

More advertisers are opting to use the Google Analytic remarketing code instead of the AdWords code; the Analytics code allows advertisers to use a wide array of criteria to create retargeting lists.

Create highly targeted remarketing lists

To remarket effectively using AdWords, it is important to get granular with the type of demographic you want to target with your remarketing ads.

Yes, in Google Analytics, there are broad list building options such as target ‘Visitors who have already converted’ or ‘Visitors who have viewed a specific page.” However, these list-building options are too generic and may leave out other types of visitors that may be ideal to remarket to.

A better approach is to customize your own list in a way that will allow you to serve relevant ads to the most relevant visitor segment.  To get started with the list customization:

• Head over to Google Analytics. Log into the Admin panel and then to the Tracking Info tab
• Turn on the Display Advertiser Support button
• Update your Analytic tracking code with the new one that appears on your site
• Click on the Remarketing Lists tab where you can fill in all the criteria required to create your own customized lists

You could create all types of lists: for example, for visitors who have stayed for more than three minutes on your site, for visitors who made a conversion, for visitors who bounced etc. depending on your marketing and conversion goals.

Additional visitor targeting for smaller budgets

If you have a small budget, you certainly want to retarget a very specific visitor segment to maximize on ROI. Therefore, in addition to creating the customized lists above, you can narrow down your target audience using criteria such as gender, geographic location, time of visiting the site, or their age.

Another way to narrow down the type of audience to target is to choose to exclude your ads from appearing on certain websites. This is especially important if you wish to dissociate your brand from certain niches such as crime, pornography, or gambling. You can prevent your ads from showing in certain sites or content types by using the Display Network Tab in AdWords.

However, as you create lists and do additional retargeting bear in mind that advertisers are only allowed to serve display ads to lists or ad groups that have at least 100 unique visitors. Therefore, do not make your remarketing lists too broad or too targeted.

Creating relevant remarketing ads

Ideally, you should create a different ad creative for each list you are looking to target.

You would not serve the same ad to a visitor who bounced and to a visitor who made an actual purchase or undertook a significant conversion. The goal is to make each retargeting ads as relevant as possible to the target audience.

It is also a best practice to ensure that your ads have the same feeling and look as your website to establish that sense of continuity and familiarity.

Many marketers shun text ads as they lack the allure of display ads. But the advantage of text ads is that they can appear in more websites than display ads can.

Balancing list membership and ad frequency

How long should you keep retargeting a visitor? How many times in a day or a week should you display your ads to the target visitor to keep your brand top of mind?

The most important aspect of effective remarketing is to do it without annoying your target audience. This is why it is vital to determine how long you will keep a visitor on the list membership and how often they will continue to see your ad as they pace through the Web.

When it comes to list membership, it really depends on the type of product you are advertising. For example, if you are advertising health insurance, it would be appropriate to keep the visitor on the list for as long as 30 days. But if you are selling tickets to an event, you only need to keep them for a couple of days heading into the event.

When choosing a frequency rate, do not make it too low that your audience completely forgets about your brand or too high that they become irritated by your ads. This is usually a matter of trial and testing to see the frequency that is garnering the most conversions.

Remember to test elements of your remarketing campaigns including the ad creative, the display frequency, duration of list membership, and other retargeting criteria such as visitor’s demographics. Regular testing is indispensible for campaign optimization.

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