Google Remarketing 101: Increase Conversions and Brand Awareness

Benefits of Google Remarketing

Remarketing is a powerful way to remain engaged with a visitor after they leave your website. You can effectively target them with relevant ads and offers as they browse a variety of other websites that are a part of the Google Display Network and/or use Google Search.

The best part is that you can really customise your advertising to prospects based on different products, services or pages they visited on your site. Obviously, this increases your brand recognition and your chances of a sale. It can radically improve your customer conversions and return on investment.

#1 Advice: Plan Your Remarketing Strategy

Like everything it pays to first do some strategic planning rather than simply jump into setting up your remarketing campaign. Whether remarketing is successful for your business largely depends on the lists you create – so don't rush this process.

Many businesses and AdWords experts may set up with a very general remarketing campaigns. That is, one campaign that catches "All Visitors" to a website, and serves them one generic advertisement. This is easy to do, but rather ineffective at maximising your ROI.

Instead of this, you want to carefully plan what remarketing lists you would like. This means asking questions like:

• Who are your different target audiences?
• What are the unique products and services that you have onsite?
• What pages do you have onsite, do you need additional ones to help you better target particular customer profiles on your remarketing lists?
• Do you have a shopping cart and want to target those who didn't complete their purchasing items in their shopping cart?
• What about those leads who made a sales enquiry about a particular product?
• How do you want to approach those visitors who "bounce" (leave your website without going beyond the first page)?
• Do you want a list for visitors who showed more interest by staying on your website for more than x number minutes?
• Are there any localities or regions that you'd like to break your lists up into?
• Do you have seasonal products or periodic services that you'd like to remind customers about one month down the track, 6 months or perhaps yearly?

Thinking about these types of questions, and answers to them, will help you to identify what lists would be good for your remarketing campaign. It will also perhaps help you to identify additional pages that need to be created in order to capture list identifying information.

Getting Started With Remarketing

So now you've done a bit of planning, you will need to setup your remarketing campaign and your lists. This requires registering for Google AdWords and Google Analytics and then you should linking them together.

Before your ads are shown to customers on your remarketing lists, you will need to add the "remarketing tag" (small snippet of code) to all pages on your website. You can obtain this remarketing tag either from Google Analytics or AdWords when you setup your campaign.

Google Analytics has an added benefit of allowing you to use more flexible visitor behaviour within the remarketing lists that you build. For example, you could create a remarketing list to target users in a certain city who stayed on the site for at least five minutes. The AdWords code only allows lists to be built based on pages viewed on your site.

The only drawback with the Google Analytics remarketing tag is that it isn't compatible with dynamic remarketing, which something you'd currently only be interested in if your sell products via your website and have a Google Merchant Centre account. If this is you do have these things then you can always implement both remarketing tags.

Once correctly setup, and the lists within your remarketing campaigns have been setup to run, you'll start being able to tap into the visitors who would otherwise leave your website without making an enquiry or purchase.

Update Your Privacy Policy

While remarketing is a great way to attract people back to your website, Google do require you to inform people about it in your website's privacy policy.

A basic privacy policy might look like:

COOKIE POLICY
This website uses the following cookies:

Google Analytics: The Google Analytics cookie allows us to see information on user website activity including, but not limited to page views, referral and average time spent on the website. The information is depersonalised and is displayed as numbers, meaning it will not be tracked back to individuals, which helps to protect your privacy. Using Google Analytics, we can see what content is popular on a website and strive to ensure you have the best user experience possible.

DoubleClick: We use of Google remarketing tags to log when users view specific pages or perform specific actions on our website. This allows us to provide targeted advertising in the future. If you do not wish to receive this type of advertising from us then you can opt out using the DoubleClick opt-out page or the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page.

This is only an example, and I recommend reading over Google's Privacy Policy guidelines to ensure your privacy policy captures everything and is up to standard.