Remarketing with Google Ads: a beginner’s guide

 What is remarketing?

Imagine someone visits your website, takes a look around, and then leaves without purchasing something. There could be any number of reasons why they didn’t complete a transaction. They may have been shopping around and comparing prices, or they may have decided to delay on purchasing, or they simply could have got distracted. Remarketing allows you to place adverts on third party websites specifically targeted at these users.

Remarketing is a common element of a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing strategy.

Using Google Ads for remarketing

Whilst there are other providers (more on that later) Google Ads is the predominant channel for remarketing adverts. The Google brand has a wide reach, meaning your advert could appear whilst your customers are reading a news article, watching a YouTube video, shopping online or viewing a blog. Google’s position as a global player means they can offer huge potential audiences for remarketing ads.

How does remarketing work for businesses?

The practicalities of remarketing may sound complicated, but in essence it’s about following and tracking a user’s habits online. A customer visits your website and leaves without purchasing anything. Their visit is then tracked and cookies are placed on their web browser. If you have an ad account with Google to run a remarketing campaign then when that user visits another website running Google ads, Google recognises the tracking cookie and displays your chosen ad to them. Remarketing works by helping businesses reconnect with customers – showing them targeted advertisements across mobile and desktop devices as they browse the internet.

Remarketing to increase sales

Driving customers back to your website is the key premise of remarketing. It’s considered a very effective form of PPC marketing, because the people targeted by campaigns are already familiar with your brand and website. American PPC firm and Google Partner Wordstream, report that remarketing ads have much higher click-through rates and conversion rates than typical display ads , meaning more customers act on them than other types of advert.

Remarketing to build brand awareness

Remarketing is also an effective tool for raising awareness of a brand. By advertising specifically to people that have already visited your site you’re keeping your brand at the forefront of customers’ minds. This builds your brand exposure, makes your brand more familiar and increases consumer confidence. This brand promotion means customers are more likely to return to you when they’re ready to make a purchase.

 The benefits of Google Ads remarketing

Remarketing with Google has a number of advantages including:

• The ability to create targeted audiences for ads based on use of your site e.g. customers who placed an item in their shopping basket but didn’t complete.
• A wide choice of ad creation options, incorporating image, text and video.
• Statistics and reports of how campaigns perform and the cost of them.

Selecting audiences for remarketing.

Audience selection is key to remarketing –you need to be sure who you’re pitching your ads to. Making smart choices about audience selection means your adverts will be placed in front of the right people, with the greatest scope for sales. Effective audience selection also makes best use of your budget.

Narrowing down your audience

A comprehensive PPC strategy will help with audience selection and the options are broad.However, Hanapin Marketing; agency behind Hero Conf , the world’s largest all-PPC conference, have identified seven criteria for remarketing audience selection as follows:

• Visiting your homepage or set product page(s);
• Reaching a certain stage of the checkout process;
• Not visiting a certain page;
• Time spent on site;
• Number of pages visited;
• Customer demography; and
• Customer location.

 Remarketing strategies

By being more targeted in your audience selection you can pinpoint ads to very specific groups of people, making adverts more relevant and with a lower total cost per click . However this isn’t an easy assessment to make and ads that are too narrowly focussed on the wrong audiences will have limited success.

For new advertisers adopting a broader approach, such as targeting homepage viewers, may be simpler(albeit more costly given the wider audience). Over time you can then adopt amore focussed approach and develop specific adverts and campaigns for different audiences.

Creating quality content is also fundamentally important and for inspiration we loveLarry Kim’s Moz blog on How to Make YourContent Marketing and SEO up to 7x More Awesome . 

Alternatives to Google remarketing

The primary competitor to Google for remarketing is Facebook. Remarketing throughFacebook allows you to target Facebook users that have visited your site and encourage them to return.

As with Google Ads, Facebook allows for audience segmentation and targeting. SpotStudio provides a detailed consideration of Facebook versus Google remarketing .They conclude that different businesses will suit different platforms, withFacebook leading on more localised advertising.

Facebook remarketing can be used to link your brand with customers and their friends, which for smaller businesses could be a better option. Overall however, SpotStudio concludes that Google is likely to suit a wider audience of businesses.

Remarketing services in Exeter

Taking the plunge in to remarketing for the first time can be a little overwhelming.If you think remarketing ads with Google or Facebook could help your business, but you aren’t sure where to start then QuayClick can help. We're a website design agency in Exeter and our dedicated SEO experts can develop a PPC marketing strategy for your business, helping you to get the best from remarketing and other forms of paid search and advertising online.

To discuss how remarketing could help you please contact us, or check out our process to find out how easy it is to grow your business with QuayClick.