Remarketing campaigns are ideal for keeping your brand in front of people who’ve previously visited your website or used your app. By targeting these previous visitors, you increase the chances of converting passive visitors into paying customers and keeping your brand at the back of their minds. Remarketing campaigns can be used for all kinds
Remarketing campaigns are ideal for keeping your brand in front of people who’ve previously visited your website or used your app. By targeting these previous visitors, you increase the chances of converting passive visitors into paying customers and keeping your brand at the back of their minds.
Remarketing campaigns can be used for all kinds of reasons, whether it’s putting products back in front of eCommerce shoppers who’ve previously visited a product page, or for enticing customers to complete a purchase if they’ve left items in a cart.
They’re also ideal for demand generation by targeting B2B customers as they browse the web after visiting your website.
In this blog, you’ll learn how to set up retargeting campaigns for Google Ads as part of your PPC management.
Retargeting campaigns can be run in a variety of ways to acheive a number of different goals. These are the most common types of Google retargeting formats you’ll have:
Standard remarketing involves showing ads to users who have previously been on your website. They’re usually found on Google’s Display Network, but can be shown on social media and other websites.
If a user has visited a product page, dynamic remarketing shows these products as advertisements to entice the user to come back and buy them.
This involves showing search ads (typically text ads, but they include display ads) to users who have previously been on your website.
Your retargeting campaign set up is a relatively straightforward process.
If you’re doing basic remarketing, you can install a retargeting tag on your website using Google Ads, and this will be easy enough to manage.
If you’re using more advanced targeting on your site, or you’ll need to manage more than one tag, it could be better to install it through Google Tag Manager (GTM).
You can also use your Google Analytics (GA4) account to set up remarketing campaigns by linking GA4 to Google Ads and importing your GA4 custom audience.
But for the purpose of this guide, we’ll go through the process of setting up and installing retargeting in GTM.
In your GTM account, go to:
Create new GTM tag → choose Google Ads remarketing → enter conversion ID → set up triggers (all pages, cart abandoned) → publish
Here’s a quick walk through of the screens you’ll go through when setting up tags in GTM…
Click “Add a new tag”
Choose Google Ads remarketing as the Google Tag type you want to create
After that, set up your Conversion ID (this makes it easier to identify your conversion, especially when you have more than one on your website)
You then choose the trigger you want. This is what initiates the follow-up advertising (for example, should it be any user who’s visited any page, or someone who’s visited a particular page, or completed a certain action)?
Once you’ve done this, you’ll be able to publish your new tag. After this, you’ll just need to test that it’s working and you’re good to go.
Your audience is one of the most important aspects of your PPC remarketing, because this defines who will see your ads and ultimately determines how successful the campaign will be in line with your goals.
Retargeting the wrong audience can just result in wasted budget.
You can create your retargeting audience directly in Google Ads following the step-by-step process here:
Tools → audience manager → audience sources → + → website visitors → set your inclusion rules (URL visited, scroll depth, session duration, visit time frame)
In your account, go to tools in the left column and go to audience manager (under shared library).
From here, you can then add your audience sources using triggers like “all website visitors”, “visitors to a particular page”, etc.
You can also define your audience based on actions on your website.
It could be people who stayed on your site a particular amount of time (this helps you avoid retargeting people who landed on your website by mistake or bounced) or those who scrolled to a particular point on a page.
You can create custom audiences with your Google Analytics account, retargeting users who’ve abandoned their shopping cart, or who’ve visited a specific page on your site, like anyone who looks at your pricing page.
To do this in GA4, enable advertising features in your GA4 account and share your custom audience with your Google Ad account.
You’ll need around 1000 users in your audience list for this to be viable for ads, or 100 in the past 30 days for small lists using Display remarketing
In your Google Ads account, click “new campaign” to get started.
You’ll be prompted to choose a goal for your campaign (sales, traffic, app promotion)
Once you’ve picked a goal, you’ll need to choose a campaign type (for example, Search, Display, Performance Max, etc.)
Then you need to set your budget and configure any automated bidding you’ll be using from day one. For example, max conversions or target CPA
After this, you can choose your targeting. You’ll select your remarketing audience from the segments you’ve created, or you can import your list from GA4.
As part of this targeting, be sure to add an exclusion for converted users (this could be anyone who got to a Thank You page, for example)
This is important because you don’t necessarily want to retarget users who have just bought something from you (retargeting is more of a reengagement tactic for users who’ve come to your site, but not done anything).
Just like any other PPC campaign, remarketing can be optimised and improved as you go to improve results and deliver a better return on your initial investment.
One thing we’d recommend you do immediately is to segment audiences for specific campaigns. For example, create different campaigns and audiences for:
Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) is the targeting to use for search campaigns and you can tailor your ad copy to speak to people who’ve already visited your website, so they already know who you are.
For eCommerce, dynamic remarketing can work best, using feeds to previously viewed products across Display, PMax and Shopping campaign.
Avoid advertisement fatigue
One thing to watch for with remarketing is showing your potential customers so many ads that they stop taking notice of them.
Whether you call it ad fatigue or ad blindness, it’s a real problem when customers are bombarded with so many ads that they start to tune them out.
To handle this, you can set frequency caps. This allows you to limit how many times a person can see your ads within a certain time frame.
And as you would with all your paid ads, continue to test your ad creative, ad copy and bidding strategies for remarketing to find the trends of what’s working, what tweaks can be made for improvements and what needs to be paused.
Need help with your Google Ads retargeting strategy?
Our PPC agency is adept at creating retargeting campaigns that keep your brand top of mind for potential customers who’ve shown an interest in you in the past.
Whether you’re looking to create retargeting campaigns for demand gen, or want to push more eCommerce sales, our PPC experts can help.
Just get in touch and we’ll set up a free strategy session to run through your current PPC campaigns (including retargeting campaigns) to see where we can make the most impact as quickly as possible to deliver better returns for your paid ad campaigns.
Speak to a member of our team and start your project today!
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