Remarketing, What?

Remarketing is putting your brand back in front of potential customers, after they have already shown an interest, by having visited your site, or interacting with your mobile app. As opposed to plain social media marketing wherein you buy subscribers and/or likes, remarketing focuses solely on customers that've shown interest in your business. In the realm of digital marketing, this takes many forms.  It can be thought of as a step before you are nurturing a lead, although it can apply equally to prospects, leads, and customers.  One of the beauties of remarketing is that it can lead to brand re-engagement for all these. The text messaging marketing is one effective way to put your product or service out there and has immediate effect.

Assuming you have remarketing already set up within your Google Ads account, a basic explanation of how remarketing works is:

1. Prospect visits your website, Google Ads applies a tracking cookie (stored in their browser)
2. The prospect is added to your Remarketing audience list
3. When the prospect visits another website with content related to your site, and the site is running Google Display ads, your ad is triggered and appears on the other website. If the prospect clicks the ad, they will be returned to your website.

Remarketing, Why?

The time frame that a remarketing list is active for is typically 30 days (or less) so the brand impression your website originally created is reinforced when they see your ad on a different site. Like all forms of advertising, digital advertising sometimes requires numerous brand impressions raise brand awareness and influence the prospect to form a positive opinion of your brand. Remarketing offers a way to create those additional brand impressions and extends a pathway back to your website.

Remarketing is also a way for you to extend your marketing reach beyond your own website properties at a very economical price point. Often the cost of a click through to your website from a remarketing campaign is only a fraction of the cost of a click through from a search ad.

Remarketing, How?

Creating audience lists (website generic, subject specific), can be complicated process and there are many ways to generate lists. Here's a bit of very good news for those just starting with remarketing. When you are running Google Ads, Google will automatically create a generic remarketing list consisting of all visitors to your site over a 30 day period. This can be identified in the Audience list as the All Visitors list.

Then you can build a remarketing campaign that displays your brands, your products, on websites within the Google display network. There are hundreds of thousands of sites displaying these ads, in every industry.

Creating ads is also thankfully easy as Google provides a dynamic display ad builder. You simply supply a few creative elements, such as a product image or logo, a tag line, a short description, and the URL on your website to link the ad back to. Google then uses these elements and can generate ads in a number of formats and layouts to conform to the ad spaces available on the display partner websites. This includes ads which are mobile responsive so the same set of ad creative can be used on a desktop banner, a square button within an article, or a banner ad on a mobile device.

Custom Remarketing Lists

In addition to the All Visitors list, which is automatically created, you can have Google Ads create custom lists based on parameters such as the pages visited. So if your business sell three items, and each has a descriptive page, you can have Google Ads store the page visitors in three separate lists. Then you can build a campaign, including ad creative, specific to that list. Then, when browsing on other websites, they may be shown an ad leading back to your website, for that specific product.

Another smart way to use Google Ads remarketing is to leverage your existing customer list by uploading it to a crate new audience. These uploaded customer lists, are then activated, if the customer is signed into Google and visits a site featuring Google display ads.

Present Custom Offers

You can even use Google Ads remarketing to make a custom offer to lure prospects back and close a sale. A custom list can bring ad traffic back to a page on your site (only available from the ad link) with a discounted offer. This can help turn a non-sale into revenue. Also, a list created based the prospect visiting a specific set of pages can trigger a packaged or bundled offer of products or services at a volume discount.