People now visit a website at least six times, on average, before making a purchase, which means that remarketing can be extremely important and getting the messaging right is crucial – dynamic remarketing helps you do that.
What is dynamic remarketing?
Dynamic remarketing is basically more refined, semi-automated remarketing. It allows advertisers to target people that have previously visited their website or app, based on products or services they viewed during their visit, showing ads tailored to them. They’re designed to remind people of what they were viewing in order to encourage them back to carry out an action.
It’s available for many business types (not just ones with Google Merchant Centre shopping feeds)
Explained simply here, in under 30 secs, dynamic remarketing is available for the following business types:
- Education
- Flights
- Hotels and rentals
- Jobs
- Local deals
- Property
- Retail
- Travel
- Other (custom option)
How does dynamic remarketing work?
In order to tell Google what services or products you’d like to remarket on your website, you must create a feed or database of inventory:
This is a .csv, .tsv, .xls, or .xlsx file, that has be uploaded to AdWords. The rows in the spreadsheet are the products, and columns the attributes of each product.
Google provides feed templates for each vertical, with handy downloadable .csv files here: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6053288
Building audience lists
There are two ways to track the visitors that come to your site; Google’s remarketing tag or by using Google Analytics.
There are full instructions here for how to add the remarketing tag to your site. Google provides the tag, available from the shared library, that must be placed on all webpages, right before the closing </body> tag or in the common file footer code (if the site has one). Otherwise Google Analytics can be used to create audiences – Admin >> Audience Definitions >> Audiences.
It’s important to remember, however, that there are restrictions when using remarketing. For example any list must have a minimum of 100 active visitors or users within the last 30 days to be able to target any of them with display ads and the maximum membership duration for the display network is 540 days.
Setting up a dynamic remarketing campaign
- Click +Campaign
- Select Display Network only
- Name the campaign and in the ‘Drive Action’ section, for marketing objectives, select ‘Buy something on your website’ or ‘Take action on your site’
- Select your usual campaigns, based on your budget and objectives – Location, Language, Budget etc. – and in the Dynamic ad settings section, check Use dynamic ads and choose the correct
- Business type and Set up remarketing to create an empty feed, get the remarketing tag and default lists
- Then return to the campaign, click ‘Feed’ and select your actual feed
Creating ads
Once the foundation of the feed and the audience has been created and the campaign is set up, the next stage is creating dynamic display ads and there are 3 ways to do it: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/3265299?hl=en
Using Google’s Ad Gallery, advertisers can create responsive or non-responsive ads or they can upload ads created with Google Web Designer.
You can then choose how the text within the ads is customised, and how the attributes shared within the feed are displayed.