Remarketing, also known as retargeting, is a way of targeting people that have previously visited a website or used an app.
In order to set up a remarketing campaign advertisers must place a piece of code, known as a remarketing tag, on every page of their website. Then when a visitor comes to the site they are automatically added to a remarketing list and can later be targeted with text and/or banner ads.
There are various types of remarketing; remarketing with the display network, remarketing lists for search ads (RLSAs), dynamic remarketing and remarketing for mobile apps. For more detail visit my previous post.
What is the best way to use remarketing?
We use remarketing for a lot of our clients with varying levels of success so it can depend on the industry you are in.
For example if you have an ecommerce site selling products such as homeware or clothing etc then dynamic remarketing could work well, given that you have Google Merchant centre set up.
If you offer a service where you provide an online quote or something similar you could target people that did get a quote and encourage them to come back to your site, retrieve their quote and make the purchase.
If you are selling a high value item that takes a lot of research and thought before purchase, then remarketing on the display network and RSLAs can work well. If you add a new brochure or feature to your website that you want people that have visited your site before, to come back and view, you can remarket to them with that message.
The beauty of remarketing for search is that you are targeting people who have been on your site and are back on Google searching again. This suggests that they are still in the research stage, and by appearing in the results, whenever they look, you can stay on their radar and give them confidence that you are the company they should choose.
You can also target these people with a different message than you would a new visitor. You can go into more detail about why they should come back and choose your brand, rather than just trying to catch that first click.
If you have an ecommerce site, an enticing offer can work well in RLSAs. Encourage previous visitors back with a ‘10% off’ or ‘free delivery’ voucher code and hopefully they’ll come back to make a purchase.
There are things you can do to ensure you do not ‘over do it’ with remarketing, to try and reduce the risk of annoying your customers and visitors to your site:
- You can limit the frequency of the ads so that they only show to a person up to 5 times a day or 10 times a week for example.
- You can also shorten the length of the membership duration, so depending on your average customer lead time you can change the length of time that a user is shown your ads, after they have visited your site.
- You can also exclude people that have carried out your call to action. So if a user did download a brochure or purchased something then you can exclude them from seeing the ads, as long as those call to actions are set up as conversions.
Confused about remarketing or RLSAs? Get in touch by contacting us!
