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Why does EVERY business need Google Remarketing with their digital marketing strategy?
If you have ever been spooked by seeing ads on another website for a site that you visited days or weeks ago, then you’re not just being paranoid… somebody is watching you. Not only are they watching, but they are now following you thanks to a Google Ads feature called Google Remarketing.
Google Remarketing (also referred to as Google Retargeting Ads) is a feature within the Google Ads platform that allows you to continue advertising your products and services to your audience well after they have left your website. As your previous website visitors navigate the internet, moving from one website to the next, your targeted ads are featured to them as a way to try and draw them back to your website to make a purchase.
This is an especially powerful tool for an advertiser as nearly 98% of your audience will not purchase your product or service the first time they visit your website. Making Google Remarketing an absolute necessity if you truly want to maximize your digital marketing strategy’s effectiveness.
So how powerful is Google Remarketing? And how effective can it be for your business when it comes to your digital marketing strategy? A recent study showed that when a prospective customer saw a remarketing ad they were 70% more likely to convert it into a sale.
This means that 98% of your audience who do not convert on the first visit is 70% more likely to convert into a sale when they see your ad a second time after they leave your website. This demonstrates how powerful Google Ads Remarketing can be for your business. It also illustrates how important it is for your business to continue to advertise to your audience after they leave your website.
The Mechanics of Google Remarketing
When we think about the concept of a Google Remarketing Strategy we know that the person we are targeting must visit or interact with our web page first for it to work. This means that we still need to focus on our primary methods of digital marketing such as Google PPC Ads and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to reach our target audience for the initial engagement. But once we attract this audience to our website or landing page, we can now let Google Remarketing Technology work its magic!
The first step in this process takes place when a user clicks through to your website. Once they reach your website a “Cookie” is stored in the user’s internet browser, such as Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, or Firefox. Cookies are nothing more than small text files, usually coded in Javascript or PHP, that are placed on your device for tracking purposes.
These are also referred to as Remarketing Tags or Pixels. Allowing website owners and digital marketers to track your behaviors on their website as well as to stay connected to you after you have left so they can attempt to re-engage you again later.
There are two types of tracking cookies, but only one is used for Google Remarketing. The first type of tracking cookie is what we call “First-Party Cookies”. First-party cookies are activated when you visit a website directly and are used by the website to help track, store, and customize your experience every time you visit thereafter. This can include language preferences, login details, or analytic data such as the pages you spend time on or features of the site you interact with most.
Then there are what we call “Third-Party Cookies”. Third-Party Cookies track your activity from one website and then shares this across all third-party websites that use the same tracking code. This provides a way for advertisers to show ads to you again when you visit these third-party websites that are a part of their network. In Google Remarketing, we refer to this network as the Google Display Network.
Websites that are a part of the Google Display Network are either owned by Google or are owned by businesses and individuals who have opted into allowing Google to display third-party advertising content on their web pages. The primary benefit to the website owner is that they can now participate and earn profit-sharing revenue from Google Advertisers when ads are featured on their website.
As of today, there are over two hundred million websites, apps, and video platforms that are a part of the Google Display Network. The Google Display Network reaches 90% of users worldwide. Providing advertisers with an abundance of website options with countless amounts of digital real estate to get their ads out there and in front of their retargeted audience.
The Anatomy of a Google Remarketing Ad
There are a variety of Google Remarketing Ad types, shapes, and sizes for advertisers to choose from when building their ads. This can and will often dictate what websites and pages their ads can appear on, where on the page the ad may be seen (above the fold versus below the fold), and impact the prominence of their ad content to reach their retargeted audience. The goal is to make sure that you create a deep library of ad creative formats and cover as many of the most common sizes, dimensions, and shapes that are offered.
This will ensure that when your retargeted audience visits a site on the Google Display Network, you have the ad size necessary to appear in the designated slot(s) that have the most prominent position to be viewed on the page.
When building a dynamic remarketing ad, you should always account for formats for each type of device your audience will use to access your ad content while on the Google Display Network. The most important to keep in mind are mobile devices and computers.
Remarketing ads use a combination of images, videos, and text that can be used to promote the products and services that your retargeted audience had likely interacted with while on your website. Making sure that you utilize high-quality images and videos with legible text that includes a call to action (CTAs) or promotion is imperative for success.
Low-quality ads not only tend to underperform but also carry a quality score that Google uses to determine how much you will pay for clicks from your Remarketing Ad. The poorer the quality score the higher the cost that you pay for each click.
Google Remarketing Prerequisites
Requirements and User-Cookie Minimums
Services such as Google Search Ads and Facebook Advertising have very few requirements necessary for you to build and launch a campaign. In many instances, all you need to do is create an account, build a list of keywords (or choose how you want to target people), create some ads, and slap a credit on it. Some of these services can be built and launched on the same day. Google Remarketing on the other hand is quite the opposite and is only accessible once you meet the requirements.
This is a common frustration point for advertisers because once they discover the power of Google Remarketing, they do not want to have to wait to unlock its capabilities. Nonetheless, let’s take a quick look at what’s required to utilize Google Remarketing.
The first thing that you must have set up and connected to your website is a Google Analytics Account. Without Google Analytics you not only miss very valuable opportunities to track the activity and behaviors of your website audience needed for Google Remarketing, but you also miss out on incredibly useful data that can assist your Remarketing Campaign Strategy.
Data that can help you isolate both demographic and psychographic audience attributes that can help you further optimize your digital retargeting efforts. This can be used in the type of images, messaging options, colors, and other attributes that may help you drive higher engagement, improve click-through rate (website visits) from your ad, and even increase your conversion rate.
After you have Google Analytics set up and tracking your website traffic, the next thing you will need is to set up and launch either a Google Search Ads or Display Ads Campaign (or both). Depending on what you proceed with will dictate the minimum threshold necessary to unlock the Google Remarketing feature. Per Google Audience Requirements, the conditions for a remarketing audience using Display Ads as a prerequisite must include a minimum of 100 unique cookies (individual users) having reached your website or landing page.
Remarketing for Google Search Ads must include a minimum of 1,000 unique cookies. These minimum-cookie requirements are the same for the Google Ads and Google Analytics Tracking Pixels. Therefore, there are no shortcuts or backdoors to circumvent what is required to reach the minimum threshold to unlock the Google Remarketing feature.
So why the requirements? Pretty simple actually. If you do not have Google Analytics set up, then you have no way to track who is coming to your website. If you do not have a Google Ads Account or Campaign, then you lack the necessary mode of delivery for your Remarketing Ad Content. In addition to the fact that without Google Search Ads you miss out on the ability to maintain both a consistent and sustainable method of driving traffic to your web page every month. More new visitors to a page = more remarketing candidates.
These requirements are critical to the success of your campaign because they also afford both Google and the advertiser a way to collect data. Data that can be used to help you with one of the most important aspects of Google Remarketing and that is Audience Segmentation.
Google Remarketing Audience Segmentation
How Optimizing Your Targeting Produces the Maximum Results
Easily one of the most important parts, and best practices of Google Remarketing, is leveraging the power of Audience Segmentation. Segmenting audiences in your Google Remarketing Campaign provides incredible targeting capabilities. Features that allow you to concentrate your efforts around individuals who demonstrate behaviors that are often associated with both higher interest and intent in purchasing your products and services.
A great way to visualize audience segmentation is to look at it from a real-world example. Consider the case of a remodeling contractor based in Austin, Texas. In a city that is highly saturated with competition, this contractor elects to use Google Remarketing as a way to stay in front of their prospective customers after their initial visit through the contractor’s Google Search Ads campaign.
They understand that not all past visitors who reach their home page are potential customers, so instead, they place their remarketing cookie on the pages of their site that Google Analytics has shown them is where their higher quality audience tends to spend the most time before converting. They also elect to target the download brochure button with their remarketing cookie as they know people who take the initiative to download and read this material also often convert into leads as well.
For the people who land on the contractor’s kitchen remodeling page, they remarket them with an ad that has a picture of a new and beautifully designed kitchen. They include a time-bound promotion of a free appliance upgrade for purchases made in the next 30 days and include a promo code that needs to be submitted at the time they schedule their free estimate.
They also decide for those who elected to download the brochure where they have a $1,500 Off Coupon, they are served with a remarketing ad of an elegantly designed room addition with an offering of an additional $1,000 off promotion. This ad is also time-bound and encourages they will receive a free estimate if their appointment is scheduled in the next 24 hours.
Audience segmentation provides great latitude for what you can accomplish in a Google Remarketing campaign. Leveraging your Google Analytics and Search/Display Campaign data can provide abundant details about your top audience groups.
Helping you focus on the pages of your site where they spend time, targeting the websites that they often visit that are a part of the Google Display Network, and custom crafting your ad visuals and content that create deeper engagement are just a few of the capabilities that Google Remarketing has to offer. Providing businesses with one of the most effective supplemental online advertising features to help you maximize your Google Advertising performance.
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How to Get Started with Google Remarketing
Going Solo versus Hiring a Professional
Anyone can build a Google Remarketing Campaign who is willing to put in the time and effort. But just know that this is a commitment if you choose to take this responsibility for your business alone. A few things we would encourage for the DIY bunch before you get started.
First, make sure that you have Google Analytics and Google AdWords set up with tracking tags properly installed on your website or in Google Tag Manager (we would strongly recommend setting up Google Tag Manager versus installing the tags directly on your website).
Second, you must make sure that you build and launch either a Google Display or a Search Ads Campaign. Remember that you either have to get 100 cookied users from Display Ads or 1,000 cookied users from Search Ads to activate the Google Remarketing capability.
Third, it would be in your best interest to solicit the help of a Graphic Designer to help you with your Ad Creative. Unless you have the money and time to invest in and learn Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, or time and a small investment to use a platform like Canva to build your ads, you should enlist professional help instead. Trust us, it is well worth the investment to let the people who are good at making graphics do just that for you.
Fourth, you will want to get comfortable searching Google for “how to” guides from reputable sources. You can use a basic Remarketing Setup Guide from Search Engine Land or you can utilize advanced guides like those created by experts like Neil Patel to help you get the job done.
And of course, as always, the PPC experts on UpCity are standing by and ready to help if you need it!