What is remarketing?

Remarketing is a technology that allows you to show ads on Google’s affiliate sites to users who are already interested in your company’s services or products. For example: they visited a product page earlier, but didn’t place an order and left.

Remarketing allows you to show ads to users who have already shown interest in your product at different times. For example, they visited the site, looked at the company’s profile on social networks, tried to place an order, watched a video about a product or service.

Thus such users are already interested in the products or services offered by your company. Return of potential customers, as a rule, occurs with the help of promotions such as discounts, coupons, gifts.

The advantages of remarketing in Google Ads

• Ability to adjust ad demonstration according to user’s behavior (only dynamic remarketing);
• Budget optimization. Remarketing campaigns can be paid for using any model that suits you – CPM or CPC (Cost Per Mille – cost per thousand impressions, Cost Per Click);
• More accurate targeting of the audience by finding users already interested in your proposal. This leads to an increase in the effectiveness of the advertising campaign in terms of conversions;
• Improving of brand awareness. The user sees your ad not on one, but on many sites;
• Possibility to return the visitor who was close to ordering, but never completed it;
• Ability to generate segments based on your data. You can create a remarketing list by the condition you want: target action, product categories on the site, email addresses. The target action on the site can be a variety of events: viewing a URL, viewing a thank you page, adding a product to cart, etc.

Types of remarketing in Google Ads

It’s important to distinguish between types of remarketing by type of site. There are 3 common types:

1. Searchable. Ad units are shown on the Google search results page;
2. KMS. Ads are shown in the contextual media network of Google. This is more than 2 million sites, videos and mobile applications;
3. Videos. You will be able to return users who watched a certain video on YouTube.

What’s the difference between static and dynamic remarketing?

Remarketing can also differ in the type of targeting to the user:

1. Static or classic. Ads are shown to users who have visited your site at some point of time;
2. Dynamic. This type of remarketing adjusts for products that the user has already chosen before.

Static remarketing involves the basic involvement of a user previously interested in a product or service.

Dynamic uses machine learning models and allows to:

1. Predict the probability of conversion;
2. Show personalized ads to the audience;
3. use the ID of each visitor. Thanks to these identifiers, you can correctly identify the user, no matter what device he or she uses to access the site;
4. Possibility to personalize advertising. Algorithms themselves will determine the basic elements and format of the ad to ensure the highest conversion for each visitor.

Thus, we can note the key differences between static and dynamic remarketing:

1. Dynamic remarketing – personalized ads for each user;
2. Static remarketing – manually created ads.

How to run remarketing in Google Ads in 2022: a step-by-step algorithm

Below, we’re going to look at setting up remarketing using the Google Ads tag. This is not the only option: you can also work with remarketing in Google Analytics. This is very handy if you use Google Analytics on a regular basis.

In Google Analytics, working with remarketing data is more in-depth and gives you the ability to analyze goals, sources, work with data from CRM. It also opens up more detailed (compared to Google Ads) socio-demographic targeting.

Preparing

Let’s move on to setting up remarketing in Google Ads. First, we need to create a new advertising campaign in the contextual media network. We will not dwell on this in detail, since the question of setting up Google Ads is the subject of a separate article.

Once the campaign has been created and all of the necessary settings have been made, click on “Tools and Settings” on the right-hand side of the screen. We’re interested in Audience Manager:

We get to the data source selection screen. Configure the “Google Ads” tag:

Start working with the data source. If you want to configure static remarketing – select “Only collect general website visit data to show ads to your website visitors”:

If you want static remarketing, you don’t need to configure any more settings. Just click “Save and continue”.

If you want to work with dynamic remarketing – click on “Collect data on specific actions people performed on your website to show personalized ads”:

To set up dynamic remarketing, you’ll need to specify the topic of the products or services:

If necessary, you can limit data processing so that Google does not use all the information it receives. Move on to adding a remarketing tag to your site.

Adding a remarketing tag to your site

You can add a tag in 3 ways:

• Install the tag yourself;
• Email the tagto your webmaster;
• Use Google Tag Manager.

Self addition of the script through editing the code of the page. You need to add a snippet of code between the tags:

Sending the tag to the developer. This is how you delegate the work of adding the script to the site to a developer or other technical person. You need to specify his e-mail address and click the “Send and continue” button:

Installation via “Google Tag Manager”.This option can be used if there is no developer at hand, but you need to install the tag now. You don’t have to edit the page code manually:

Click on the “Detailed Instructions” line for a detailed algorithm:

After the tag is installed on the site, you need to check the status of the source in the Audience Sources section. If it is active, then you can move on to configuring the feed for one or more topics.

Return to the screen where all the data sources of Google Ads are listed:

• “Conversions: 24 hours” – this is the total number of conversions with tag activation over the last 24 hours.
• “Active Parameters” is the total number of tag parameters that Google Ads received yesterday.

Creating a new segment

Now we will select the users you want to “return”. It can be website visitors, app users or YouTube channel subscribers, customer list, own user categories. First we need to create a new list, so we click on the “+” icon:

Google Ads allows you to configure the following data segments:

To set up a segment from visitors to a specific URL, click “Page Visitors” and go to set up a new segment:

We’ve already selected the users (page visitors) from the segment earlier. Now you need to specify the URL of the page and set the rule for it.

Our target is the users who have visited the page before, so we specify the target URL.

Note: you can specify several conditions at once, and you can mix them with each other.

Now specify the pre-fill settings for the segment. You can start with a completely blank one, or you can add users from the last 30 days that are relevant to your conditions to the segment.

Specify the data retention period. During this period the visitor will be added to the segment.

In the “Description” section, you can add information about the segment you created (optional). After completing the settings, click “Create Segment”.

That’s it – the data source is saved. Now you need to run an ad campaign based on it.

How to run a campaign in KMS based on dynamic remarketing with a custom source?

Open the Google Ads site and proceed to create a new campaign as usual. To do this, click on the “New Campaign” button.

Choose a priority target for the ad campaign. Please note: the selected target must be available for KMS campaigns(Example: “Create a campaing without a goal’s guidance”).

From the types of campaigns, choose KMS(Example: “Display”).

The system will offer two options:

1. Smart Display campaign;
2. Standard Display campaign.

To configure targeting for previously generated audience lists, select Standard Display campaign.

Specify the site to be promoted and the name of the campaign.

Fill in all the campaign settings as usual. We will not dwell on them in detail, since we are only talking about remarketing.

In the context of remarketing, we’re interested in the “Targeting” section. To access it, make the appropriate campaign settings, assign a budget, and specify a bid assignment model.

Click on the “Overview” line:

Complete the setup by clicking the “Done” button. Next, form all the necessary media ads and complete the creation of a new campaign.

Summary + bonus: situations where remarketing is sure to get results

It’s impossible to answer how much remarketing in Google Ads costs without looking at the specific campaign. But it is possible to calculate exactly what that cost is made up of.

The price of a remarketing campaign depends on the following factors:

• the total budget of the advertising campaign;
• the cost of ads;
• format of the ads;
• the chosen theme;
• the activity of competitors in the niche etc.

What is the right payment model for remarketing campaigns?
Cost per click (CPC) is suitable when there are clear budget constraints and you want to control them. It’s ideal for improving sales in a remarketing campaign.

Cost Per Mile (CPM) remarketing is more difficult to control. It’s harder to get results with this model, too. CPM is more suitable for experienced advertising professionals.

The use of remarketing in Google Advertising makes sense in at least three scenarios:

• Cross Sell. Remarketing works well for cross-selling when you need to sell an additional assortment or related products. Resales work well in wholesale niches as well;
• Negative demand dynamics. The use of remarketing will stabilize demand for a product or service that is steadily declining;
• Expensive niches where one-touch sales are unlikely, for example: B2B, corporate niches (banking services, especially leasing).