How To Setup a Remarketing Campaign

One of the most important facets of effective online marketing is finding the right audience. In a Display Campaign there’s no use in showing an ad promoting sports car insurance on a kids game site,  unless they happened to get very lucky at their school’s Christmas raffle then the only result will be a poor Click-through Rate (CTR), or even worse a high volume of expensive irrelevant traffic draining budget away from better performing sites.

Remarketing

A much better technique is to target your ads towards people that you already know are your audience by Remarketing to people that have already visited your site but didn’t convert. This could be for a number of reasons; perhaps they didn’t have enough time or they didn’t spot an offer that would have changed their mind. This is where Remarketing comes in, when a user meets your requirements – such as reaching your tickets page but not converting – then they will be added to your Remarketing ‘list’ and become eligible to be served ads, perhaps changing their mind with an offer they missed or reminding forgetful customers about your site.

Related Posts:
Shopping Cart Abandonment and the Case for Google Display Network Remarketing  

Improving CTR

A quick look at one of my own Remarketing Campaigns reveals that this month so far a 25% improvement in CTR and a massive 37% increase in the Conversion Rate has been seen over the standard Contextual Display Campaign on the Google Display Network - Remarketing really does work!

5 Easy Steps

Now we’ve got past the why let’s get on to the how. Luckily for any budding Remarketers, with a bit of patience and strategy it couldn’t be easier to set up a simple Remarketing Campaign for all the most important pages on your site, just follow the steps below and you’ll be up and running in no time.

1. On the campaign tab of Google Adwords head down to Shared Library>Audiences and you should be able to spy an Audience called ‘Main List’.
2. From here click on the hyperlinked [Tag] on the right to find your Remarketing Code.
   This tag is used by Google to identify when a user has accessed a particular page on your site, once the tag fires for this user they will be added to your remarketing list and quickly a pool of potential customers will start building.
3. Copy and paste this code in to a text document, taking care to avoid making any changes to the text, and send this over to your web development team. The tag must be placed just before the </body> tag on every page of your site, or if this isn’t possible then on the pages that you want to build a Remarketing list from.
4. Next you need to set up an Audience, head back to the Audience Page and click ‘New Audience’. Define what URL (or part of a URL) that you want to target on your site, for example any URL containing ‘/running-shoes’ to remarket to anyone that had visited the ‘Running Shoes’ area of your site. Decide on a membership duration (30 days is normally just about right as long as your offer doesn’t run out), give your Audience a name and Save. Now you just need to sit back and watch your Remarketing List grow while you look on proudly at your work.
5. Up next is to create a Display Campaign in AdWords as usual. Then I usually create one ad group per Audience for ease and assign each of these Ad Groups to your required Audience, or selection of Audiences dependent on your strategy.