Your website may see 1,000 visitors in a day, but only 50 end up making a purchase or converting. And that’s on a good day! This unbalanced ratio can send off alarm bells, but it’s actually normal.
Only a very small percentage of site visits result in conversion, which means the majority of your visitors leave without taking any action. That doesn’t mean that you’ve lost their business for good.
There are any number of reasons why a customer may click off of the page even though they are interested in your products or services. If you can get these individuals to return again, you have another opportunity to gain their business.
how does google remarketing work ?
What Is Remarketing? How Do These Campaigns Work?
Remarketing is about bringing previous visitors back to your website through the use of ads. It’s also referred to as retargeting because you are trying to target prospective customers that you’ve already reached and marketed to in the past.
Remarketing campaigns use a tracking script that is embedded into the coding of your website. With the user’s permission, a pixel is downloaded in the background when they visit. This small scrap of data allows you to add them to your remarketing list and target them with display ads across the Internet.
If you’re remarketing with Google Ads, you can use remarketing campaigns to reach past visitors on YouTube, Gmail, in apps, search listings and on any website partnered with Google’s Display Network.
Step 1: Have A Goal
You should have a clear goal for your remarketing campaign. This goal will dictate the type of site visitors that you wish to engage again. There are four basic remarketing audiences that you will want to pay attention to:
- People that visited a landing page but did not convert: For example, if a B2B company is using Google Ads and landing pages to encourage people to fill out a lead generation form, remarketing can be used to engage prospects that didn’t fill out the form.
- People that almost purchased, but did not finish checkout: This approach looks specifically at people that abandoned carts or browsed and compared products but didn’t complete their transaction.
- People in your marketing funnel that need more information: You still have content or other resources that you want them to see to help reach the decision stage. Remarketing brings them back to your site and connects them to these materials.
- Past customers: Remarketing can remind customers who purchased in the past about your great products and encourage them to return for another transaction.
When you have a clear audience or goal in mind for your remarketing, it becomes much easier to develop your strategy. Not only will you know how to reach these individuals and what messages to use, but also where on your site you need to include the remarketing tags.
Step 2: Implement A Remarketing Tag
Before you can create a marketing list and begin targeting past site visitors, you need to insert the aforementioned remarketing tag into your website’s code. There are actually two tags at play here:
- The Global Site Tag collects data on what pages of your website visitors access. It needs to be present on each one of your pages and will be used as the foundation of your remarketing list.
- Event Snippets are used to gather specific information on what visitors did on each page. Thus, they need to be more carefully placed. You only want to include these tags on certain parts of your website. For example, an event snippet on a transaction page can help you determine which users finished purchasing. This is handy when refining your remarketing list based on your goal.
Both remarketing tags can be found in your Google Ads Dashboard under the “Shared Library” menu. It’s important to note that adding tags into your site’s coding can be complex. You may want to get help from your website developer. Alternatively, you can use the Google Tag Manager, which is a tool designed specifically to help marketers add, remove and edit tags on their site without having to add the code by hand.
Step 3: Create Your Remarketing List
Once these tags are correctly installed on your site, your remarketing list will begin to populate. To use your remarketing list as an audience, you need to add a new audience under the “Audience Manager” option in the “Shared Library” menu. Click on the add symbol and Google will detect your remarketing list.
Next, you can add rules and parameters to how Google will use your remarketing list. For example, you can select a specific set of pages that remarketing targets visited. This is where you need to think strategically in terms of how to reach your remarketing goal.
To finish, click on the button to “Create Audience.” You’ll also be asked to provide a description for your list. This is optional but will help you keep your different lists separate from one another.
Step 4: Create A Remarketing Campaign
You’ve developed your list and told Google how to use it. Finally it is time to create your remarketing campaign in Google Ads. The majority of remarketing is done through the Google Display Network, which means setting up your campaign is not going to be much different from any other Display Campaign that you’ve published.
The main difference when creating a remarketing campaign on the Google Display Network is when asked about audience targeting. When you reach the “People” section of the campaign creation menu, click on the “Audiences” menu. This is where you will find the option to target based on your remarketing lists.
Choose the remarketing list you would like to add to the targeting and finish creating your campaign.
Conclusions
You are now retargeting your past site visitors with display ads that will encourage them to return and convert! Remarketing campaigns are not much different from any of your other Google Ads projects.
They require the same level of attention and monitoring as any other Display Campaign. You have to make careful adjustments based on the data to improve your remarketing over time. Once you optimize these campaigns, however, you’ll see great results!
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