By Helen Brown
Hello! My name is Helen and I am a recovering Internet shopaholic!
I just love to look at lots of different websites full of clothes, shoes and handbags………………..my husband is not impressed, he thinks I have way too many things to wear! I know its bad, and I must be getting better as I haven’t had anything delivered for quite a while now………but can you blame me really, anyone who understands or is studying Internet marketing will know how it is targeted and how, even if you leave a site without making a purchase, you will see lots of bright and shiny ads that attract your attention and make it oh so difficult for you to leave your computer (and their websites) alone! But that’s just my perspective as an Internet user, as a professional that is very interested in how it all works, I now have another perspective……………………..
So I have just recently started studying for my Display Advanced exam, and once again, any relevant information I can get my hands on for study is great. The more learning sources the better if you ask me! I’ve just taken part in the Google “Re marketing on the Display network” webinar, and I would like to share what I have learned with you.
Remarketing is getting the attention of anyone who has previously visited your website within a set time period and trying to entice them back by means of targeting ads to the user after they have left your site. This is how it works-
A customer is browsing a website, they may decide to place something in a shopping cart, or they may just view the available products. There will be code within these viewed pages that will place a cookie in the customers browser. The customer then leaves the site without making a purchase. After they leave the site and whilst they continue to browse, they will see adverts and products from the site that they recently left. This is en extremely relevant and potentially valuable form of targeting. After all, Google has reach on a massive scale when it comes to the Display network, there are hundreds of thousands of sites and there are an estimated 35.4 million unique monthly users. Anyone who visits your site will be ‘tagged’ by your code, whether they have come to you through an organic listing, a paid listing or even if they have typed directly into the URL bar.
So is this a clever strategy for advertising? I think so.
So when you apply this to your AdWords account, what does it all mean? First of all, as per usual you have all the great functionality of the usual AdWords features, Display or text ads, control over pricing with CPC or CPM pricing, you can use conversion optimiser if you have set out goals for CPA, detailed reporting functions, advanced targeting features such as delivery optimisation, geo targeting and frequency capping etc. There is the display ad builder which allows you to create ads with ease in a variety of sizes, Google highly recommend creating your ads in as many sizes as possible to allow them to display on a variety of different sites.
To get started with a re marketing campaign, first of all you will need to enable your audiences tab. You will notice when you are in your campaigns screen that there is a little arrow drop down next to the ad extensions tab, click this drop down and enable the audiences tab by selecting it and clicking o.k . Click new audience and then re marketing list, you can now create your first re marketing list! Give your list a name, it is a good practice to name your list according to the page name that you are making a list for. Always give the list a description to clearly define the purpose of the list, this will help to clarify in the future if you decide to make other re marketing lists.
Next you will need to set your membership duration, that is the length of time you want the user to see the ads after they have left your site. This is set to a default of 30 days, you can change this to suit your needs but in this example of 30 days, after the 30 days have passed they will no longer be targeted with these ads. If the user should click the ad and convert within the 30 days, they would then be removed from the list. There is a maximum amount of days you can set for the membership duration, this is 540 days (18 months, that’s a long time!) It’s also possible to create a time delay so that you can re target someone who previously converted for example, 6 months or even a year previous, clever!
The system will now create a new re marketing tag, you will then see a link which will be the same as name of your re marketing list, when you click this link a box will display on the screen which will contain the re marketing code. This code will need to be copied and then placed between the body tags within the html of the web page. Keep in mind that if the code is to be added to a payment page for example, you will need to make sure that the page security level tab is showing https.
OR you can select from an existing tag e.g a previous conversion tag if you already have conversion tracking set up, this code can be used and then you won’t need two sets of code installed on one page. In this case, the code will still register conversions and also tag with re marketing cookies also.
It’s a good practice that anyone starting a re marketing campaign have a new separate campaign to do this so that you can efficiently manage the budget and also have clear reporting on the success of the campaign. You must be opted into the display network and select ‘relevant pages only on the placements and audiences that I manage’. They also recommend having a different ad group for each tag that you create. You will need to add the different lists to the appropriate ad groups. Click audiences, and then add audiences, you will be able to complete this action.
Something very important to keep in mind! You don’t want to bombard users with your ads! I know I would find that very annoying as I am sure many others would too, it is good practice to use frequency capping which can stop the ad appearing more than a specified amount per day, week or month to the specific user.
Also, in the webinar there was a recommendation that more aggressive bidding should be used for a re marketing campaign with bids set up to 20% higher to ensure that your ads are eligible to show. Also you will need at least 500 users in your list before your ads are eligible to show (if you are a large business this is easy to achieve, but if you are a small business that might take a while so patience will be key to this!), you will see an error message in your account if your list is too small.
I know this is a lot to take in, or at least I think it is! but it is also a very clever and sophisticated way of making sure you maximise on your exposure. I hope that this blog post helps anyone who is thinking of re marketing their business for the first time, or anyone currently studying to better understand what it means and how it works. Thanks for reading! 
