How you set up your remarketing campaign depends on your business goals and the types of customers that you'd like to reach. To help you meet your goals, here are some tips and suggestions to bear in mind as you set up your remarketing campaign.
Remarketing list strategies
1. Target all your website visitors and app usersThe most basic way to remarket is to reach an audience that has visited your website or used your app. The recommended approach is to use the “Google Ads optimised list”, which help you reach website visitors, app users and other audience sources.
Smart bidding strategies such as Enhanced CPC (cost-per-click) will automatically adjust your manual bids for clicks that seem more or less likely to lead to a sale or conversion on your website.
Target CPA (cost-per-action) bidding is an optimisation tool that can help you maximise your return on investment (ROI) by optimising bids in real-time, impression-by-impression. With Target CPA bidding, you no longer need to adjust your bids manually to reach your conversion goals.
Target ROAS (Target return on ad spend) helps you convert customers by setting a maximum cost-per-click bid while trying to achieve an ROAS equal to your target.
Maximise conversions will seek to obtain the most conversions for your specified budget, independent of ROAS or a target CPA.
Manual bid strategies: If you prefer to manage your remarketing campaign bids manually, we recommend setting a maximum CPC bid.
Here are a couple of bid strategies that can help you improve your remarketing performance:
If you're happy with the performance of your remarketing campaign, you should consider raising your bid to reach more customers and improve your ROI. Raising your bid can help you improve your ad's position, increasing your chances of appearing consistently on Display Network websites to people on your remarketing list.
If you've created remarketing lists with various membership durations, you can use bid management to your advantage. Say that you want to reach visitors who came to your website in the past 30 days separately from people who visited your site in the last seven days. You can create two different lists, each with varying durations, and then bid more aggressively for the list that's more valuable to you.
Example
To do this, she creates a list of television page viewers with the membership duration set to seven days and targets this list with a more aggressive bid. She also creates a second list of television page viewers with membership duration set to 30 days. To prevent reaching seven-day visitors with both lists, she then creates a custom combination to target the 30-day membership list, excludes the seven-day list, and uses a less aggressive bid.
With dynamic remarketing, a Google Ads product suggestion engine can show products and services to people who previously viewed those products and services on your website. The suggestion engine will also decide which type of ad layout is likely to perform best, based on the person and device that they're using. Learn more about dynamic remarketing
Sometimes people will place items in their online shopping baskets without completing their purchase. Since these customers are often very close to making a purchasing decision, it can be a valuable opportunity to contact them and help them purchase. To reach this audience, set up your remarketing list to target 'Visitors of a page who did not visit another page', and specify the URL of your shopping basket page and order confirmation page.
Example
Nina runs an online electronics shop. She finds that her customers put big-ticket items in their shopping baskets but don't always complete their purchases. Nina decides to set up a remarketing campaign to attract these customers back to her shop and hopefully complete the sale.
Customers who've already purchased items from your website may also be interested in complementary products or services that you offer.
By creating a list of 'converted customers', you'll reach a smaller group of your website visitors, but these customers will already be familiar with, and interested in, your business. Make sure that you customise your ads for this group.
You can also create remarketing lists for certain products. If customers have viewed certain items and then made a purchase, you could show them ads for another related product.
Example
Jason owns a gardening supply shop and wants to reach customers who've already viewed the plant seeds section in his shop and then made a purchase. He knows customers who purchased plant seeds are often interested in plant food products, so he sets up a remarketing campaign to advertise these related products to those existing customers.
To showcase different product categories, create a remarketing list for each product category where the URL for each list contains the category name.
Example
She creates an ad that appears for customers who browsed her 'Women's Clothing' page and a different ad for customers who browsed the 'Men's Clothing' page.
If you anticipate that customers are likely to purchase from your business within a certain time period after their initial interactions, you can create a remarketing list with a specific membership duration.
To reach customers who made a purchase within the last 30 to 90 days, create two remarketing lists: one with a 30-day duration and one with a 90-day duration. Then use a custom combination list to reach all customers on the 90-day list, but not the 30-day list.
Example
Ad strategies
10. Tailor your ads to your remarketing strategyYour creative strategy is just as important as your remarketing list strategy. Here are some general recommendations for your remarketing ads:
- Relevant to the audience that you'd like to reach
- Same look and feel as your site
- Compelling call-to-action
Example
Jane's remarketing ads to people who visited the women's outer garment section of her website would be more relevant if they promoted women's down jackets instead of a generic message.
Higher bids increase your ability to reach more people on your remarketing lists, maximising your exposure to this valuable audience. When determining what bid to set, consider the value of your customers in each of your remarketing lists.
Example
Reggie sells electronics. Since TVs are more profitable than cameras, he bids higher for a remarketing list that targets visitors to TV pages than for a list created for camera pages.
He's also set up two custom combinations to target two sets of customers:
- Those who've visited his website but haven't initiated a purchase
- Those who've already begun the checkout process on his website but abandoned it without completing a purchase
People who have already added products to their shopping baskets are more likely to complete a purchase, and therefore are probably more valuable to him. In this case, he bids higher for the ad group with this remarketing list.
General strategies
13. Broaden your location and language targetingSince remarketing can help you reach your ideal customers, you should be able to show them ads no matter where they are on the web. Your website visitors may be multilingual and may access your website from around the world, so make sure that in your campaign settings you select to target all languages.
When you choose your location targeting, bear in mind that you should be able to serve customers in the regions that you target.
Increasing the duration of your list (e.g. from 30 to 60 days) allows you to engage with people who visit your website within the specified time period. In most cases, the longer the duration, the more users you'll have on your list.
To potentially increase conversions from your list, you could decrease its membership duration to get only the most recent visitors. However, decreasing the duration could limit the number of potential customers whom you're able to reach.
Frequency capping limits the number of times that a person is exposed to an ad per day, which could reduce your impressions.
Ad scheduling lets you specify certain hours or days of the week when you want your ads to show so that you can reach your customers while they're awake and online to see your ads.
Long-term strategies
18. Invest your ad dollars on websites that show resultsIf you're spending a large percentage of your budget on one or two websites but aren't getting enough conversions to justify the investment, you could decrease your bid for such a website or exclude the site from your campaign.
Conversely, if a handful of sites are performing exceptionally well and delivering a low CPA, you may want to increase your bid on these sites.
Conversion tracking lets you see how many conversions you're getting from your remarketing campaign. You can also evaluate your performance on Display Network sites that showed your ads compared with the performance on the Search network and decide how to bid and optimise based on this data.
Use a complementary online advertising strategy to attract more people to your website so that you can add them to your list. Display and search campaigns are effective ways to achieve this.