Set up remarketing lists for search ads

To tailor the display of search ads to customers who have clicked your social or search ads, follow this process (see the details below):

1. In Search Ads 360 label campaigns, ad groups, or ads that are relevant to your remarketing efforts.
   
   Search Ads 360 can use social ads that support click tracking to help build cross-channel remarketing lists. Search Ads 360 cannot use view tracking to build remarketing lists.

2. In Search Ads 360, create a remarketing list and associate it with the labeled items.

3. Depending on the search engine, do one of the following to set up a remarketing list.

   • For Google Ads accounts in the same advertiser, set up the remarketing list in Search Ads 360. In Google Ads, generate the remarketing tag and then add it to your site.

   • In other search engines such as Microsoft Advertising, or Google Ads accounts in a different advertiser, set up a remarketing list for your web site visitors and update your site with the remarketing tag the search engine generates. For this list, set up a URL CONTAINS rule that adds customers to the list when they click ads associated with a specific Search Ads 360 remarketing list.

Supported search engines

Search engines, including engine track, that support rule-based remarketing lists, such as "URL contains rules", can work with Search Ads 360 to build a remarketing list from a social audience.

Learn more about how to set up rule-based remarketing lists in Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising.

1. Label items in Search Ads 360

1. Create a label to identify the social campaigns, ad groups, or ads that are relevant to your remarketing efforts.

   You can use a label in more than one remarketing list, and you can add multiple labels to a remarketing list.

2. Apply the label to social campaigns, ad groups, or ads.

   Note that social ads (and the campaigns and ad groups that contain them) are visible only after Search Ads 360 has recorded a click on the ad. That is Search Ads 360 automatically creates social campaigns, ad groups, and ads as reporting metrics become available.

When customers click the labeled ads, Search Ads 360 adds a URL parameter to the landing page URL. The parameter uniquely identifies the remarketing list, and the engine can use that ID to add customers to a remarketing list maintained by the engine.

You can also label search campaigns, ad groups, ads, or keywords if you want to use Search Ads 360 for search-to-search remarketing.

Labels are hierarchical and cumulative. For example, if you apply a label to a campaign, all of the campaign's ad groups and ads will be included in the list. If you apply another label to a specific ad, the ad will be included in the campaign's label as well as its own label.

2. Create a remarketing list in Search Ads 360

Search engines other than Google Ads

1. In the left navigation panel, click Remarketing.

2. Click + Remarketing list.

3. Name the remarketing list.
   For non-Google Ads engines, we recommend that you use the same name for both the Search Ads 360 remarketing list and the corresponding list you create in the social engine. You may want to prefix the name with SA360 or the engine name to help find and sort your lists. For example, name the list SA360: Sandals and boots or Facebook: Sandals and boots.

4. Under "Create a list of customers from", select one or more of the following audience sources:

   • Search engine: customers who click labeled search ads will be added to the list.

   • Social engine: customers who click labeled social ads will be added to the list. 

5. Under "Remarket to customers within", click the ▼ (arrow), and then select Search engine.

6. Under Source labels, select the labels you want to use to build the remarketing list.

7. Skip the Google Ads engine section.

8. Click Save.
9. In the reporting table that appears, find the new list and copy the value in the URL parameter column. Search Ads 360 generates this value to uniquely identify the remarketing list. You'll need this value later when you set up a rule in the search engine.
   

After you save the remarketing list, it may be a few hours before Search Ads 360 starts appending &ds_rl=URL-parameter to landing page URLs. Similarly, if you remove the remarketing list, it may be a few hours before Search Ads 360 stops appending the ds_rl parameter.

Build a Google Ads remarketing list for search ads in Search Ads 360

Before you start: On the advertiser's site, make sure you've added remarketing tags generated by the search engine (see Google Ads Help).

For Google Ads accounts in the same advertiser, you can build a remarketing list in Search Ads 360 or you can create the remarketing list in Google Ads and then sync the list into Search Ads 360. The steps that follow describe how to build a Search Ads 360-generated and managed remarketing list for search ads that will be trafficked to Google Ads.

Alternatively, see Google Ads Help for information about how to build a remarketing list for search ads in Google Ads. RLSAs that are created in Google Ads can't be managed in Search Ads 360.

1. In Search Ads 360, in the left navigation panel, click Remarketing.
2. Click + Remarketing.
3. Name the remarketing list.
4. Under "Create a list of customer from", select one or more of the following audience sources:
   • Social engine: customers who click labeled social ads will be added to the list.
   • If you want to use labeled search ads to build the audience list, also select the Search engine check box.
5. Under "Remarket to customers within" click the ▼ (arrow) and select Search engine from the list.
6. Under Source labels, select the labels you want to use to build the remarketing list.
7. In the Google Ad engine section, under "Membership status (specifies if new visitors can be added)", Open is selected by default.
8. Under Membership duration, optionally specify the number of days a cookie ID remains in the list.

   30 days is selected by default. The maximum is 540 days.

9. Optional. In the Select Google Ads accounts section, select the accounts that you want to use the remarketing list.
   This step is optional because Search Ads 360 traffics the remarketing list to every Google Ads account in the advertiser.
10. Click Save.
11. Target the Google Ads list in Search Ads 360 or in Google Ads by doing any of the following:
    • Display specific ads only to list members
    • Prevent ads from displaying for list members
    • Use a different bid to reach list members

3. Set up a remarketing list in a search engine

Before you start: On the advertiser's site, make sure you've added remarketing tags generated by the search engine. Learn more in Microsoft Advertising Help or Google Ads Help.

If you don't want to generate a Google Ads remarketing list in Search Ads 360, or to use the remarketing list in a Google Ads account in a different advertiser, you can complete the following steps to create a parallel list in Google Ads or in any other search account that supports "URL contains" rules. 

 

1. Sign into the engine and do the following:

   1. Create a parallel remarketing list to collect the same audience as the Search Ads 360 remarketing list (learn how to create a remarketing list in Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising).

   2. For example, in Microsoft Advertising, set up a "URL contains" rule that adds customers to the list when a social ad's landing page URL contains parameters associated with a specific Search Ads 360 remarketing list.
      Use the following syntax for the rule:
      URL contains ds_rl=URL-parameter
      Where URL-parameter is the value of the URL parameter Search Ads 360 generated to match the Microsoft Advertising list with the Search Ads 360 list.

      Note that Search Ads 360 passes a maximum of 3 remarketing URL-parameter values to the landing page URL. If an ad's label is included in more than 3 Search Ads 360 remarketing lists, the engine only sees the first 3 remarketing lists identified by Search Ads 360 and the user will only be added to those 3 lists by the engine. The other lists will not contain this user, and audience targeting with these other lists will not apply to this user. 

2. Use the engine's remarketing list to target interested customers.

   For a Google Ads account, you can set up targeting from Search Ads 360:

   1. If the remarketing list was created in Google Ads, sync the Google Ads remarketing lists into Search Ads 360.
      If you've scheduled engine changes to sync on a regular basis, make sure to wait until the next sync occurs. You'll only see your Google Ads remarketing lists after they've been synced into Search Ads 360.

   2. Apply the Google Ads remarketing list to a manual or Shopping campaign to do the following:

      • Display specific ads only to list members
      • Prevent ads from displaying for list members
      • Use a different bid to reach list members

Next steps

In a Google Ads engine account, you can report on Google Ads remarketing lists from Search Ads 360.