Google Ads dynamic remarketing

Implementation Guide

This section describes how to implement Google Ads dynamic remarketing tags in Tag Manager with one instance of the remarketing tag for all steps of your purchase funnel.

The main steps for this process are:

1. Configure your website to pass values to Tag Manager via the data layer or custom JavaScript.
2. Create data layer variables in Tag Manager.
3. Create triggers.
4. Configure the remarketing tag with custom parameters.

Configure variables

Configure a Tag Manager variable for each piece of dynamic data that we want to pass to the remarketing tag. In this example, we'll have a variable for 'Event Name', 'Event Value' and a variable for 'Event Items'.

• Event Name: The dynamic remarketing event name, which describes the event being measured. It is used by the Google Ads system to assign users to one of several automatically generated user lists. We recommend that you use a specific set of event names from the list of recommended events described in Google Ads helps center.

• Event Value: The value of the remarketing event. This represents the total value of the products or services the user is interacting with.

• Event Items: The list of items the user is interacting with. This variable must be an array of objects with properties following the dynamic remarketing item schema. Each item must have one or more of the following properties: 'id', 'location_id', 'origin', 'destination', 'start_date', 'end_date', 'google_business_vertical'.

See the list of events and parameters on the Google Ads Help Center.

There are several ways to capture dynamic data with Tag Manager. For example, you can pass values explicitly to Tag Manager from your website using the data layer, or you can use Tag Manager to extract it from your site if possible using custom JavaScript variables.

Update your site to pass values to Tag Manager via the data layer: This is the more robust method for remarketing tag configuration. This method will pass dynamic values directly to your remarketing tag from the data layer, but it requires that a developer make code changes on your website. We recommend that you use a specific set of event names from the list of recommended events. Once the event data is available in the data layer, create data layer variables in Tag Manager to pass these values to your tags. In Tag Manager, create a data layer variable for 'items' and another for 'value':

1. Click Variables  New.
2. Select Data Layer Variable.
3. For Data Layer Variable Name, enter 'items'.
4. Click Save.

Repeat these steps to create a second Data Layer Variable that uses 'value' for the Data Layer Variable Name.

Developers can learn more about data layer implementations at the Tag Manager developer site.

Use custom JavaScript variables: You can alternatively use custom JavaScript code to populate the dynamic parameter values from Tag Manager with custom tags. This approach, while less robust than the former, is sometimes the most practical way of deploying the remarketing tags since it doesn't require you to make any code changes directly on your site. You can write custom JavaScript code that will pull the required dynamic values from the existing pages source code and pass it to the tag.

In general, the data needed by the remarketing tag is already present somewhere in the document and can be retrieved via JavaScript code that is injected into the page through Tag Manager. The downside of this method is that it relies on your site's source code as observed at the time of implementation, and future changes to Tag Manager may require you to revise your custom JavaScript code.

Configure triggers

The next step is to set up triggers in Tag Manager for the remarketing tag. Each trigger is built by specifying a type of event, and one or more filters to specify when a tag should fire.

Pageview-based triggers

In most cases, the trigger you need to create will be based on the view of a particular page, or on a subset of pages. For example: On an ecommerce website, we'll usually want to create one trigger to fire the tag on all product pages, one trigger to fire the tag on the cart page, and one trigger to fire the tag on the purchase confirmation page.

To create a pageview trigger

1. Click Triggers New.
2. Click Trigger Configuration and select Page View.
3. Set the trigger to fire on Some Page Views.
4. In the section 'Fire this trigger when an Event occurs and all of these conditions are true', enter Page URL contains <path>, where <path> is a predictable part of the URL for the pages where you want this tag to fire (e.g. /products/).

To create a trigger that fires a tag on a group of pages (e.g. the product pages), use operators like "contains" or "matches regular expression" so it matches the desired page URL.

Non-URL triggers

In situations where the URL can't be used to differentiate page types, you may be able to use other variables as filters for the pageview event. For example, an ID attribute may be present:

To create a trigger that will fire when this attribute is found:

1. Click Triggers New.
2. Click Trigger Configuration and select Element Visibility.
3. Set Selection Method to ID.
4. In the Element ID field, enter cart_title.
5. Set this tag to fire once per page.
6. Set Minimum Percent Visible to 1%.
7. Set the trigger to fire on All Visibility Events.

Asynchronous events

To ensure the best performance of your dynamic remarketing campaigns, it's important to fire tags as soon as the user completes an important step in the purchasing funnel, such as when a product is added to the cart. If a cart update doesn't lead to a new pageview, you can trigger based on a click event or a custom event.

If you have a data layer implementation, use a custom event to let Tag Manager know that a product was added to the cart and pass the relevant product information at the same time.

When an item is added to the cart, your website code should use dataLayer.push() to add an event to the data layer:

Next, create the trigger in Tag Manager:

1. Click Triggers New.
2. Click Trigger Configuration and select Other: Custom Event.
3. Set Event Name to add_to_cart.

Configure tag instance

You now have all the pieces ready to be assembled. You have configured variables to receive dynamic data and have set up triggers to tell Tag Manager when to fire remarketing tags. The final step is to set up remarketing tag with the configured variables.

Here's an example remarketing tag configuration:

1. Click Tags New.
2. Click Tag Configuration and select Google Ads Remarketing.
3. Set the Conversion ID (and optional Conversion Label) to the value provided by Google Ads. Learn more
   TIP: Use a Constant String variable for your Google Ads Conversion ID. This will make it easier to create and manage additional Google Ads tags.
4. Check the box labeled "Send dynamic remarketing event data" and reference the Tag Manager variables that you created earlier:
   • Event Name: {{Event}}
   • Event Value: {{value}}
   • Event Items: {{items}}