Google Ads Remarketing Best Practices

Remarketing with Google Ads is one of the most budget-friendly optimization strategies that advertisers use to boost conversion rates and generate more sales.

The idea behind remarketing is to entice people who have already shown interest in your products or services to revisit your website. Your previous visitors are the most likely to convert, whether that’s through making a purchase or subscribing to your newsletter.

Read on to discover Google Ads remarketing best practices that you can implement to improve your conversion rates.

Why You Should Include Remarketing in Your PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Strategy

With remarketing, you can target users who have previously visited your site with personalized ads. Your objective is to get them to return and perform a conversion activity this time around.

Most visitors won’t lead to conversions on their first visit to your site. The more complex and expensive the products or services you offer, the longer they take to do what you intend for them to do.

It may even take dozens of visits to your site for customers before they finally convert. This is where remarketing steps in to give your site visitors that extra nudge towards conversion.

It’s easy to set up a PPC advertisement with remarketing as a campaign goal. Plus, it’s a lot cheaper to run compared to brand-new campaigns in Google Ads.

However, it’s worth noting that with remarketing, one person’s results, especially in the beginning, will not always be the same as another.

5 Ways to Remarket on Google Ads

There are several different techniques you can implement when running Google Ads remarketing campaigns.

• Standard remarketing – Your image ads on the Google Display Network are shown to people who have previously visited your website.
• Dynamic remarketing – Specific product or service ads are shown to previous site visitors, boosting conversion results in the process.
• Remarketing lists for search ads – Ads target past visitors who perform follow-up Google searches after leaving your website.
• Video remarketing – Your ads are served to people who have previously interacted with your videos or YouTube channel. They will see these remarketing ads while they browse YouTube and Display Network websites, apps, and videos.
• Customer list remarketing – This remarketing tactic allows you to use customer information you have gathered from previous advertising campaigns. This strategy lets you target audiences that are similar to your customers.

Google Ads Remarketing Best Practices for the Different Google Ads Networks

Let’s take a closer look at each of the Google Ads networks, and consider the Google Ads remarketing best practices for each one.

Search Network

• Identify the keywords that yielded the best results and focus your remarketing bids around them.
• Remember to personalize the CTA of your ad copies.
• In terms of keyword options, instead of implementing exact or phrase match types, use broad match. That’s because you’ve already qualified and narrowed down your audience. Therefore, using broad match keywords is an advantage.
• Make use of engagement tracking to draw your visitors back to where they left on your website. This will significantly assist with customer retention.

Shopping Network

• Use both customer and site visitor data to generate your lists.
• Identify visitor segments you want to treat differently.
• Create audience lists that target specific audiences to a product or service.
• Make bid adjustments to drive more volume and engagement from your audience lists.
• To maximize your ads’ reach, make sure to apply audiences at the campaign level.
• Implement broad keyword selections and match types as the audience has already been narrowed down by your specific remarketing parameters.
• Take advantage of automated ad creation so that your ads appear in relevant ad spaces and your bids are set to maximize conversion value.
• To keep your ROAS (return on ad spend) at a specific target, set an optional ROAS. If you fail to set your target ROAS, Google will attempt to maximize your ads’ conversion value within your set budget.
• For maximum performance and to keep things simple, target all products or services in one campaign. This also simplifies the ad performance comparison.
• Use multiple product images in your ads.

Video Network

• The main thing to consider with video remarketing is audience selection. When choosing your remarketing audience on YouTube, keep in mind that you have limited time to demonstrate the value of your product or service. As such, you must keep your audience engaged.
• Your best audience for video remarketing are the people who have already engaged with you or those who are aware of your brand, product, or service. This is vital as it can be the final push your audience needs to choose you over the competition. However, don’t keep your target audience to just your previous customers — also, target similar audiences using new custom audience campaigns in Google Video Ads.
• Grab potential customers’ attention and show them why your product or service is the answer to their pressing need.
• Go beyond conventional text ads’ 70-character limit and don’t restrict your campaigns’ potential by using dull, static image ads.
• When demonstrating the value of your offering, use the connecting power of 30-second video clips instead of just a sentence or two.

Additional Tips for Google Ads Remarketing Best Practices

When you’re serious about remarketing, you should be using data analytics and optimization techniques. Think about the following when you’re ramping up your remarketing efforts.

Google Analytics Best Practices

Using analytics for remarketing takes a little practice to perfect. Here are some tips to help you leverage Google Analytics to get the most out of your remarketing:

1. Track Your Campaigns

Use UTM (urchin tracking module) parameters for better ad campaign tracking in Google Analytics. UTM parameters, also known as UTM codes, are text snippets added to your URL for better Google Analytics tracking.

2. Integrate Analytics Data With Google Ads

If Google Analytics is set up on your site, you have abundant customer interaction data at your fingertips. Make use of this data to better track how the customers you acquire through remarketing behave by linking your Analytics account with Google Ads.

3. Target High-Value Customers

With remarketing, you can retarget high-value audiences based on different customer demographics, such as gender, age, and interests, to boost your ROAS.

4. Exploit Google Analytics Customized Audiences

Create a very customized and segmented re-marketing list from Google Analytics audience segments and use them in Google ads to show more personalized ads to your audience.

Optimization Configuration Settings

If you’ve been in PPC advertising for a while, you’ll know how important optimization is to your campaign. Here are some pointers to ensure you are optimizing for remarketing success.

Define Your Bidding Strategy

You’re free to retarget anyone who has visited your website. However, setting your bid high for visitors to key pages, and decreasing your bids for other visitors is a significantly more cost-effective strategy.

This is because people visiting key site pages such as products, pricing, and other related landing pages are more likely to convert into paying customers than others.

Use smart bidding tactics such as enhanced CPC (cost-per-click) to automatically adjust manual bids for clicks that are likely to result in a sale or conversion.

Identify Your Frequency Capping Limit

Frequency capping limits the number of times your ads are shown to the same person. With the right remarketing frequency cap, you avoid wasting your ad dollars on people who’d rather not be your customer. It also ensures you don’t annoy potential customers by serving them your remarketing ads too often.

Optimize Your Images for Dynamic Remarketing Ads

With Google Ads remarketing, your ads are shown to previous site visitors. With dynamic remarketing, you can take targeting to a whole new level. It allows you to serve people specific advertisements about the exact products or services they already viewed on your website.

Better Sales and Conversions With Google Ads Remarketing

When done right, Google Ads remarketing is an effective PPC strategy that can dramatically boost conversions for your website. Just remember to use the correct parameters for optimizing your campaigns.

Make sure your audience lists are the right ones and that your content is engaging enough to keep your audience hooked.

It’s also worth mentioning that campaign results depend on the industry you’re in or the data types you use for targeting. But all in all, the majority of businesses that take advantage of remarketing campaigns improve their conversion rates by 5-8 times.