How Does Google Remarketing Work?

In Google Ads (formerly known as AdWords), remarketing is one of the hottest trends to know about now. When you understand what it can do, you’ll see why advertisers love it.

It’s almost impossible to convert first-time visitors. Most people will browse your site then leave without even coming close to buying anything.

But that doesn’t mean the chance is gone.

In fact, when you use remarketing in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, each visit is just the beginning of a potential new customer relationship.

We’ve put together this definitive guide to Google Ads remarketing for you, not only so you understand the benefits and features, but also so you can take action to make remarketing work for your campaigns.

How Remarketing Works in Google Ads

Remarketing is made possible by a simple code snippet, which is known as a pixel or tag. When you add this snippet to your website, the advertising platform (i.e. Google Ads, Facebook, Bing, etc.) will be able to track visitor behaviors.

Whenever someone visits your site, Google Ads adds them as a user on your list, and it also prompts the user to enable cookies on their website browser.

This is an important aspect.

When users enable cookies, they give permission for advertising platforms like Google Ads to track their on-site behaviors and store information about what they look at.

Once the code snippet and cookies are in place, you will be able to display your ads to users while they browse the internet. Long after they have left your site, you can serve up targeted ads on other sites on the Google Display and Google Search networks, and in YouTube videos.

By using the data at hand to tailor your ads to the interests of each user, remarketing makes it possible for advertisers to optimize their ads for a much higher conversion rate.

Options for Google Ads Remarketing

Like any good marketing channel, remarketing with Google Ads provides several options to explore. Here are the different ways you can do remarketing in Google:

1. Standard remarketing – Show your ads to previous visitors while they are active on the Google Display Network.
2. Dynamic remarketing – Show your ads to previous visitors that viewed products or services on your website.
3. Remarketing for mobile apps – If a user was active on your mobile site or app, you can target them with your ads whenever they are using other mobile sites or mobile apps.
4. Remarketing lists for search ads – Otherwise known as RLSA. In a similar way to standard remarketing, you can target past visitors, but this time on Google Search Network.  
5. Video remarketing – Show your ads to people that previously engaged with your YouTube channel or other video platforms. You can target them with video ads on YouTube or on the Google Display Network websites and videos.
6. Email list remarketing – Also known as Customer Match, this allows you to serve ads to people on your email list whenever they’re logged in to Gmail, Google Search or YouTube.

7 Benefits of Remarketing for your PPC Campaign

Statistically, 3% or less of first-time visitors convert, with around 90% bouncing off on a new website after looking at just one page.

It takes time to convince people to buy.

That’s where remarketing comes in.

Here are seven benefits of using remarketing in PPC campaigns:

1. Engage Prospects at the Right Time

By targeting people — that have already interacted with your business — at the right time, you can show ads just as they are searching elsewhere, and at a time when they are more likely to buy.

2. Customized Ads

You have over 100 templates to choose from and can customize the fine details with your own text, colors, images, and your own logo. With Google Ads remarketing, it’s easy to create professional ads.

3. It Increases Personalization

By segmenting your audience with defined remarketing lists, you can target similar groups of people with tailored content and ads. For example, one list could focus on following up with people who abandoned carts.

4. Higher Conversion Rates

Remarketing is all about catching up with people after they have left your website. By re-engaging them with targeted content that is relevant to their interests and on-site behaviors, you stand a better chance of winning them over.

5. It’s Cost-Effective

As remarketing focuses on qualified prospects, your ads will be more relevant. Therefore, your Quality Score will increase. This helps reduce cost-per-click (CPC) rates. Furthermore, with real-time bids, Google Ads calculates the optimal bid for people viewing your ads. This helps you win auctions at the best price, saving your budget.

6. Better Device Targeting

Using visitor data, you can see where your ads are displayed, how people visit your site, and the total price you will pay for clicks. Using these insights, you can customize remarketing ads to engage more people on different devices.

7. It Enhances Search Engine Optimization

Between data insights and a greater focus on nurturing relationships with previous site visitors, you can optimize your ads and content marketing efforts for greater relevance. Over time, this improves your search engine optimization performance, which has a big impact on brand awareness and lead generation.

Highly Effective Google Ads Remarketing Strategies

Not every PPC campaign is the same. Therefore, there is no all-conquering remarketing technique that will work for everyone.

The approach you take depends on what your goals are. Here are five Google Ads remarketing strategies to consider for your campaigns.

1. Similar Audience

You can use this to show your ads to people who share similar characteristics to the users already on your remarketing list.

Google Ads uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze behavioral data from the many millions of websites and apps on its Display Network. This enables it to discover similar users based on demographics, browsing activity, and purchasing habits.

Google Ads can automatically identify which remarketing lists are suitable for Similar Audience by assessing the following factors:

• The number of visitors on the original list
• How recently these people joined the original list
• The similarity of these visitors’ search behavior

Benefits of Similar Audience Remarketing

1. Increased reach. Your ads will be shown to more people with similar interests to your existing visitors.
2. Better chance of a conversion. People are more likely to convert on subsequent visits after you retarget them and guide them back to a specific product or page they expressed interest in before.
3. Deeper data insights. As you gather more statistical data on a larger group of similar visitors, you can understand more about their behaviors and interests.
4. Increased ad relevance. As your ads are optimized to engage more people, ad relevance increases, which in turn leads to a higher Quality Score. This is good news for ad performance and your budget.

When to Use this Remarketing Strategy

Similar Audience remarketing is good when you want to boost traffic from existing prospects. However, take care not to focus solely on this strategy as it may be too narrow to attract new leads with other interests.

2. In-Market Audience

Remarketing with In-Market Audience allows advertisers to connect with users that are actively considering products and services on the Google network. You can use this strategy to target a wide variety of consumers based on interests or purchasing intent.

When you are considering visitors for In-Market Audience, Google Ads will consider:

• Their clicks on related ads and any subsequent conversions.
• The content of the site and the pages they visit.

In doing this, Google will collate a group of people with shared interests who are likely to be interested in whatever product or service you offer. This allows for efficient mass targeting. You can also customize the targeting settings further to optimize your costs.

Benefits of In-Market Audience Remarketing

1. Increased ROI. The high-level targeting boosts ad performance, effectively driving conversions to earn you a much better return on investment (ROI).
2. Cost-effective. You only have to pay for attracting more interested users, saving costs on unqualified clicks.
3. Selective targeting. You can focus on a specific category, product or service, and increase engagement on that alone.

When to Use this Remarketing Strategy

If you want to display your ads to a specific audience that viewed a particular product or category earlier, then In-Market Audience is a good strategy. These users are already in the consideration phase of the buyer’s journey so this type of filtered remarketing can be very successful.

One word of caution is to avoid investing too heavily in this as it will limit your reach to new visitors considering other products.

3. Affinity Audience Targeting

Google can create predefined lists of users, which are segmented by general interests based on their search history and browsing behavior. These segmented groups are known as Affinity Audience.

While this may seem akin to In-Market Audience, there is a subtle difference.

For In-Market Audience, the groups are populated by Google, and they comprise users who have displayed purchasing intent by comparing products within a defined category. By comparison, you can compile your own Affinity Audience lists, and customize these audience depending on several key web activities, such as:

• Search history
• Keyword use
• Website visits

Google offers all this data, which gives you more control over your ad targeting.

Benefits of Affinity Audience Remarketing

1. Refined targeting. You will be targeting people who have already visited your website.
2. Grows your audience. You can build lists of people with similar browsing histories, and reach more people with similar interests to your existing customers.
3. App targeting. You can find prospects that use specific apps or websites.

When to Use this Remarketing Strategy

If you want to build brand awareness or encourage consideration among groups of people that have an interest in your products (or similar products), then Affinity Audience targeting is a smart move.

This Google Ads remarketing technique works well even when you don’t have a lot of information about your prospects, as Google can help you learn more through analyzing their search history.

4. Remarketing Search List Retargeting

The Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) feature is one a popular Google Ads remarketing strategy that allows you to customize search ads to target previous visitors.

In your Google Ads account dashboard, it’s easy to select keywords, adjust bids, and create ads that are aligned with user intent. That makes it possible to target specific people when they are using Google or browsing on search partner websites.

You can create remarketing lists and set the status to ‘Open’ or ‘Closed’, which determines whether Google will add users to your list or not.

There are two methods of using RLSAs:

1. Make bid adjustments for users that are searching on Google with the keywords you have already bid on.
2. Set up your search ad groups to be triggered when a user on your list uses your keywords to search on Google.

Benefits of RLSAs

1. Organized audience. You can use these lists to arrange your audience into specific groups.
2. Relevant targeting. You can show the right ads to the right people.
3. Optimizes your budget. With increased relevance comes higher Quality Score, and in turn, lower ad costs.
4. Customized ads. This allows you to target each list with a tailor-made ad.

 When to Use this Remarketing Strategy

Many advertisers use RLSAs to remarket to people who abandoned carts. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple email encouraging people to return to complete their order and you can close the sale.

5. Customer Match

This remarketing strategy helps you re-engage users across several Google channels, including Search, Shopping, YouTube, and Gmail. By leveraging customer information in your Ads account, it targets your customers with specific ads.

To do this, you must upload customer data files in your account, which can include information like names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers. Google Ads’ algorithm then cross-references this data with its other partner databases. You can upload this data, and edit it through a Google Ads API.

Unfortunately, Customer Match is not available to everyone in Google Ads. To use it, your account needs:

• Good history of policy compliance.
• Good payment history.
• Minimum 90 days lifetime of Google Ads account.
• Over $50,000 USD total lifetime spend in Google Ads (or equivalent in another currency)

Benefits of Customer Match

1. Unlimited membership duration. This is the default setting as Customer Match audience don’t expire.
2. Sharable audience data. You can share Customer Match audience between multiple Ads accounts.
3. Boosts brand loyalty. This strategy is good for retaining existing customers, encouraging them to return and buy again.
4. Reduces cart abandonment rates. It’s a good technique to bring back cart abandoners.

When to Use this Remarketing Strategy

It takes time for people to trust a brand. By remarketing to the same visitors again, you can build familiarity with them. The fact that you can use this strategy to reach people on multiple channels makes it useful for spreading brand awareness and fostering trust.

Unlike RLSAs, the Customer Match strategy is specifically for existing customers. This gives it a high-level of targeting, which limits its usefulness for reaching new prospects.

How to Improve Google Ads Remarketing

So, with the key strategies in mind, what else can you do to improve your remarketing game?

Here are nine tips to ensure you maximize your chances of turning every site visitor into a paying customer.

1. Re-engage Cart Abandoners

Quite often, people get distracted during the checkout process. They may add items to their cart, then leave your site because they had something else to do. As they are already so close to conversion, these prospects are low-hanging fruit.

Here’s what to do:

• Create a remarketing list that targets “Visitors of a page who did not visit another page”
• Enter the URL of your shopping cart page
• Enter the URL of your order confirmation page

2. Showcase Different Product Categories

Create a separate remarketing list for every product category. The URL for each one should contain the category name.

Next, create a Custom Audience list based on the previous visit history of your visitors. This will display your ads to people that are already interested in that specific category.

3. Focus on Specific Time Periods

By analyzing visitor data, you can determine when people are more likely to make purchases. Use engagement data to optimize your remarketing campaign, setting up your ads to target prospects during peak times of the day, and certain days of the week.

4. Use Responsive Search Ads

Responsive search ads are great because they dynamically adjust their format, size, and appearance to fit whatever ad space is available. This saves you a lot of time and ensures you can display the best ad copy to each audience group.

5. Optimize Your Remarketing Lists

This is vital if you are going to maximize your results. By identifying key parameters that will help you connect with previous customers, you can generate better results and make more efficient use of your budget.

6. Use Geo-Targeting

A lot of advertisers focus so much on getting the right keywords that they don’t think about who the people behind the search actually are. More specifically, they don’t think where they are. You can use geo-targeting to bid higher on keywords that are being used more in a specific region and exclude location that you don’t want to retarget. This is great for local business.

7. Demographic Segmentation

With demographic targeting, you can refine your audience by age bracket, gender, household income, and parental status. Here are a few tips to maximize your budget:

• Segment your bids based on Demographic Performance.
• Use Exclusions to narrow your reach. If you know particular demographics aren’t relative, exclusions can reduce wasted ad spend.

8. Membership Duration

How long do you want to store a cookie in a user’s browser? You can set the membership duration to a longer period to ensure your website will still remember users even if they return weeks or months later.

9. Cap Time Limits

With this setting, you can control how many times an individual visitor will see your ad on Google’s Display Network. Specifically, it is the average number of times a unique user will see your ad in a position of “1” over a specific time period.

You can use frequency capping to control this, and you can apply the limit at the ad, ad group, and campaign levels. When applied to campaigns, it limits the impressions individual users will have each day, week or month. By using Cap Time Limits, you protect your ads from being bombarded by individual visitors.

Shopping Remarketing Lists

This option target users that have previously visited your site and displays Shopping Ads to them while they are searching for your products on the Google network.

Here are three aspects to consider when exploring Shopping Remarketing Lists.

1. Custom Combination Testing

Navigate to the Shared Library tab in your Ads account, and then create a custom combination in the same place that you set up remarketing lists. Test out various combinations so you can discover what works best. Bonus tip: Experiment with combinations with different cookie lengths.

2. Selecting Your Audience

Knowing your audience is crucial in marketing. In paid advertising, its importance cannot be understated. You must define your remarketing list audience by analyzing data and developing a clear strategy that allows you to reach them.

3. Leverage Data Analytics

Data is a veritable goldmine – when you know how to use it. Put it under the microscope to evaluate key parameters like traffic, engagement ratio, and conversion rate. Continually monitor and test your retargeting campaign data to optimize your campaigns for better results.

Google Ads Remarketing Will Grow Your Brand

So, now you have all the knowledge you need to get started with Google Ads remarketing. Of course, it’s easier said than done, but the only way to get good at remarketing is by diving in with these strategies and tips.

Consider your goals, your audience, and whatever it is you are offering. Over time, with a proactive attitude to tweaking and testing, you’ll figure out what works best for your business.

Remarketing can be highly profitable, and it’s easily one of the best ways to boost customer retention and brand awareness. Done right, you can master Google Ads remarketing to optimize your budget with relevant, targeted ads that resonate with more people, ultimately creating loyal brand advocates who will help take your brand to the next level.