A quick look at Remarketing with Google AdWords and Analytics

Have you ever visited a company’s website only to later find you are being followed around the internet by their ads? If the answer is “yes”, then chances are you are being remarketed to.

What is Remarketing?

Remarketing enables you, as an advertiser, to show ads across the web to people who have already visited your website. You can even make the ad specific to the pages a person has viewed. So, say your customer was lingering on a page on your site with those fabulous, bright pink shoes you sell; you can start showing them display ads containing the fabulous, bright pink shoes. Or if they have bought the shoes you could show them display ads promoting the handbag that goes perfectly with them!

Remarketing works well because the people you are targeting have already engaged with your brand on your website. You have already put the hard work in through great SEO or PPC or other forms of advertising to get them to visit your site, now you are making sure they remember your brand while showing them products that they have already demonstrated an interest in.

A great example of remarketing done well is this from the Bodyshop; after I visited their “colour crush eyeshadow” page… I was shown this advert which showed several of their products including the “colour crush eyeshadow”.

How Does It Work?

If you are remarketing with Google you will need to add a bit of code (a tag) to your website. This can be done in two ways, either by adding the code Google AdWords provides or by using the code Google Analytics provides. Whether you choose to use the code provided by AdWords or by Analytics, you only have to add it once to each page on your website. Previously you had to create and add a different piece of code to every page you wanted to create a remarketing list for – this often resulted in a lot of pieces of different code present on your site.

Once the code has been added to your site you can start creating remarketing lists. The lists can be created either in AdWords or Analytics. You can create lists based on the pages people have visited on your website. If you use Google Analytics you have considerably more options on what to base your lists on. For example, you can create lists based on the time a person spent on your site, the number of pages they visited as well as many other metrics. So, if you only want to advertise those pink shoes to people who browsed your site for over five minutes, and you want to avoid the people who have bounced off your site, you can.

Once there are over 100 people on your remarketing list, and you have created your ads, the campaign can begin.

If you’re thinking those ads that follow you around the internet are really annoying, or are "a bit much", or perhaps you’re not sure if remarketing is for you, then you should consider ad frequency capping. This allows you to set how many times your ad will be shown to a person, and therefore you can effectively advertise your product or brand without being one of those annoying advertisers.

Additionally, you can stop showing your remarketing ads to people once they have converted.

Who Should Be Using Remarketing?

Remarketing can form part of an effective marketing strategy, whether you are a large company with a big budget, or a small company focusing on direct marketing to achieve a high ROI. As remarketing becomes more sophisticated, and you have more options when creating remarketing lists you can have more certainty that you are advertising the correct product to the correct people.

Remarketing is a great way to capitalise on your existing visitors, turning them into returning visitors. Not everyone is impulsive when it comes to shopping, not even fabulous pink shoes are a sure thing! People do browse the web before buying, especially when it comes to expensive purchases like holidays and cars, and remarketing enables you to be there while your potential customer is wandering around.