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What is Remarketing?

If you’ve heard people talk about “retargeting”, think of it as the same thing.

Remarketing is simply a term that Google has decided to use, while Facebook and other platforms use the word “retargeting”.

These two things have the same function.

Remarketing is what we can do as marketers to put ads in front of people who have already interacted with us. For example, they have been to our website or they watched our YouTube videos. Later on, when they’re doing other things like surfing other websites or watching other YouTube videos, we can decide to remarket to them–meaning show ads specifically to those people.

How do we build this Remarketing list? 

The most common way is to access the list of people who have come to your website. 

So to create a list like this, you need to have some code from Google on your website. You can generate “remarketing code” from your Google Ads account. Go to the audiences section, and put this code on your website.  

Another way is by using Google Analytics.

Simply set up audiences in analytics and import them into Google Ads.

Once you have the code in your website, you have to define the audience. Google is going to automatically create an audience for you. They create a list of people who have been to your website that has the code on it within the last 30 days. That’s the standard Remarketing list.

You can define your own list in a lot of different ways.

One option is to create a list of people who have been to specific pages of your website. Another option is to create a list of people who have been to your website within in the past 3 days or 90 days, even up to the maximum of 540 days (from the last time they were on your website).

There are a lot of other specifics that you can set up in your Google Ads when it comes to defining the Remarketing list. These variables must be specific to your business. If you have a service that’s time-sensitive, you shouldn’t be setting up a Remarketing list for 90 days out. If these people would have made a buying decision within a few days (or within a day),  there’s no reason to run ads to them 90 days later.

However, you also shouldn’t be too specific with this list. You need at least 100 active people on the list to be able to execute Remarketing. If you have a particular page of your website that only gets a dozen visitors each month,  then it wouldn’t make sense to set up a Remarketing list for that specific page. You need to go broader, and get enough people on the list for your Remarketing ads, for it to actually have an impact.

Another way you can set a Remarketing list is based on YouTube.

Google owns YouTube, so they are intertwined. If you have a YouTube channel, you can create Remarketing audiences from people who: 

  • Are constantly watching your channel
  • Have watched any of your videos
  • Have watched a specific video
  • Are your existing subscribers
  • Other specifics 

If you currently don’t get a lot of views, creating a list is not suggested. But if you have a good YouTube channel that gets a favorable amount of views and subscribers , you can create a good list. As these people have taken the time to watch your videos, if you have something that you want to sell to them, they are already warmed up to you.

How do you use the Remarketing list?

When you already have a good list, you can set up campaigns to target people on the different types of Google properties a.k.a. the different places that show Google ads.

The most common type of ads when it comes to Remarketing is Display Banner Ads.  

What are these? They’re banners that you find on different websites as you browse the internet. If you see one that’s advertising an offering from a site you visited previously, that is a Remarketing ad

Even if people don’t click the ads, they are still effective in keeping the business “top of mind”. This is especially good for a business that is running pay-per-click bidding as opposed to pay-per-thousand impression bidding. The goal is to get the people back to the website after they have already been there at least once by keeping it top of mind and reinforcing your offer.

You can also run Remarketing ads on YouTube.

If someone has been to your website, you can choose to show them a video ad on YouTube. The video ad can also show up for people who have watched a video from your YouTube channel.  

It can also work the other way, too. If someone has watched any of the videos on your YouTube channel, you can also create a list out of your viewers, then you can show display banner ads to those people.  

The last place where you can use Remarketing list is with Search Ads.

You can put your ad in front of the people who have been to your website, and are now back on Google.com searching for something. 

This strategy is usually used to get more aggressive with the bidding in Google Ads. Normally, you only want to pay $1.00 per click to get someone to your website. But if someone has been to your website before, that person becomes more valuable to you, so now you’d want to pay $1.50 or $2.00 per click for that person and other people who have that similar search pattern.

This can be set up as Remarketing for “search” campaigns. Either you set up a campaign specifically for Remarketing to this valuable target audience, or you could simply add the Remarketing list as a subset of your normal search campaign, and adjust the bids in order to bid more aggressively to these valuable people.

Summary:

Essentially, REMARKETING is showing ads to people who have already interacted with us in different ways. All of these ads and audiences are intertwined. Once you have a Remarketing list set up, you can use it pretty much anywhere. Keep in mind that with your particular business, you want to make sure that your Remarketing strategy makes sense. Make sure that you want to show your ads to people who would likely still become your customers.

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  1. […] example is the “Remarketing Audience”. If you’ve set up “remarketing” on your site, you’ve created an audience of people who […]

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