Marketers know the majority of site visitors leave without taking any action. These people can be encouraged to return to the site with the help of traditional or dynamic remarketing.
Nowadays, however, the Internet is full of advertising, so it’s vital for each campaign to stand out from the crowd by using the most relevant and useful content. To achieve this, you can use the incredible potential of special types of remarketing.
The aim of this article is to expand your knowledge of remarketing possibilities and explain new ways to use remarketing to reach your goals.
Multi-level remarketing
Thanks to this function, you can show users different adverts promoting new offers, and even change the frequency of ad impressions, depending on the number of days since their last visit to your site. Such tactics are suitable for products or services that have a long sales cycle or trial period.
For example, we have a list of people who have bought a printer in our store. Our goal is to show them a banner with an offer to buy ink after three months. To do this, we’ll create one remarketing list with a 90-day duration, and an identical list with a 120-day duration. In the next step, we’ll combine these two audiences: choose the ‘Custom combination’ option from the drop-down menu.
Then we add the audience with the longer period of time by using the ‘Any of these audiences’ condition. The ‘None of these audiences’ condition will help us exclude the audience with the shorter period of time.
In the last step, you should create a new campaign or ad group for this new audience. As a result, our ads will start being displayed 90 days after the visitor bought a printer at our online store, and these ads will follow the customer for another 30 days.
Similar audience
Similar audience is a special kind of remarketing audience that includes people who are not visitors to your site, but their behavior and interests are very similar to those of your customers.
Using similar audiences is a simple and effective way to increase your traffic.
AdWords will record views of sites in Display Network over the last 30 days, and this information will be used for the automatic selection of a new group of potential customers within the network who have similar interests and behavior.
Google makes remarketing lists for creating similar audiences by itself, so lists with similar audiences will automatically appear next to your remarketing lists in Shared libraries. Please note that you won’t be able to see such lists if your remarketing audience contains cookies for fewer than 500 visitors:
We recommend creating a separate Google Display Network campaign for similar audiences, because quality indicators for these ads could be lower than for the traditional remarketing campaign.
Remarketing lists for search ads
With the help of traditional remarketing lists, you can display ads with special content or adjust your bids depending on the category of your site visitors.
To make your search ads visible to users from your remarketing list, the list should contain cookies for at least 1,000 visitors. You can check this from the Audiences tab in Shared libraries.
There are several strategies for using remarketing audiences for search ads:
- Add an audience to the existing campaign and increase bids for recent visitors to your site;
- Create a new campaign with a specific audience and adapt the text to your needs (offer a promotional coupon, promote special deals and so on);
- Exclude past visitors to your site who are still interested in products similar to yours. It will help to attract new visitors only;
- Target your ads at previous buyers who are interested in related products, or at high volume keywords that haven’t been used in a main advertising campaign.
Remarketing for YouTube viewers
If your brand has its own channel on YouTube, you can use remarketing for video viewers.
With the help of AdWords for Video, you can create remarketing lists of users who have completed one of the following actions:
- Interacted with or viewed your YouTube videos;
- Subscribed to or unsubscribed from your channel;
- Viewed your TrueView in-stream ads;
- Visited your channel.
To create a video remarketing list, your YouTube and AdWords accounts have to be linked. If you haven’t made advertising campaigns for video, please follow the guidelines at: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2545661?hl=en To create a remarketing list for YouTube viewers, go to the navigation panel and choose the ‘Video Remarketing’ option in Shared Library, click ‘+Remarketing list’, then choose a new remarketing list type and fill in the other fields.
You will be able to manage your lists from the ‘Targets’ tab of the video campaign.
As we promised at the beginning, we will now explain two ways to optimize your remarketing campaign.
One of the options is to exclude placements with low CTR. On some sites, advertising banners aren’t placed in the best position, which is why users rarely spot the ads. To exclude such low-performing placements, go to the Display Network report, find the Placements tab and analyze the CTR, bounce rate and conversions.
Highlight placements like those shown in red, click ‘Edit’ and select ‘Exclude.’
Before you exclude large platforms such as YouTube, remember that you can only exclude individual URLs on the site. To identify such URLs, select the site and go to the See details menu, then choose the ‘Selected’ option.
You can also add to the list of excluded placements those sites where visitors have a high bounce rate (this information can be obtained from Google Analytics).
The second method of optimizing your remarketing campaigns is to exclude certain categories of sites, so you avoid displaying your ads next to any content that you would not like to be associated with your brand. By this we mean different kinds of sensitive content, mobile apps, games or social networks. By default, only gambling is excluded.
You can find this option by going to the ‘Display Network’ tab, then scrolling down to the bottom of the page and clicking on the green ‘+ Options’ button.
You can also turn off showing your banners below-the-fold here.
As you can see, remarketing is an evolving discipline, which provides plenty of opportunities for smart advertisers. To take advantage of the benefits of remarketing, you simply need to determine which types of retargeting are most suitable for your business, then add them to your traditional remarketing campaign.