This week I decided to write about Remarketing in AdWords, which seems to be a confusing topic for some marketers.  Over the past month or so, I’ve received a lot of questions about both the concept and execution of Remarketing.  Let’s start with a quick introduction.  Remarketing is a new feature in AdWords that enables marketers to target people browsing the web (across Google’s Content Network) that have already visited their websites.  You can target these people with custom messaging, since you already know they visited your site (or specific sections or pages on your site).  It’s a form of behavioral targeting and can be a powerful way to “re-market” to specific visitor segments.

For example, if you run an e-commerce website that sells sneakers, you could target people on Google’s Content Network that visited specific sections of your website, such as the section containing running sneakers or cross trainers.  To clarify, you could provide specific advertising just for that visitor segment (and your advertising would run on other websites, not on Google.com).  Essentially, this is your second chance to get those visitors back to your site to act, so your messaging might be different than the first time you are in front of them.  It’s also worth mentioning that remarketing can potentially creep some people out, depending on the execution.  For example, an ad that says, “We know you visited {enter your website here}. Come back or we’ll tell everyone!” will probably creep prospective customers out.  Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean you should do it.  :)

Setting Up A Remarketing Campaign, A Step by Step Tutorial

Although Google has provided several articles in the AdWords Help Center about remarketing, I still don’t think there was a great example of walking advertisers through the setup (step by step).  Since it can definitely be a little confusing while you are setting up your first remarketing campaign, I’m going to provide the necessary steps below (with screenshots) of how to set up a remarketing campaign.  After the tutorial, I’ll provide some key takeaways, so you can be off and running.

Without further ado, let’s set up a remarketing campaign:

1. Develop Your Remarketing Strategy:
   I don’t recommend jumping in and creating a campaign until you clearly understand what you are trying to achieve.  For example, who are you trying to target, what do you want to say to them, and what is the ultimate goal?  In its simplest form, remarketing enables you to target people that visited your site in the past (or visited certain pages or sections of your site).  Then you can “remarket” to them while they are browsing the web (across Google’s Content Network).  You can target them with either text or display advertising.  For this tutorial, we’ll use a fictitious e-commerce website that sells sneakers.  Let’s say that we just launched a new trail running sneaker, specifically designed for running outdoors.  We are driving prospective customers to a landing page for the new sneakers via a number of channels (paid search, email marketing, etc).  To keep this simple, our goal is to remarket to anyone that visited that landing page to get them back to the site.
2. Let’s first add an audience by creating a remarketing list.  A remarketing list is essentially the visitor segment you want to target on the content network.  For our example, this includes any person that visited our landing page for our new trail running sneakers.  When you create a new list, you will receive a new snippet of code that needs to be placed on the landing page.  This snippet will “cookie” visitors that are viewing the landing page (in order for you to remarket to them later on).  Note, if you target a section of your site versus just a page, then you need to add the snippet to every page in that section.  The same goes for creating a remarketing list that contains all site visitors.  For that case, you would need to add the snippet to all pages on your site.
3. In your account, click the Audiences tab and then click the “Add Audiences” button.  If you don’t see the audiences tab, then click the arrow located on the right hand-side of your tabs.  You’ll be able to “show” the audiences tab by selecting a checkbox.

Finding the Audiences Tab in AdWords:


4. Once you click the “Add Audiences” button from within the audiences tab, you will see two sections, one that says “Select An Ad Group” and then one below it that says “Add Audiences”.  Don’t select an ad group at this point (you haven’t created the campaign and ad group you will use for remarketing yet) and click the link for “Create and Manage Lists” to create a new audience (this link is in the “Add Audiences” section near the bottom of the page).

Creating a new remarketing list:


5. You will be presented with a new page.  Once you are on this page, click the “New Audience” button and then click “Remarketing List”.  Enter a name for your audience, a description, the membership duration (cookie length), and then select the radio button for “Create a new remarketing tag”.  The membership duration is how long you want the cookie to last for users that visited our landing page.  You can keep 30 days for our example.  Click “Save” when you’re done.

Adding Details For Your New Remarketing List:


6. When you click the save button, you will see your new audience displayed in a table.  Chances are you only have one remarketing list (since we have only created one in this tutorial.)  If you have created others, they will also be listed.  There should be a column that says, “Tag/Rules” which contains a link that triggers your new snippet of remarketing code.  When you click the link, you can copy the code that needs to be added to the landing page.  You can place the code snippet before the closing body tag in the landing page </body>.  Again, we are only adding it to one page, but if you wanted to target visitors of a section of your site, you would need to add the snippet of code to all pages within that section.

Triggering Your New Remarketing Code Snippet:


7. Congratulations, you have created your first audience (based on the remarketing list you just created).  Now you need a campaign and ad group that targets that new audience.  The new ad group will contain the ads that will be displayed to your visitor segment (the people that viewed our landing page and are now browsing the web after leaving our site).  Go back to your campaigns tab to view all of your online campaigns (you can click the “all online campaigns” link in the upper left-hand corner of the page you are currently viewing.)
8. Create a new campaign and append “Remarketing” to the name of the campaign.  It’s not necessary to do this, but will help you quickly identify the remarketing campaign in the future.  Make sure the campaign only targets the content network.

Selecting Content Network Only Under Campaign Settings:


9. Create a new ad group and give it a descriptive name like “Trail Sneakers Remarket”.  Do not add any keywords to this ad group (since they aren’t necessary).  The ad group will only contain ads that will be presented to the visitor segment you are targeting.  This will be possible once you “connect” your remarketing list to your new ad group.  Set a proper content bid in your ad group settings (based on your knowledge of your current campaigns and ad groups).
10. Now create your ads that will bring visitors back to your site! Be creative and provide messaging with the understanding that these people were already on the landing page for our new sneakers.  This is your second chance to get them to convert, so you should tailor your message knowing this.  For example, you probably don’t want to provide the same core message that you would present to a new prospective customer (one that never saw the sneakers before).  Maybe you could provide additional selling points for the new trail sneakers, or maybe you could provide a special offer, discount, or other incentive to get them to come back.  As always, you can test various ads to see which ones perform the best.This is also where you can go overboard and creep people out (like I mentioned earlier).  For example, “You liked our sneakers enough to visit once, come back or else!”  If you creep people out, you’ll hear from them alright (just not for the reasons you want!)  :)

What About Visitors That Converted Already?
You might be wondering if your remarketing ads will show up for visitors that did convert already. For our example, your ads will still show up. You would need to set up a “custom combination” if you want to exclude visitors that converted. I cover custom combinations later in this post, but the topic is bit more complex so I plan to cover that functionality in a later post.

11. Once your ad group and ads are created, it’s time to connect this ad group with the remarketing list we created earlier.  To do that, make sure the new ad group is active by clicking on the new ad group in the remarketing campaign (as you normally would to edit settings, ads, keywords, etc.)  Click the “Audiences” tab after selecting your new ad group and then click “Add Audience”.  You should see the audience we created earlier in the list.  Click the “add” link located to the right of the audience list.  Then click “Save” to finalize the connection.

Finding The Audiences Tab And Add Audiences Button In Your New Ad Group:


Connecting Your New Ad Group With A Remarketing List:


12. You’re done! You have successfully set up a remarketing campaign.  You can check back to see how many people are being added to the remarketing list by visiting either the ad group you connected the list to or by visiting the Audiences tab at the account level.  You will see the number of users added to the list in the “number of users” column for each audience.

Now that you know how to technically set up a remarketing campaign, let’s run through some key takeaways.  Depending on the site at hand and the strategy you develop, you will probably end up testing various scenarios to see how remarketing works for your business.

Remarketing Key Takeaways:

1. When using remarketing, you can target all site visitors, specific sections of your site, or even specific pages.  If you are new to remarketing, you might want to start by remarketing to any person that has already visited your website.  Once you get the hang of it, then you can develop more complex remarketing strategies.
2. You can also remarket to visitors based on actions they take on your site.  For example, visitors that did not convert on your site.  You could remarket to people that added items to their shopping cart, but never purchased the item.  How about people that just signed up to learn more about a specific product or service?  Some of these scenarios require that you set up “custom combinations”, which enables you to combine remarketing lists using Boolean operations (AND, OR, or NOT).  I can probably write an entire blog post about custom combinations, so I’ll save that for another day.  That said, you can read more about custom combinations in the AdWords Help Center.
3. In addition to focusing on specific areas of your site or specific actions visitors take, you can also remarket based on channel or campaign.  For example, you could remarket to visitors from your email marketing campaigns.  Or you could remarket to paid search visitors, or just paid search visitors from specific campaigns.  As I explained above, I would start with more general remarketing campaigns and then get more granular and complex once you get the hang of it.
4. Don’t forget to take advantage of the visitor intelligence aspect of remarketing.  Your ads will be presented to people based on something they did on your site in the past.  You can provide tailored messaging based on that intelligence.  But as I explained earlier, be careful not to cross the line and creep people out.  And that’s very easy to do by the way.

It’s Time to “Remarket”

I hope you now have a better understanding of what remarketing is and how to set up a campaign in AdWords.  As you can see by what we’ve covered in the post, remarketing can be a powerful way to provide targeted ads to people that were already on your site (via both text and display advertising).  Just be careful with your messaging… I’ve already seen some companies use remarketing and creep people out from a privacy standpoint.  There’s definitely a fine line between effective marketing and turning off prospective customers.  Now go ahead and join the behavioral targeting revolution.

GG