What Is Google Remarketing And Why Should You Use It To Advertise Your Website?

Google remarketing, or retargeting, is the process of showing your Google ad to people who have already interacted with your website. You can do the same to leads who have interacted with your app. 

What it does is it follows people who have at least shown interest in what you offer. As a result, you are showing your ad only to people who have already seen your product in the past. 

Today, we will take a closer look at Google remarketing, and also discuss why you need to use this to advertise your website. 

How Does Google Remarketing Work?

Google remarketing starts with your Google AdWords account. If you do not have one yet, you have to create one now. 

Once you have an account, you need to get a code snippet from Google, and then paste that inside your website’s HTML code. Once that code is installed, Google can now record a list of people who interacted with that page. 

You have to paste that code per page. This is necessary, as each page is like an identifier that shows Google which part of your website was visited. 

Let us say that you have an info product on your website where you are selling an eBook, then you have another product which is a course. You have to paste the Google AdWords code snippet once for the eBook, and then once on the course page.

Now, you can create a remarketing list on your Google AdWords account. You can also segment your list. You have a different list for all people who visited your eBook page, and a different list for all people who visited your course page. 

This happens because of the marketing tag. This tag saves people in each list you create. Now, you can create a remarketing campaign ad. What you will do is choose a list as your audience, and Google will show your ad only to these people who interacted with your website.

Now that you have created an ad, you need to choose how you want to show them. The options are:

• Search network – your ads will be shown on Google Search on both desktop and mobile
• Display network – your ads will be shown on YouTube, mobile apps, and on the sidebar ads of other websites that use Google AdSense

If you want your ad to show on both networks, you need to create your ad twice, one for each network, and just use the same retargeting list.

Here are the steps to create a remarketing campaign form start to finish:

To create a remarketing campaign, you have to go to your Google AdWords account and click on the Shared Library link. From there, you have to click on Audiences, and then choose the Remarketing List. It is in this process that you are creating your remarketing list.

It is on this list that you need to create rules for your list. This is where you can add people to a list if they visited a particular page on your site, or if they added to their cart but did not proceed with the purchase. 

If you want, you can do a remarketing list first, and then add the Google code snippet later. To do this, just save the list you created and then click on Tag Details in the remarketing tag area. Once you click this, you can choose to send the email instruction to yourself, or to your web developer. 

One this is done, you can now create an ad. Use the remarketing list you made, and this will tell Google that it will only show your ad to the people who have interacted with your website.  

Why Use Google Remarketing for Your Website?  

There are many benefits to marketing your ads to people who have seen your products before. While sales are obviously one, let us take a closer look at the other benefits of Google remarketing.  

• Timing – if a person interacted with your website, you can show your ad to that person immediately, provided that you already have an ad set-up in Google that is programmed to target that person. For example, a site visitor read your blog, and then leaves. 

If he goes to YouTube, the ad he is going to see on YouTube is yours. This can also happen in any part of the Google universe. If a person visited your site, leaves, and then does a search on Google, Google will show your ad to this person if the search is related to the keywords you are targeting. 

• Targeted ads – instead of showing your ads to random individuals, you are showing them only to people who have a better likelihood of purchasing. Why is this? Any person who interacted with your website already knows you. Seeing an ad about your site just makes you more credible.  

You can also do this to individuals who added something in their shopping cart but did complete the purchase. In this case, your ads will show only to people who abandoned their carts. 

• Lots of audiences – you can advertise not just on one platform but on several ones. With Google remarketing, you can show your targeted ads on a browser, on a Google PlayStore game, on PlayStore itself, and even on YouTube. As you can see, your ad is going to follow the person you are targeting, provided that you choose these platforms to show your ads.

• Cost-effective – the normal way of showing ads is costly. You pay per click or by 1,000 impressions. The sad truth about advertising is that your ads may be shown to random people who have no interest in what you are offering, regardless of how you set your keywords or how you choose your target demographics. 

With Google remarketing, you can save a ton of money because how your ads are shown is controlled. Instead of merely showing to thousands of people who fit your chosen demographics, they will only be shown to people who interacted with your website or app. 

• Analytics – as always, Google does a good job at this. With the analytics dashboard, you can see how your retargeting strategy is working. In this dashboard, you will see how your ads are performing, what the engagement is, how much you are paying, and for what. 

With Google, you can also create ads in different formats. You can create video ads, carousel ads, or single-image ads. It is completely up to you to choose how you want your ad to look like. With ads like this, you can create A/B tests and see which ones convert the most. 

Summary

Like Facebook retargeting, Google remarketing is a cost-effective way to show your ads. Instead of advertising to people who have never seen your product before, you can show your ads to those who have already interacted with your app or webpage.

In the physical world, it is what we usually call a follow-through—an activity where you call someone who has visited you or your shop before. Follow-through is a fundamental sales technique, which we often observe from insurance and car sales agents. 

If you are serious about growing your web traffic or improving your conversion rate, you have to use Google remarketing—follow people who have shown interest in your ad and make your ads targeted to specific people, not random ones who are likely to skip your ads.