First of all, what is remarketing?

Remarketing, also known as retargeting, is an online advertising method that helps you get back to the attention of those who abandoned your site without buying or achieving a goal.

Did you happen to go on a website and later, while browsing on the Internet, to still see its ads on other sites? Then it’s very likely that you’ve already met this form of advertising.

Tracking a visitor interested in certain products and presenting the products again to him, is called remarketing.

Remarketing has been in existence for a long time but has grown in 2012 since remarketing tag settings could be made easily by changing a small piece of Google Analytics code and lists could also be created from your GA account.

What is remarketing good for?

When it comes to internet shopping, acquisition at first sight only occurs in 2% of cases. Even if the prospective customer found the perfect product, they will still check one more site to ensure that he or she found the best price as well. This is the average behaviour of 98% of website visitors.

Once gone from your site the chances for a visitor to return are small for many reasons. Being able to get back in front of him reminding him of the offers found on your site, having a second chance to convince a potential customer to buy is what you can finally do through remarketing.

For example, if a visitor leaves the site abandoning a product in the basket without leaving an email address or other contact method, by remarketing you can show him ads with offers for the products they were interested in, giving them that final impulse to place the order.

So it’s no wonder that people who are using remarketing notice an increased ROI; more sales and achieved goals and more brand searches as well. A study conducted by Advertise.com showed a 400% increase, a comScore study showed 1.046% and an AdRoll study showed 75%.

How does remarketing work?

Remarketing is possible via cookies or pixels, Javascript codes that tag and track anonymously the visitors of your website wherever they are browsing on the Internet. Codes are not visible to visitors and do not affect the performance of your website.

Remarketing is then created using ad networks and, as the largest network at this moment is Google Ads, reaching up to 85% of Internet users, we will focus our discussions on that:

How to do remarketing through Google network

There are three tools that are part of remarketing through Google:
– Google Analytics (where you install the tracking code, and create lists) – requires settings
– Google Ads (where you create the ads, select the lists) – requires settings
– Google AdSense (the display system for Google Ads in display network) – no settings required

If your Analytics and Google Ads accounts have not been linked yet, it’s time to do this (you’ll need an administrator access to your Google Ads account too). Once you’ve linked the accounts, you’ll see the option to create a New Remarketing List in Analytics.

What to be aware of:
– The name given to the list can’t be changed in the future.
– If you create a special list for the visitors of a specific page, be sure to enter the address page without the domain. Example: /thankyou.html instead of www.site.com/thankyou.html
– If you do not have a lot of traffic on the website, set the Membership duration to 540 days instead of 30 days, in order to not lose visitors from the list after 30 days. 540 days is the maximum allowed time.

Once the list is created, you have to wait to collect at least 100 unique people/cookies – a minimum limit imposed by Google Ads to show the ads in Google Display Network.

It is good to create lists for each product / goal / page / important sections of the website.

Make the change of the Google Analytics code as soon as possible so people can get started on the lists.

You then go to the Google Ads account where we’ll create campaigns / groups / ads in close relationship with the created remarketing lists. You can see information about the remarketing lists in the Shared library section.

Learn more about remarketing best practices and many other things to take into consideration when creating your Google PPC campaigns by taking our next Google Ads Course in London.