Coding Series: Part 4 – Remarketing

Once your primary coding is properly installed and you are finally tracking conversions, analyzing website performance, and gauging return on advertising spend, it’s time to launch a Remarketing campaign. Remarketing is a unique advertising technique that allows you to reach people who have previously visited your website but didn’t purchase your product or convert into a lead. This advertising feature also allows you to cross sell, up sell, and promote other relevant products to your customers.

Benefits: Remarketing

Remarketing campaigns allow you to stay in front of your audience as they continue to shop around on the Internet. Instead of advertising through the search network, remarketing advertisers will integrate the Google Display Network into their online marketing strategy through the use of image and text ads that are delivered through Google’s partner sites.

How It Works: Remarketing

To launch a remarketing campaign in Google AdWords, you will need to add an additional piece of code to those pages of your website that are associated with certain categories or goals. This code is called a remarketing tag. Once the remarketing tag is embedded on relevant pages, the code directs AdWords to save visitors who reach these pages to the audience list you’ve built within your remarketing campaign. AdWords then attaches a cookie ID to the visitor. This cookie will allow AdWords to identify your audience members even after they leave your site. As these users browse other sites in the Google Display network they will be targeted by AdSense, which will read your remarketing cookie ID and determine which ad to show. Depending on the remarketing lists you want to create, you may need to embed different tags on different pages.

Code Implementation: Remarketing

To get started, you need to determine who you would like to show your remarketing ads to. As a default, it’s a good idea to target any visitors to your website who do not complete a conversion action. From there, you can create more targeted lists or even include visitors who completed a purchase and target them differently with relevant promotions or up sell / cross-sell opportunities.

* Disclaimer: Before the remarketing advertising campaign can begin, you must accrue a minimum of 500 cookie IDs. Due to this limitation, be sure the webpage on which you are creating an audience list receives enough traffic for you to meet this requirement.

To set up the remarketing list:

Click the Campaigns tab in your Google AdWords account. In the sub-navigation menu, click the Audiences tab to add a new audience group.
To create the remarketing list, click the “create and manage lists” link toward the bottom of the page.
Complete the new remarketing list form by entering a list name and membership duration.
* Google recommends starting with a 30-day period.
To add the new tag to your website, select “create new remarketing tag” in the tags section. You can even create a custom combination tag to exclude visitors from your remarketing campaign who have already completed a purchase by using the current conversion tag that was created when you installed conversion tracking.
Finally, click [tag] under “Tags/Rules.” In the Page security drop-down menu, select HTTP or HTTPS depending on the security level of your webpage. Then, copy the code and paste it into the relevant pages within your site between the <body> tags, closer to the </body> tag.
To target ads to your newly created audience list, you will want to add the list to a current campaign or create a new AdWords campaign dedicated to your remarketing efforts.

Whether you are running a branding or direct response ad campaign, remarketing is a great tool for increasing your return on investment by driving traffic back to your website for a sale or website registration. You can create a remarketing campaign to target all visitors, those viewing a specific product category, non-converting visitors, abandoned shopping cart visitors, converting visitors for up sell or cross-sell promotions, and users who converted in the past. There are a lot of variations for your remarketing list, which means a lot of opportunity to target your end consumer and stay relevant in their minds.

To find out more visit: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=27765.

If you have any other questions about Remarketing campaigns or how to install the code, Leverage Marketing’s Google certified team is here to help!