As a digital marketer in today’s highly competitive landscape, you know the importance of retargeting your audience. Remarketing campaigns allow you to stay in front of visitors even after they leave your website, keeping your brand and messaging fresh in their minds and ultimately driving them back to convert. However, setting up a retargeting campaign in Google Ads requires some technical knowledge to ensure it’s optimized for success. This step-by-step guide will walk you through how to create a robust remarketing campaign in Google Ads to boost your conversion rates and ROI. By the end, you’ll have the skills and knowledge to build an effective retargeting strategy to reach high-intent audiences.
What Is Remarketing and Why Is It Important for Google Ads?
Remarketing, also known as retargeting, is a Google Ads feature that allows you to show ads to people who have already visited your website. By tracking visitors with cookies, remarketing helps you reconnect with potential customers and stay at the front of their minds.
Remarketing campaigns are important for the following reasons:
- They help convert website visitors into customers. Remarketing ads remind people who have already shown interest in your product or service about your business. This significantly increases the likelihood of them eventually converting.
- They improve brand recall. Seeing your ads again helps reinforce your brand in the minds of potential customers. The more people see your ads, the more familiar and memorable your brand becomes.
- They capture sales from abandoned shopping carts. Remarketing is ideal for e-commerce businesses. It allows you to re-engage visitors who left your site before completing a purchase by showing them ads for the items left in their cart.
- They increase brand awareness. In addition to reaching previous site visitors, remarketing ads also expose your brand to new potential customers. The more people see your ads, the wider your brand awareness becomes.
By enabling remarketing in Google Ads, you can stay connected with your valuable website traffic and bring more of those visitors back to ultimately become customers. When leveraged effectively, remarketing is a highly effective tool for driving conversions, improving brand recall, and capturing more value from your advertising spend.
Setting Up Remarketing Audiences in Google Ads
To create remarketing audiences in Google Ads, you will need to:
Define Your Goals
First, determine your goals and objectives for your remarketing campaign. Do you want to increase brand awareness, drive traffic back to your site, or increase conversions? Your goals will help shape your audiences and ad messaging.
Choose Your Audiences
You have several options for building audiences in Google Ads:
1. Website visitors – The broadest audience, including anyone who has visited your site. Useful for brand awareness
2. Page visitors – Visitors of a specific page or set of pages. Good for promoting content or products featured on those pages.
3. Conversion audiences – Visitors who have converted in a desired way, e.g. made a purchase or signed up for a newsletter. Perfect for cross-selling or upselling.
4. Similar audiences – Google Ads will find audiences with interests similar to your converting visitors. Useful for prospecting and reaching new potential customers.
5. Custom combinations – You can combine multiple audiences into one for a tailored segment. For example, visitors of a product page who haven’t purchased.
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Choose Your Ads and Placements
With your audiences defined, create text, display, and video ads to show them. Place the ads on website content related to your product or service. You can also remarket to people searching for relevant keywords on Google.
By defining concrete goals, building specific audiences, and crafting targeted ads and placements, you can create a remarketing campaign in Google Ads that keeps your brand in front of interested visitors and turns them into valuable customers. With regular optimization, remarketing can become a key driver of ROI for your business.
Creating Effective Ad Copy and Landing Pages for Remarketing Campaigns
To effectively remarket to your potential customers, you need to create compelling ad copy and landing pages tailored to their interests.
Focus your ad copy on the items or services your potential customers showed interest in. Mention limited-time offers or special promotions to spur them into taking action.
Use emotive language and an enthusiastic tone to reignite their interest. For example, say “Check out the latest styles now!” or “Sale ending soon – don’t miss out!” Provide minimal text, around 5 to 15 words, to capture attention quickly.
Include a clear call-to-action like “Shop Now” or “Learn More.” Place this in a high-contrast button or link leading to your product or service page.
Landing Pages
Optimize your landing pages for conversions by:
-Highlighting the products, services or content your audience previously engaged with. This familiarity will make them more inclined to take the next step.
-Keeping your page clean and clutter-free. Remove any distractions to make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for.
-Using social proof like ratings, reviews, and testimonials to build trust. But keep these authentic and relevant to what you’re remarketing.
-Offering a time-sensitive deal or promotion on that page. For example, “24-hour flash sale – 60% off all products shown.” Urge them to act fast before the deal is gone.
-Placing eye-catching calls-to-action prominently on the page. Make buttons big, bold and bright so they’re hard to miss.
-Loading quickly on both desktop and mobile. No one will wait around for your page to load. Optimize images and keep page sizes small for the best experience.
Following these best practices for your ad copy and landing pages will lead to higher click-through and conversion rates for your remarketing campaigns. Provide a tailored, compelling experience for your potential customers and make it as easy as possible for them to continue their journey with your business.
Optimizing Bids and Budgets for Remarketing Ads
Once you have set up your remarketing campaign in Google Ads, optimizing your bids and budgets is key to success. Bidding and budgeting for remarketing allow you to maximize the impact of your ads while controlling costs.
Setting Competitive Bids
To determine competitive bids for your remarketing ads, examine the metrics for your existing search and display campaigns. Look at your average cost per click (CPC) and set bids at or slightly above this amount for remarketing. You can also check the suggested bid ranges in Google Ads for your target keywords and audiences. Start with the lower end of the suggested range and increase over time based on performance. Higher bids will increase your ad impressions and clicks but also costs, so find the optimal balance for your goals and budget.
Adjusting Budgets
You have the flexibility to adjust daily, monthly and campaign lifetime budgets in Google Ads at any time. For remarketing campaigns, monthly or lifetime budgets often work best. Set an initial budget based on your existing advertising costs and adjust up or down based on performance and business factors. Some things to consider when optimizing your remarketing budget include:
- Cost per conversion: A higher budget may decrease your cost per conversion over time due to increased scale and optimization.
- Seasonality: You may need to increase budgets during peak seasons or sales periods to boost traffic and conversions. Decrease again when demand slows down.
- New product launches: An additional budget for remarketing can help raise awareness and drive interest when you release new products or services.
- Competitor activity: If competitors are increasing their ad spend, you may need to boost your own budget to maintain visibility and share of voice.
- ROAS: Evaluate your return on ad spend (ROAS) and increase the budget if the additional investment is generating a good return. Decrease if ROAS starts to drop.
Optimizing bids and budgets for your remarketing campaigns in an ongoing process of continuous testing and improvement. Make incremental changes and monitor how they impact key metrics like impressions, clicks, conversions, and ROAS over time. With regular optimization, remarketing can become one of the most effective tools in your digital marketing strategy.
Analyzing Performance and Optimization Tips for Remarketing Campaigns
To get the most out of your retargeting campaigns, regularly analyze how they are performing and make optimizations to improve results.
Check Impression Share
See what percentage of your potential impressions are actually being shown to users. A lower impression share means many users who could see your ads aren’t. Increase your budget or adjust targeting to increase impression share.
Monitor Click-Through Rate
A high CTR, or the percentage of viewers who click your ad, means your ad is relevant and engaging to users. A low CTR could indicate your ad needs improvement. Try A/B testing different ad copy or images to increase CTR.
Evaluate Conversions
The most important metric is whether your ads are driving conversions like sales, signups or other desired actions. If conversion rates are low, your ad may need optimization or your landing page could be improved to better convert viewers. Consider A/B testing different landing pages as well.
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Refine Targeting
Analyze which targeting options like keywords, topics, interests and demographics are performing best and adjust targeting accordingly. Broaden or narrow your targeting as needed to reach high-intent users.
Set Bid Adjustments
Increase bids for high-performing targeting options and decrease bids for poorly performing options. Bid adjustments allow you to optimize your budget to spend more on the users most likely to convert.
Add Exclusions
Add exclusions to prevent your ads from being shown to users who are unlikely to convert. This could include competitors’ names or certain unqualified keywords and topics. Exclusions improve relevancy and reduce wasted impressions.
By regularly checking on these key performance indicators and making incremental optimizations over time, you can significantly improve the results from your retargeting campaigns. Continuous improvement and testing are key to success.
Conclusion
By following the steps in this guide, you now have a solid retargeting campaign set up in Google Ads. Your ads will reach visitors who have already expressed interest in your business by visiting your website. Make sure to monitor your campaign closely to optimize for the best performance. Check your ad impressions, clicks, costs, and conversions regularly. Pause or remove underperforming ads and placements. Add new ad creatives and audiences to keep your campaign fresh. Retargeting works best when used as part of an overall digital marketing strategy. Combine it with other Google Ads campaigns like search, display, and video ads to boost brand awareness and drive the best results. With consistent optimization of your retargeting campaign, you’ll turn more website visitors into customers and grow your business.