Remarketing in Google AdWords consists of static image, animated image, video and text ads that are placed on the Google Display network. What makes remarketing different from standard Display advertising is the targeting. Remarketing consists of using a special tracking code to place cookies in the computer of people visiting your website, and then serving ads to those with that cookie, specifically, on the Display network. The main point with remarketing is that you want to find those people who have shown enough interest in your products or services to visit your website. These people are more likely to perform whatever activity you’re considering a conversion than people who have not yet been to your website. There are a variety of strategies for how to best target these people, which website visitors to target, how to make the most of your remarketing ads, and how to optimize these remarketing campaigns. In this guide, we will delve into these topics and give best practices based on experience and Google recommendations.

The very first step to remarketing, like most things in paid search, is to analyze your data and develop a strategy.  You’ll need to decide which visitors to your site you’d like to target ads to and which visitors you don’t want to target ads to. All of these groups, the ones you want to target separately and the ones you don’t want to target at all, are audiences. There are different ways to target these audiences:

There are also custom combinations, which we’ll describe more in detail later, but these allow you to target people who visited one page without visiting another. The strategy here would be, for example, to target people who visited the first page of your checkout process without hitting the thank-you page. This would mean targeting users who were interested enough in your product to add an item to their cart, but for whatever reason didn’t actually complete the process.

You can target any audience based on URLs. If you’ve got a thank you page after people submit their email address for signing up to get more information or register to see a special deal, you could use the URL of that thank you page for a remarketing list.

Here are some possible steps you can use as you’re getting started:

The first step in building your remarketing campaign is to generate and place the special code you’ll need to place cookies in your website visitors’ computers. How you do this changed during 2012. You used to do this by going to the “shared library” tab in your AdWords account and creating an individual code for every page you wanted included in one of your audiences. Currently, this code can be generated within Google Analytics or within AdWords. It involves the placement of a single code on every page (called a run of site code).  This is the same one that Analytics already uses to monitor traffic on your site with a slight modification. Whichever way you use to generate the code,  simply place the code on every page of your site and use URLs to build custom combinations and audiences.

If you have a Google Analytics account, you can get a remarketing code there. If you don’t have one, we suggest you get one (they’re free!), but we’ll describe how you can still generate a code in AdWords in a moment just for you. The reason you want a remarketing code from Analytics is the cool feature of being able to set-up remarketing lists based on goals instead of just pages visited. You could set one up for people who have visited at least 4 pages, spent at least 5 minutes on your site, etc.  It will also save whoever manages your site a lot of time, as it will greatly reduce the amount of code that needs to be placed on your site.

If you’re using Google Analytics to remarket, here’s how to set up that code: once you’re in your Google Analytics account, click to the “admin” section.

Click the blue link labeled “remarketing lists”.  (If you don’t see anything that says remarketing lists, there is a chance you’re not logged in under a user that’s granted admin access to the Analytics account you’re in.  If that’s the case, get access and check back here.)

Click the button that reads “new remarketing list”.

These options you’ll see now include naming your list, choosing an Analytics profile and AdWords account to use with your list, specifying the type of remarketing you want to opt into (all visitors or those that visit certain pages), and the ability to modify the membership duration.

You’ll want to name your list whatever your intention is. We’ll get more into custom combinations later, but you could name it “All site visitors”, “cart abandoners”, etc. We’ll discuss custom member duration more later as well.

In order to start collecting the appropriate data, you will need to make a minor adjustment to your current Analytics code that you’ve already placed on your website.

This modification is compatible with both the synchronous and asynchronous versions and won’t affect any prior changes you’ve made to your code.

After you’ve made the changes to your Analytics code, you will also need to take care of a few additional items, as stated by the Google team:

Now, if you don’t have Analytics for some strange reason, don’t have admin access to it and/or don’t want to agree to the terms of service, you can still create and manage remarketing lists directly in AdWords.

To do this, you’ll want to go to the “shared library” in your AdWords account. Click “Audiences”.

Click “new audience”.

Since you haven’t set any remarketing lists up yet, you’ll want to choose “remarketing list”.

Here you’ll want to name it and generate the code. Again, the name will depend on what your intentions are for the remarketing list. You now want to place this code on the appropriate page. If you want to target all visitors to your site, you’d want to place the code on your home page. If you’d like to target people who visit a specific product page, place the code there. Just make sure you name it properly to reflect the page you’re targeting to ensure you don’t get confused about what you meant to do later. You can now manage all of your remarketing codes in your AdWords account.

The big differences between placing the code from your Analytics account versus your AdWords account are:

The member duration is how long you’d like to store a cookie in someone’s computer and target him or her. There are many different strategies to selecting membership duration. You want to think about your business and your goals when selecting membership duration.  They can last up to 180 days.

You are always at risk of annoying people if you show them your ad too much all over the Internet.

Another feature in a similar vein to membership duration is frequency capping.

This feature allows you to decide how often you’d like each individual user to see your ad during specified time period.  Keep in mind that if you show your ad too often to users, just like if you show it to them for too long, there is a possibility that you will cross the line and they will become annoyed by your product or service.

A classic example of this is the story about a group of successful, upper class wives that were being remarketed to by Prada. They would get served Prada ads all day, on every site, all over the Internet. It started to become very obvious that they were being targeted, and it came off as creepy. Resentment toward the brand began to build, which is exactly the opposite of what they were trying to accomplish.

You don’t want this to happen with your ads and your remarketing audiences, so pick a frequency cap that seems appropriate for your goals. If your customers have a long average time between conversions, you’ll need fewer impressions to gently remind them of your brand again from time to time.

If your business is built for repeat customers, you may want to focus on impressing as much as possible. For instance, restaurants like Jimmy John’s ideally want people to order their sandwiches every single day.  They’re not going to care about burning someone out, as it’s feasible that someone could order from them multiple times in a week. Repeat business is important to them, so they show ads to users constantly. They’ll show ads directly after someone has just ordered, even!

The main point is to pick something that makes sense for your business goals.

You can set-up custom combinations in the “Shared Library” tab in your AdWords account in the exact same place where you set up your AdWords-based remarketing.

Create a new audience, but this time it will be a custom combination.

If you wanted to target users who hit the first page of your checkout process without reaching your order confirmation page, then you would want to set up a custom combination.

Select the remarketing audience you’ve set up for people who hit the first page of your checkout process. You should have done this by just creating a new remarketing audience and using the URL of that page. Then, select “none of this audience” and select the remarketing audience you set up for people who have hit the thank you page. You can also select anyone who has performed your AdWords conversion, if that’s what you’re tracking as an AdWords conversion. Save this, and then select this custom combination as your audience in the ad group you’ve created for this audience.

You can interlace interest categories with remarketing audience for custom combinations as well.

Perhaps you’d like to create an internet category marketing campaign that will be focused purely on trying to get your brand out to as many people who have never heard of your website as possible. You could create a custom combination audience targeting whichever interest category you’re interested in targeting and using a remarketing tag for your home page URL, “all site visitors” perhaps, as a negative audience. This custom combination would target your interest category without impressing ads to anyone who has been to your website within the amount of time your set your membership duration to.

You don’t have to only use one positive and one negative for these, either. You could choose to target only people who have been to a certain URL on your site, perhaps a product page, that are also interested in certain interest categories. Let’s say your website sells dog beds, and your company has hard data that shows people that Google has marked as being interested in dogs are 65% more likely to convert than people Google has not marked as interested in dogs. Then, you could create a custom combination targeting your dog bed product page and the interest category “dogs”.

The main take-away here is to really think about what could work for your website and test all viable options!

One strategy that can work really well for some advertisers is what’s called delayed targeting.

We’ll start with an example. This is a client that is a subscription-based service. Some members select to pay on a month-to-month basis. So, we decided to make an audience that targets people who have converted with member duration of 30 days. We made another identical audience, but made it for 90 days. We then made a custom combination by making the 90-day member duration our target, and excluded the audience for 30 days. This means we’re targeting people who have converted, 30-90 days after converting. This targets those users who are due to convert again.

Member duration will also intersect with the messaging within your ads.  If you have offers that give users a seven day free trial, you could target converters starting seven days after their initial conversion.

You know your sales cycle better than anyone, so think of creative ways you can make the most of the high level of targeting that remarketing affords you.  Users think of your brand 30, 90 or even 180 days after being introduced to it initially.  Adjust your messaging accordingly.

Optimization in remarketing comes in a few different forms:

While your results may vary, we’ve found the most success with remarketing ads when they are very brand focused. This is due to the fact that the people you’re targeting are familiar with your website. They might not pay any mind to a random creative advertisement, but they may be much more likely to notice an ad that’s touting a brand they’re familiar with. This is especially true if you plan on testing special offers for remarketing visitors. They may not notice a discount or sale if they don’t notice that it’s for a site they’re familiar with. Our best advice is to start with ads that match your website and your brand as a control set of ads and test from there.

For the most part, you can probably direct remarketing visitors back to wherever they came from. If they got a remarketing cookie from a product page, it’s probably safe to land them back on that product page. However, if you’re planning on offering specials to them, you’ll want to create a custom landing page that reflects that deal. If they come back to the site and don’t see anything about the deal they were promised in the ad, they’re likely to bounce.

It’s a bit tricky to do placement exclusions for remarketing. If you’re not familiar with what we mean, placement exclusions happen when you download a placement report and decide which sites your ads are performing poorly on that you should block from showing your ads. This is a very easy task when you’re dealing with topics or contextual marketing on the Display network. Then, you can look at performance and relevancy at face value. However, with audience targeting, such as remarketing or interest category marketing, then you’re targeting the person who happens to be on that website. Content relevancy of the page itself may not be as important in a remarketing campaign as it will be in other display campaigns.  Remember that you’re targeting the user and not the content.

So, what do you do? You’ll still have websites that perform poorly, and you should still exclude them. Even though we’re targeting the people visiting the site, some sites attract bad people (i.e. people who don’t want to give you money) more than other sites, display your ads in such a way that invite accidental clicks, etc. However, we recommend being more tolerant with your remarketing placement performance. Give those sites as much tolerance as you can within your goal margins.

Remarketing is a powerful targeting method on the Google Display Network.  By tailoring your ad copy and bids to the highly specific audience you’re going after, it can show a tremendous return in your accounts.