The concept of remarketing is closely linked to the AdWords Display Network. It involves showing display ads targeted at users who have visited our website.
To use remarketing on the Display Network, it is advisable to choose “Display Network only – Remarketing” as the campaign type when creating it, although this post doesn’t aim to show how to set it up but rather to introduce newcomers to the concept of this type of AdWords campaign.
It is important to understand the philosophy behind it: if a Google user visits our website, the visit is recorded in a list, which is a set of cookies from people who have visited the site. This record is generated by a tag implemented in the code just before the tag.
Later, when these visitors browse pages in the AdSense program (sites that show Google ads), they will see text ads or banners previously added to the campaign settings.
The main value of remarketing is that it draws visitors back to the site, so it is strongly focused on return on investment.
In short: a user visits our website, we tag them with a cookie, add them to a remarketing list and run a display campaign targeting that list.
Image source: www.torange.us
As with any other AdWords campaign, segmentation is very important, so it is advisable to create many lists, which can be used depending on the audience you want to reach and whenever you like. Ads are usually text and image (banners); it is advisable to use the impression frequency cap per ad group so as not to be annoying and harm your brand image. The ideal number of impressions is between 3 and 5; otherwise users may end up hating us.
Another added value of this type of campaign is its low cost. The cost of a click on the Search Network, where users are shown what they are looking for, is not the same as showing a user your products or services.
This type of campaign can create ads automatically if we don’t create them ourselves or have someone to do it. By clicking the “new ad” button, we can choose the “display ad builder” option, which scans the website and generates ads based on the images on our site.
If we have the chance to make the banners ourselves (the best option, in my view), we need to keep certain things in mind: static banners should be .jpg or .png; animated ones .gif or Flash; the maximum supported size is 50 KB. It is important for the message to be clear and direct and for both static and dynamic banners to be visually consistent with the page they link to. Banner variety is especially important on the remarketing Display Network. Keep in mind that dynamic banners attract more attention than static ones. This results in a higher CTR (how often users who see the ad end up clicking it), which drives more visits to the website.
I hope this post has served as an introduction to remarketing on the AdWords Display Network.
