How to do Remarketing in Google Ads?

Remarketing consists of creating personalized ad campaigns for those users who have previously visited your website, your e-commerce, or other content. Based on this previous behavior, we can assume an interest in the brand or any of its products and send more personalized content to complete the purchase process or conversions that have been left halfway.

And if we talk about remarketing, we have to talk about Google Ads since this platform is one of the "inventors" of the concept. Since it accounts for no less than 50% of global investment in digital advertising, it is one of the star sites to launch your campaigns.

The remarketing process in Google Ads can be summarized in 3 steps:

• The user visits our website or interacts with our brand's content (for example, a video posted on YouTube).
• This user is marked with a cookie and is incorporated into a remarketing list whose parameters we have previously defined (for example, all users who have visited the page of product X in the last 30 days).
• A targeted ad campaign is created for this list, which can only be seen by users who are part of this list.

But let's talk about it more in-depth.

Where can I do remarketing with Google Ads?

Google Ads, previously called Google Adwords, allows you to remarket almost everywhere globally thanks to its connection with the famous advertising platform Google Adsense, which displays ads on a reasonably high percentage of websites in the world.

Still, five types of remarketing can be done in this powerful tool:

1. Standard display remarketing: it is the primary option that Google Ads offers us to create remarketing campaigns based on images or banners to influence the visitors again on our website. 
2. Dynamic remarketing: it is perfect for online stores since you impact the user exactly with image banners of the products that the user visited. If you want to see how they work, just add a product to your Amazon shopping cart and you'll see.
3. Video remarketing: show personalized ads to users who have previously interacted with your videos or subscribed to your channel. In order to create remarketing lists for your videos, you have to link your Youtube account to Google Ads. 
4. Remarketing RLSA (remarketing list for search ads): segmented remarketing campaigns in the Google search network. This way, you get to show your ads on the Google search engine. It is targeted to a particular audience and with a higher conversion rate. 
5. App remarketing: show the ad to users who have used your mobile application. 

Remarketing on Google Ads step by step

1) Log in to your Google Ads account and get your remarketing tag.

The remarketing tag or pixel is simply a code that you must copy and paste into your website. You can do it in just two minutes if you have the Google Tag Manager tool.

Once you have installed this code, the users' information who visit your page will start to be saved. In addition, the data will be pretty detailed, for example, the specific products they have visited. Thus, users will see your remarketing ads from that moment on when they leave your website.

2) Create one or more remarketing lists

Remarketing lists in Google Ads allow us to select the parameters to show ads to users. For example, we could create separate lists for users who have viewed the home page, visited a specific product or made some kind of conversion.

To create a remarketing list, go to the Google Ads tools section and make a list with a new audience.

Audiences are created in the audience manager by choosing from several options: users who visit our website or any of its pages, users who have downloaded and used our mobile application, users who have interacted with our data videos on Youtube or customer list.

For example, you can upload a list of customers from their emails.

You have multiple options to create an audience to your liking. You should think about which ones make the most sense according to your business objectives, but above all, you should try out several different options and compare the results: you may be surprised!

An essential practical nuance: when naming your audience, create a uniform terminology, not only for Google Ads but for all your remarketing campaigns on any platform. This will make it much easier for you to create them, manage them and know what each of them means at any time.

If you want to learn how to get the most out of your Google Ads Audiences, we recommend you to visit our blog post. 

3) Create your campaign by selecting the remarketing list you are going to associate to it

Once you have done all the preliminary work of creating audiences, it's time to get going!

We will create our campaign and under "Audience" we will choose the custom list we have created, for example, one of "Customer Lists".

Generally, you will have to wait a few weeks between setting up the audiences and launch your first campaigns. The reason is that the remarketing lists you have created have to "fill up" as users interact with your website, your app or your YouTube channel.

Once you have a sufficient critical mass, you can start launching your campaigns. Usually, we will design a different campaign for each remarketing list we have created, depending on the business objectives we want to achieve.

Another important decision you will have to make is whether to create a Google Ads search or display remarketing campaign. Both ways have their advantages and disadvantages and can be complementary, so I recommend testing both and seeing what they can offer.

4) Create one or more variants of your ads

At this point, you only need to create your "Ad Group" within your "Campaign." Here you can also select the audience you want to impact.

A small but crucial detail: when setting up your remarketing campaigns in Google Ads, don't forget to launch several variants of your ads simultaneously. For example, you can change the copy, the title or the visible URL (or the image in the case of display campaigns).

Creating ad variants allows you to run A/B and multivariate tests and compare the performance of the different elements. This way, you can see which versions work best and optimize your budget.

5) Start the campaign!

You're all set to go! Once you launch your remarketing campaign on Google Ads, users who are part of your lists will start seeing your ads on Google search engine and other sites on the web.

6) Constantly analyze the results

Google Ads has a powerful analytics system that allows us to know what is happening with our campaigns almost in real-time. Thus, you will be able to monitor metrics such as impressions, frequency or click-through rate.

Use this information to continuously track campaigns and see what types of remarketing and ads are working best. Over time, you will be able to know what works and what doesn't and make the most of your budget to get the most out of remarketing in Google Ads.