5 Advanced AdWords Remarketing Tactics You Might Not Have Thought Of

Remarketing is a very cool and relatively new AdWords feature which allows you to target visitors to your site on the Content Network. Here are five AdWords Remarketing techniques that don't seem to be very well known.

1. Impression Capping

Remarketing is great because the traffic quality is so much better than everything else on the content network

Remarketing is great because the traffic quality is so much better than everything else on the content network. This mean that you can afford to raise your bids and show your ads even more often. From a users point of view this can mean that they see your advert everywhere they go on the web. Up to a point this is desirable for an advertiser but it is possible to go too far; in my experience, users can get annoyed or fed up with your adverts after a time. This is why you should frequency cap.

You can setup frequency capping in the campaign settings tab in the AdWords interface. You can set the cap at the campaign, ad group or advert level to control how many impressions a user gets per day, week or month. I recommend going with 2 impressions per ad per day but I have to admit that this isn't something I've tested.

2. Delay Targeting

One problem with remarketing is that many of the conversions recorded by your campaign might have happened anyway without you having to spend money for the click

One problem with remarketing is that many of the conversions recorded by your campaign might have happened anyway without you having to spend money for the click. If the user was only researching a purchase they may return to you anyway without the need for any extra advertising spend.

To avoid this problem you can put a time lag in between a users last visit to your site and when they start to see remarketing adverts.

Create a new audience called "Recent Visitors". You don't even need a new remarketing tag to do this. Set the cookie length to be however long you want to delay (5 days seems to work well for me). Then exclude people in the "Recent Visitors" audience from your campaign. Simple!

3. Target Existing Customers

target these people, either to upsell to them or to remind them that you exist

Most people have an audience setup of people who have converted but they only use it as a negative audience for other campaigns. I say that you should target these people, either to upsell to them or to remind them that you exist. This works best for companies selling low end products where people are likely to purchase again. This technique is best combined with the Delay Targeting tip above.

4. Add "Responders" into Their Own Audience

I bet this audience has a different per visit value than normal.

Tag your remarketing landing pages so that you can create an audience for people who respond to remarketing ads. "What is the use of this?" I hear you ask:

1. You can show them different ads in the future (or no ads at all) to prevent banner blindness and to stop them getting fed up with seeing your adverts everywhere (see also point 1)
2. I bet this audience has a different per visit value than normal.

5. Borrow from the Email Marketers Playbook

Remarketing is very similar to email marketing

All of the above tips came from taking fairly standard email marketing ideas (don't send too many emails, think about when you start sending emails, your best ROI comes from targeting existing customers and that it is worth paying special attention to those who respond to email) and applying them to AdWords Remarketing.

Remarketing is very similar to email marketing in that you have a list of people (an audience) and you are trying to target them in the most appropriate way. I think there is much to learn from email marketing that, given sufficient technical/web development skill and a bit of creativity can also be applied to remarketing

Comments

• 

  Rob Watson

  Posted 1 year, 3 months ago.

  Hi There
  I was just thinking about frequency capping when i came across your post.
  I had a customer complain that they were seeing our adverts too many times.
  I appreciate your point about how this can be like email marketing. Send too many emails and people will just unsubscribe.
  Good tip on the delay targeting too. Gonna have to try that out.
  Cheers
  Rob

• 

  PPC Analytica

  Posted 1 year, 3 months ago.

  Hi Rob,
  
  Glad you found this useful.

• 

  Dan Perach

  Posted 10 months, 21 days ago.

  Great Post, thanks.
  
  I just implemented Delayed Targeting, very smart!

• 

  Laura

  Posted 9 months, 27 days ago.

  Fab post and very helpful. I like advice which is customer focused as well as selling benefits to marketeers :-)

• 

  Jeff

  Posted 7 months, 21 days ago.

  Good idea re: delay targeting!

• 

  Jordan McClements

  Posted 7 months, 6 days ago.

  Another great reason to use a 'delay' in your remarketing is if you are importing goals as conversions to AdWords then there is at least a 24 hour delay before the goal registers as a conversion as far as I can tell, so (again as far as I can tell) you need to combine lists so that you don't show to anyone who has visited your web site during the last day otherwise you'll be showing ads to people who AdWords doesn't realise have converted yet (unless someone from Google can tell us different).

• 

  Jordan McClements

  Posted 6 months, 30 days ago.

  Scrub that - it turns out you currently can't use conversions that have been imported from Google Analytics as part of your remarketing lists (which is a bit of a shame).

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