The Ultimate Google Remarketing Guide

Are you thinking of remarketing your business or advertising online? With Google being the world’s largest search engine, companies can increase their customer base, reach new customers, and amplify their voice — all thanks to its remarketing tools. In fact, according to the platform, the average business can expect to make $8 for every $1 spent on a Google remarketing campaign!

In this article, we’ll cover how to level up your campaigns with Google remarketing and reach those customers that have your brand on the tip of their tongue. Let’s dive in!

How Remarketing With Google Works

Have you ever wondered how to reach shoppers that have shown interest in your brand, maybe even visited your website or mobile app, but ultimately didn’t make a purchase? That’s exactly what Google’s remarketing campaigns help you tackle.

Running a remarketing campaign with Google Ads is a straightforward process. Much like retargeting on other platforms, it involves choosing your campaign goals, selecting your audience, uploading your creative assets, and setting your budget plus other campaign parameters.

The first step? Creating an audience list, which might include

• Users that have visited your website

• Users that have used your mobile app

• Users that have interacted with your brand through a Google platform like YouTube

• Users/existing customers that have given you their email address

Once you’ve identified general audience categories, you can narrow your list down even further using demographics, interests, and location-based filters.

To get started organizing your audience list, click on the “Audiences” tool, which you can find by clicking on “Shared library” on the Google Ads platform. Remember: Try to match the shoppers on your remarketing list with your campaign goals — if your objective is to bring traffic to your mobile app, targeting mobile shoppers makes the most sense.

Then, follow the normal process of setting up a Google ad campaign. We’ll dive into the various placement options a little later in this post.

Choosing a Remarketing Strategy for Your Campaign

Whether you’re looking to get more shoppers to recover their abandoned carts, encourage more in-person customers to visit your brick and mortar store, or simply spread awareness, Google has a remarketing campaign option to fit just about every strategy.

However, there are a few different remarketing approaches for your brand and products. Here are three common strategies: 

• Remarketing site visitors who didn’t perform a specific action (like signing up for your email list or downloading an eBook)

• Remarketing site visitors who added products to their cart but never completed the purchase

• Remarketing site visitors who never clicked on the content or page you wanted them to see

Types of Google Remarketing Campaigns

Here’s a list of all the remarketing options along with the benefits Google Ads offers:

Standard Remarketing Campaigns:

Google Ads shows your past site visitors your ads as they browse the internet. (This helps keep you in mind while they’re web surfing!) 

Dynamic Remarketing Campaigns:

Along with the standard campaigns, Google Ads also allows you to show specific products or services past visitors have clicked on. These campaigns are “dynamic” because they can be personalized using your audience’s past activity on your site.

(Dynamic) Mobile App Remarketing Campaigns:

Dynamic app remarketing campaigns target consumers who have previously visited your app or mobile website. Google recommends having a strong install base for your app to scale efficiently with a dynamic mobile app remarketing campaign.

RLSA Data Segmenting for Ad Campaigns:

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, or RLSA, allows you to customize ad campaigns for previous visitors, as well. But in this case, they see your ads when they Google something. This can be especially helpful to those who want to target and customize search ads to gain more customers. Instead of targeting everyone looking for a similar product or service, these ads refine that audience to anyone who has interacted with your brand in the past.

Google Ads Remarketing via YouTube:

Remarketing via YouTube allows you to serve ads to users on the platform. These ads can be placed dynamically throughout the YouTube platform or added to specific videos. Visitors can see these ads both directly on YouTube and anywhere else those videos are posted on the internet.

Customer Match (or Email Blast) Remarketing:

Imagine email blasts, but better. Google’s Customer Match campaigns have the ability to take your email mailing lists and dish out curated ads to those past or potential customers through Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, display ads, and Google Shopping.

Tracking Your Performance

If you’re looking to get the most out of your Google remarketing campaign, you’ll need tools to help optimize your efforts. Tracking metrics across your ad campaigns can give you the insight to improve your future performance — a must if you want to find the best cross-channel strategies available.

A comprehensive performance tracking tool — like AdRoll’s Cross-Channel Performance Dashboard — can help you:

• Gather data for all your campaigns and identify the most effective channels for your audience

• Uncover strategies to reach your audience where they are online

• Provide a concrete and cohesive customer experience throughout all customer journey stages

• View progress toward benchmarks

• Refresh/pause ads with a low click-through rate

With these tangible insights, you can optimize your campaign to reach more and more of the audience that got away. There’s a market full of potential customers out there who have already interacted with your brand — all they need is a little push in the right direction with the help of remarketing campaigns.

Wondering whether Google remarketing or Facebook retargeting is best for your business? Read more:

Last updated on May 25th, 2022.