Strategies To Help You Become A Better Adwords Remarketer 

As the title suggests, this article is made to help you become a better Remarketer in Adwords. So, I’m going to assume that you are already familiar with Adwords Remarketing as our goal here is to make you better. So you should each already be knowledgeable in regards to Remarketing Lists (Audiences), and how to setup a general Remarketing Campaign. Here are some strategies to help you make the next step:

Remarketing Lists (Audiences)

1. Reaching all visitors to your website: This is the simplest way to remarket as Adwords already sets up the “All Visitors” Audience for you once you have the Remarketing Code placed across your website. This list simply targets anyone and everyone that has visited your website. In the early days you would have had to set this up yourself and define your audience as anyone that visited your domain containing simply your root level domain name (xyz.com). Again, today they already have this made for you once data starts being collected through Adwords.
2. Target each of your different product categories: As you should already know, you can build lists to show specific ads to, which makes a good case to go ahead and build lists for your product or service categories. You can do this by first identifying your category pages, and then build individual audiences for each of them. You will then build out individual Ad Groups that will only target one each of these audiences. Now you can develop your test and/or image ads for each audience which specifically targets that product or service. The audiences will only include visitors that made it to that specific page that the audience targets meaning that you now have well targeted ads that speak to what the visitor was originally interested in.
3. Target visitors that don’t convert on your site: A good rule of thumb, sometimes, is to not bombard your visitors that have made a purchase already with more Remarketing Ads that follow them around relentlessly. In order to make this happen you will need to setup a “Custom Combination” Remarketing List. A Custom Combination list will help target visitors who left your website before they converted, and exclude all other visitors that did convert. To do this is fairly simple. You should already have a Remarketing List that targets “All Visitors”. The next step is to make a new Remarketing List that targets visitors that HAVE converted. So now you have a Remarketing List targeting everyone, and another targeting just people that have converted. Lastly, create a new Remarketing List, but make it a “Custom Combination” Remarketing List. This will allow you to target multiple lists with different instructions. Once inside the list, target the “All Visitors” list first. Then, simply exclude your Converted Visitors list next. Now, your Custom Combination Remarketing List will only target visitors that haven’t converted.
4. Target visitors that have shopping carts that they abandoned: At times your visitors will add items or products to their shopping cart, regarding eCommerce websites, but then never complete the purchasing process for any number of reasons. Since visitors like these are on the fence, or close to making a decision, about purchasing from you it is important to get your brand back in front of them before they forget about it. You can accomplish this, once again through a Custom Combination list. First, create a list for people that have made it to your Shopping Cart. In some cases this will simply be a URL like “…/cart.html”. The second list will be the same as what I outlined when targeting visitors that don’t convert on your website; You will need to build a Remarketing List targeting everyone who HAS converted on your website. Lastly, you will build a Custom Combination Remarketing List that targets the visitors that are included in the list that visited your cart page. Then exclude the visitors that have converted by excluding the Converted Visitors Remarketing List. There you have it… you are now targeting all of your abandoned cart visitors.
5. Learn to Cross-sell or Up-sell your existing customers: We have already talked about building a Remarketing List for your converting customers. Now we can take this to the next level and discuss how to up-sell them. There are a number of ways that you could tackle this, but we will start with the simplest. Knowing that we already have an audience for converting customers, all we need to proceed further is an audience for our products. We previously discussed building an audience for product categories as well. We can use that here too. By setting up a Custom Combination list targeting your converted users AND your customers that viewed a specific category, you can now target shows ads to these audience members that show related product information. For instance, if a visitor came to your site and view a category for, let’s say, televisions and they made a purchase; You can now build specific targeted ads for related products like sound bars, DVD players, Blue Ray players and many other related products that someone that just bought a television might be interested in. The name of the game here is to strike while the iron is hot and have them purchase something else. This is also a great opportunity to advertise a discount code specific to this audience that offers them a discount to entice them to make the additional purchase.
6. Remarket to converted visitors during a specific time period after their purchase: In some industries you can identify that people may be more likely to make an additional purchase after a certain time span following a purchase. If you were to own an appliance store you might recognize that the majority of people that buy a range online to have delivered to their residence might buy a pot and pan set, or even a set of plates about 30 days after their initial purchase. However, you see that they stop making additional purchases after 90 days from the initial purchase. With this information you can target these individuals with specific ads for these additional products by creating two remarketing list. The first would target converted visitors that made a purchase but place a 30 day duration on it. On the second, do the same except place a 90 day duration on the list. Lastly you only will need to setup a Custom Combination Remarketing list that targets the visitors on the 90 day list, but excludes the visitors on the 30 day list. Done!

So that about wraps up Part 1 of my series on “How to Become a Better Remarketer”. In my following articles we will cover other strategies that include Ads, Bids and other general and long term strategies.

By: Ed Cehi, PPC Director