Google Remarketing – What It Is, Why Use Google

On the average, 97% of website visitors leave a website without buying.  It is a fact that most of these potential customers are gone forever! What if there was a way to reach back out to these customers easily and seamlessly?  There is through Google’s remarketing.

By using Google remarketing a marketer can easily serve a relevant ad to a visitor that has been on their website and left by using an almost endless stream of websites in the Google display network when their abandoned visitor is online browsing the web. To achieve, all a marketer needs to do is place a small snippet of code that Google provides on the pages of their website that they wish to promote with Google remarketing ads.

When using Google remarketing you have full control just like in Google search on how much you are willing to pay for each click, which allows you to ensure you receive a profitable ROI. A powerful way to keep your brand in front of customers, Google remarketing can give the appearance that you have an immense marketing budget with customers thinking ‘wow this company is everywhere!’  This not only encourages customers to return and purchase, but  it also instills a confidence that may very well have customers returning on their own without clicking on the ad, which of course would incur no charge.

Google offers a number of different options for their remarketing including dynamic ads, which thanks to Google’s Ad Gallery, makes creating semi-easy and free.  For eCommerce marketers, dynamic ads are able to capture images, prices and headlines of products that customers viewed before they left your website and re-serve these products to customers.  You know the potential customer has interest because they already viewed a particular product, why not remind them and reshow the same product?

The second type of remarketing is a bit more complicated and involves creating audiences. Basically, what creating audiences does is allow a marketer to segment users by which page they viewed before leaving and serve an ad tailored to have them return.  It also allows a different bidding strategy to be implemented.  Example, a visitor that made it to your shopping cart is a far more valuable customer to have return than one that viewed a single category page.  With Google’s remarketing system, a marketer can bid higher for ads shown to cart abandoners than to website browsers.

The use of audiences is also a very effective way of using remarketing for Professional Service marketers.  Abandoned visitors can be easily segmented by which part of a website they visited allowing an effective bidding strategy to be implemented.

What It Looks Like

Retargeting-AdIn the above example, I visited UGG Australia’s website and looked at the UGG Men’s Brunswick Robe. Then I visited and was served an ad for the same product that I was just looking at (although UGG elected not to display name and price, which I personally prefer). Wow, how did they know!

Why UGG Australia may indeed have the marketing budget to advertise on all the sites in the Google display network, most companies including yours probably does not.  However, think of how impressive it would be to a would-be customer if they thought you did!  Plus the ability to serve a potential customer the exact product they have already looked at and shown an interest in is a powerful tool in the conversion game.

With Google retargeting you can control how many times and how often ads are served to a customer (frequency caps) along with controlling which websites ads are ineligible to show (if you find a particular partner site has a low conversion rate, you can omit it from the list of website eligible to show your ads).  These tools are just a few that allow marketers to be able to control their advertising and generate a positive ROI.

Review-and-Ratings-SystemWhy use Google for retargeting?

You may be saying to yourself, there is a ton of retargeting companies out there, why use Google?  The truth is that although different retargeting companies say they have this advantage or that advantage over the other, most respectable retargeting companies have a very similar reach (which websites ads are eligible to be shown).  With Google retargeting, you can also use Google’s code for other display network advertising you might use as well.  In addition, Google’s system is user friendly to create ads and the reporting is delivered alongside your other AdWords reporting marking retargeting easily tracked using the same interface as Google search ads.

A final plus for using Google retargeting, Google is not going anywhere and is constantly growing.  A few years ago, I used a different retargeting company that was smaller, but very effective (it was before retargeting was available with Google).  Suddenly, the retargeting company I was using was purchased by AOL and the service changed, product functionality declined and prices went up.  I had to change my remarketing company and lost hours of time that I had spent building out retargeting campaigns.  With Google, they are always adding new sites into their network and additional features that make remarketing more effective and easier to track.


Remember 97% of your customers come to your site and leave.  Will they come back?  Maybe, maybe not.  With Google remarketing you can stay in front of your lost customers with precision ads that help drive return traffic with a system that allows you to control cost and create an effective ROI.


Happy Marketing!

