ReMarketing and Affinity Lists for Increased Relevance and Sales

Have you ever wanted to reach potential customers who have visited your website and keep your brand in front of them and have another chance to earn their business? Yeah. We all would. This has been possible for a few years and gets easier with each passing year. If you’re confused about remarketing vs retargeting, don’t worry; they’re the same thing. The team at Google just has to be different so they call it remarketing.

You put in a lot of energy to get customers on your website or in your store. I’m sure you want every opportunity to make the sale. Sometimes people just need some extra time for a paycheck to come in or to save up for your product. This is the perfect reason for why EVERY business needs to use remarketing. Naturally, you’re a smart marketer. You should continue to use the tactics that you already know that work. Now while that sounds ridiculously obvious, I understand that it’s actually harder to stick to than you might think; just like that diet plan…

The good news in 2015 is that there is no short supply of data to illustrate why remarketing is so important. Maybe you have seen the stat that shows 49% of customers visit 2 – 4 websites before they decide to make a purchase. Obviously, it should be no surprise to you, then, that 96% of consumers don’t make their purchase on the first visit to a website. Does this describe you and your buying habits?

When was the last time you visited a website to perform research on a product or service to buy later either on the website or in the store?

Did you see ads between the time you first visited the site and the time you returned to buy? Well those ads played a part in persuading you whether you realize it or not and that’s why so many companies are doing this and you should as well.

So let’s create a Remarketing Campaign now. Yes it will be a separate campaign within AdWords. Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) will assist in getting in front of those customers. Think of RLSA like a booster rocket for your Google search and Display ad campaign: it essentially puts your great ads in front of highly qualified customers who have already shown interest in your business or your products by visiting your website. Let me clarify something here. There are a few types of remarketing. RLSA is for Search only text ad campaigns.  This campaign requires a list of 1000 visitors or cookies placed. The other type of remarketing uses the Google Display Network and uses a mix of text and display (banner or video) ads. This remarketing campaign requires only 100 visitors or cookies before activating. In order to maximize the reach of placements where your ads may appear on the GDN, you will want to use both text, image ads in as many ad sizes as possible to your campaign and if possible, video ads as well. The Ad gallery offers an easy way to create ads. It pulls images from your website and you supply the text. While this works, I recommend you create your own image ads. I’m sure you or your team can be more creative than the gallery tool.

To create your remarketing campaign, follow these ten steps:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account.
2. Click the Campaign tab at the center of your AdWords user interface screen.
3. Click the red + Campaigns button.
   1. From the drop-down menu, select “Display Network only.” (assuming you don’t want an RLSA campaign)
4. Select the “Remarketing” radio button.
5. Enter a campaign name, bid strategy, and budget.
6. Click the Set up remarketing button. You’ll go through the guided process to set up your remarketing tag and create your lists:
7. Next, AdWords will create the remarketing tag for you. You’ll be able to email the tag to yourself or your webmaster or your client, along with instructions on how to add it to each page of your website. Note that If you use Google Analytics, you will see a checkbox to use the tracking code that’s already on your site instead.
8. You will see that AdWords has automatically created an “All Visitors” list to get you started, so you don’t need to create this list yourself. The “All Visitors” list includes everyone who has visited any tagged pages on your website. You can later create new lists for your different groups of site visitors (I will discuss this later in this article). Click Return to campaign.
9. Click Save and continue.
10. Just like other campaigns, enter the ad group name and a bid that you feel will be competitive.

On the Remarketing lists tab, you’ll see the “All Visitors” list added to your ad group.

Click Save and continue if you want to create your ads, or Skip ad creation if you want to do this later.

So how do you create RLSA or Display Audience Lists?

It’s a simple 4 step process.

1. Within AdWords when creating a remarketing campaign you will 1^st create an audience list and when you create that list you will be given some javascript tagging code. You will place that code on every single page of your site.
   1. To set up an audience list you will simply go to Share library > Audiences > Create a remarketing list. This step automatically creates the main remarketing list which captures all of your visitors. You can then create as many lists as you want based on the sections of your website which people visit. The cool thing is that there is no need to add a separate tag for each list; one tag will segment all of the lists used.
2. Create Multiple Lists Focusing on general (all) visitors, recent shoppers who purchased and, those who abandon the shopping cart.
3. As a rule of thumb use 35% – 40% of the entire SEM budget on remarketing.
4. Keep all targeting options turned off because you want your special offer remarketing ads to follow your visitors EVERYWHERE they go for a time period from 30 to 540 days.

Now that you have an overview of the process that will work for either type of remarketing, you can select the type which will work best for you and your goals. While the RLSA (search) is very powerful, most people use the Display remarketing on the Google Display network as well as linking their Youtube Channel to the remarketing campaign to capitalize on their videos. The campaigns which see the greatest success are the ones which use a separate ad specifically offering a special offer and a strong, compelling call to action.

Most of the time, the remarketing campaign will have zero constraints. No In-Market groups, affinity groups, demographic segments or placements set because you want the ads to follow the person everywhere they go. There may be times when you don’t want to be so blatantly obvious there is remarketing going on. To go covert, you can now use Custom Affinity Audiences which allows you the marketer to define who you want to get in front of across the web, regardless of the device they are using to access the internet. Custom affinity audience option works across the entire Google Display Network, which, according to ComScore, reaches 94% of the web in the United States on a monthly basis, and 89% of global internet users. How’s that for reach?

You can create a custom list that targets only people who visit specific pages on your site or watch a specific video and a different list for a different event, product or service page. Staying in front of this list will increase sales.

Good luck.