Reach, Follow & Convert with Remarketing #BiddableWorld

Today, I had the opportunity to speak at the Biddable World conference in London, an event dedicated to paid marketing. My talk was all about remarketing using Google AdWords and Google Analytics and how you should be using it to get more conversions from your paid search campaign.

The key lessons to be taken away from the session were:

• Best practices for implementing the code
• Creating targeted lists using demographics and conditions
• Smart Lists and who should be using them
• Optimising tips and techniques for better converting campaigns
• Remarketing Lists for Search Ads
• Real life example targeting strategies

You can view the slides below or you can read through this post which should help to give you an overview of what the talk was about.

The Slides

Implementing the Code

One of the most important thing to remember is to update the Privacy Policy on your website to explain to your visitors how you are using cookies. When you enable remarketing, you need to declare that you use DoubleClick cookies to do this. Here is an example of the Privacy Policy on the Koozai website.

The next thing you need to think about is whether you are going to use the AdWords Remarketing code or Analytics Remarketing code. My recommendation is that you should be using both to get the most flexibility with your remarketing campaigns. You can run both sets of code on your website without any issues, one goes in the head and the other in the body.

Creating your Lists

Analytics offer five different ways to create lists:

1. Smart Lists
2. Specific Page or Section
3. All Users
4. Completed Goal
5. Segmented Data

I almost always would use the Segmented Data option as you can get your lists a lot more targeted which means they are more likely to convert for you compared with doing blanket remarketing.

If you are creating lists with segmented data you can either import your already created Advanced Segments or you can create your own lists from scratch. What you choose to do will depend on how you have your analytics account set up. If you already have lots of Advanced Segments in your account that are full of interesting stats, then you may choose to just import them without starting again.

There are so many different metrics and dimensions that you can use to build your lists including:

• Technology
• Behaviour
• Date of First Session
• Traffic Sources
• Conditions
• Demographics
• Sequences

One thing to consider if you go down the route of using conditions (AND / OR statements where you merge datasets together) is that users are not removed from a list if subsequent sessions disqualify them from the segment.

This basically means that if you have a user that falls into two different segments, they will remain in both and they don’t get removed.

Depending on what you are trying to achieve, I would recommend using the Custom Combinations remarketing feature within AdWords; if you are looking to create lists with multiple segments especially if you are saying visited X but not Y. If you were to use analytics for that type of list, it will not work.

Create all your lists in Google Analytics and then create Custom Combinations using those lists from within Google AdWords.

Remarketing List Starter Pack

If you are completely new to remarketing, there is a great little starter pack with segments already created for you within the Analytics Solution Gallery – https://kooz.ai/remarketing-starter-pack

Optimise, Optimise

It is very important to not get complacent with your remarketing campaigns. They need just as much attention as the other paid search campaigns you are running. As with normal paid search, there are various techniques that you can use to optimise remarketing campaigns. Here are just a few things you should look at:

• Monitor automatic placements
• Add negative placements
• Split test ad creative & landing pages
• Review location performance
• Test different membership durations
• Update your strategy with new lists & adapt existing lists
• Review Lost IS due to budget
• Review Lost IS due to rank
• Test different ad sizes & types
• Use the dimensions tab to track
• Exclude high bounce rate visitors
• Exclude visitors with minimal time on site
• Review frequency capping
• Review categories and exclude inappropriate ones
• Set & optimise bids at ad group level
• Review mobile performance

In the slides, you can scroll through to the optimise section where I look at some of the above techniques in more detail.

RLSA Campaigns

If you are asking why you should care about RLSA campaigns, AdWords have written a one sentence statement to address this very question. I am not going to go into any detail about RLSAs in this post as Tara West wrote a very handy guide to Remarketing Lists for Search Ads recently which covers everything you need to know.

Example Remarketing Strategies

In the final part of the talk, I looked at some example remarketing strategies using some well know brands to bring the ideas to life. When you begin remarketing the most important thing you need to think about is your strategy. Without a good strategy your remarketing campaigns will either fall flat on their face or you will get some results but no where near what you should be getting.

Here are some of the examples I used:

If you need any help with your remarketing campaigns, please get in touch with us!