Creating a Google AdWords Remarketing Campaign

Over the past few weeks we've noticed that a lot of people aren't aware of how to go about creating a remarketing campaign in Google AdWords. For those who are familiar with the term but uncertain as to what it is, remarketing allows you to show Google adverts to people who've already performed an action on your website. Here are some examples:

• Show tablet banners to people who've looked at the tablets page on your website.
• Show banners to people who added products to their cart on your site but didn't purchase.
• Show banners to people who viewed a specific product on your page but didn't purchase it.
• etc
• etc

The options are endless, but so is the return on investment. Think about it for a second, how about this scenario: A person comes to your website and they add a few products to their cart but they never check out. It could be a number of reasons but one reason might be that there's a high delivery charge. Imagine whilst, clicking around the Internet, they saw a banner for your site that included a coupon for free delivery.. they may easily click that banner and arrive at the checkout process, this time there's free delivery! That got your mind running didn't it? 🙂 The process for setting up a remarketing campaign is not difficult, but Google's layout and supporting documentation complicates it in our opinion. What should take no more than 20 minutes ends up potentially putting someone off because it's not explained well. The process goes like this:

1. Create a Google AdWords account.
2. Choose a new campaign and select display network only.
3. Upload your banners accordingly to an AdGroup.
4. Go to Shared Library on the left, then Audience and create an audience (list).*
5. Finally, assign said list to your AdGroup.
6. Don't forget to add your remarketing tag to your website, this is like adding your Google Analytics tracking code.

* An audience (list) is a group of people based on similarities. For example, you could create an audience called "tablets" and then set up rules that add people to this list provided they've been to the Tablets page on your website. Important Notes: Dynamic remarketing is not available in South Africa so don't select that option. Even though AdWords makes you think you need to, just don't because it'll end up wasting hours of your time and creating more confusion than anything! We also suggest creating all of this inside Google AdWords, doing it through Google Analytics could easily confuse you further. Google Resources:

• How remarketing works
• Creating your first remarketing campaign