With internet technology consistently advancing every passing year, advertising technology advances as well. One of the most popular recent innovations in online advertising is retargeting. But what's retargeting, and why is it so important? If you've ever seen advertisements with sandy beaches after visiting a travel site, you've been a part of behavioral targeting or Google Remarketing.
What is Google Remarketing
What retargeting does is put a cookie on your computer when you visit a particular website. This cookie communicates with outside member websites in the ad network and displays advertising based on the cookie's settings. The most popular and accessible version of retargeting is Google remarketing.
How Does Google Remarketing Work?
For example, you can create multiple Google remarketing cookies in order to further specialize your advertisements to different groups of customers. You can target visitors who are just aware of your product. Create an advertisement to remind visitors about your service, and get them to look at your services and items in more details. You can target interested buyers who have shown interest in your product. Create an advertisement to get users who have already viewed the shopping page to come back and convert. You can also create a special offer for these customers. You can target previous buyers who may or may not have become loyal customers. Remind customers of new deals or other products they might be interested in.
You can also vary the frequency of the ads and the demographics of people in these categories. Ultimately, the extent to which you can personalize and develop advertising through Google remarketing is limited to your efforts and imagination. Here are the ways you can do google remarketing:
Select Your Audience
The very first step to remarketing is to analyze your data and develop a strategy. You’ll need to decide which visitors to your web site you’d wish to target ads to. These groups, the ones you want to target separately and the ones you don’t want to target at all, are audiences. There is an infinite number of ways to target these audiences.
Set-up Retargeting Codes
One of the things to do in building your retargeting campaign is to generate and place the special code you’ll need to place cookies on your website visitors’ computers. This code can be generated inside Google Analytics or inside AdWords. It involves the placement of one code on each page called a run of web site code. This is the same one that Analytics already uses to watch traffic on your web site with a small modification. Whichever means you use to generate the code, simply place it on every page of your site and use URLs to build custom combinations and audiences.
Create a Remarketing List
If you’re using Google Analytics to retarget, you can start creating remarketing audiences in Google AdWords. If you’ve only just installed the piece of code it might take a couple of days for the audiences to populate.
Set-up Custom Combination
After making your remarketing lists the next step is to make a campaign in AdWords and run ads to those audiences. Like with anything else on Google AdWords, you must test and optimize consistently to get the best results.
