For those of you, who have never heard of the tool known as Remarketing, listen up. Remarketing allows you to find your previous website visitors across the internet and display relevant banners to drive them back (remarket) to your website to complete their transaction. In other words, by targeting visitors who are already aware of your website, one can assume the action of revisiting your site will increase the likelihood of going forward with your offer resulting in a conversion; a true win in my eyes!

You may be asking yourself, how does Google do this exactly? Well, once you place a custom tracking tag on the pages of your website (you can create this tag under the Audiences section found in the Control Panel & Library portion of your AdWords account), Google will then place a cookie that will trigger targeted ads to searchers that are visiting other sites around the web that are part of Google’s Display Network. I think this is a great tool since the chance of turning a cold lead (someone who has never heard of your company before) into a customer is a very long and tedious process. But, if you target a lead that has already been to your site and already knows who you are; the more likely they will be interested in purchasing or making a conversion. While there are other Remarketing platforms out there, Google Remarketing is the most powerful since they have the largest network of websites anywhere available in its display network.

Some things to remember before activating Remarketing:

• Remarketing is available in the content network only and applied at the ad group level.
• The content network setting needs to be for placements, not keywords for maximum reach.
• The best set up is a new campaign for placements and an ad group with no active placements.
• If you want to get the most out of it, have AdWords Conversion Tracking enabled and running, it will import and use some of the same tags.
• For even easier management, link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts through data sharing. Under settings in your GA account, enable the checkbox under “Share my Google Analytics data” and for “with other Google products only.” (Google Analytics will help you identify pages that have significant traffic and are points of conversion and contact within your website. Pages to think about including are product and services pages found within your website, since you want to reengage with visitors who didn’t end up taking action and converting.)
• Experiment & Have fun!
• Still don’t think you understand Remarketing? Watch this video to learn more!