What is PPC remarketing?

Remarketing is also known as retargeting, which means a practice of showing ads to users that have previously interacted with your ads or visited your website.

Remarketing is done by injecting a snippet of code, which enables a business to store data on user behaviour and search history, commonly known as “cookies”.

The data can then be used for a more targeted advertising approach. This audience group is believed to be the likeliest to interact with your ad again by clicking on it and converting.

Remarketing campaigns are more cost-effective and available across different advertising networks and platforms, such as Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, and the Google Display Network.

It can be a very successful advertising method, not only for building brand awareness, but as well for a direct conversion.

This article comprises seven best practices for achieving a successful, goal-driven remarketing campaign that remarketing agencies can use to improve the performance for their clients.

Remarketing Best practices

1. Target high-value customers

Limit your budget spend by only targeting users that are most valuable for your business. A valuable customer means that their purchasing ability and the likelihood of converting is higher. Prioritise users that spend a longer time on your product or service pages or your site.

Create a remarketing list of active buyers to target with your remarketing ads. Remember that audiences have a membership duration, meaning that cookies added to an audience will expire a set amount of days after being added, which is usually after one month.

2. Set remarketing campaign goals

A remarketing campaign goal example could be a specific sales or subscriptions number you want to attain, or to turn cart abandoners from the previous month into converting customers this month.

Set clear campaign objectives, as that is the only way you will be able to track progress.

As an increasing number of shoppers are switching from shopping in-store to online and mobile shopping, shopping cart abandonment will increase.

A study showed that 75% of shopping cart abandoners say they plan on returning to the website to make a purchase later.

It is estimated that with strategically planned out remarketing campaigns, advertisers would be able to recover about 63% of merchandise that was abandoned.

3. Set a cap on ad frequency

The remarketing ads can also be capped at a certain amount per week or per month, so your existing and potential customers would not be put off by the amount of your product or service ads they see. Limiting the ad frequency will ensure your target audience does not feel harassed.

To cap ad frequency, head to Advanced settings and click on Ad delivery: Ad rotation, frequency capping. You can set Frequency capping per your desired impression amount per day, week, or month. Alternatively, you can enable Google to decide how many times your ad is shown.

4. Update ad copies

Keep your ads fresh if you are frequently showing your ad to the same users, as they will want to see new information, so keep testing different ad copies.

Remarketing ads can be highly personalised, and you must do so because it is essential to differentiate the marketing approach as the same tactics are not likely to work for different market segments.

Create custom ad copy messaging to your audience groups, as well as see if the calls to actions need to be changed too. Additionally, you can test different ad sizes to understand which perform the best with your audience.

Remember to include a call to action and brand name.

5. Segmenting audiences

Create ads based on audience interests, demographics, behavioural patterns (visit homepage only, product page visitors, blog readers, content consumers (download infographics, eBooks, etc.)). You can manage your audiences on Google Ads Shared Library Tab Audience Manager section.

Another way to segment users and then target them as an audience group is to segment users that have abandoned their shopping carts in the previous month or two. These users were at the end of the purchasing funnel and are potential buyers.

Additionally, you can create Custom Combinations, meaning a new audience, that is a combination of several of your existing audience lists. The custom combination could target your app user audience and your website visitor’s audience list.

6. Use Dynamic remarketing

Use dynamic prospecting to see what the best products are to advertise to your desired target audience at a specific time. This will increase your chances to acquire new users and potential customers.

Dynamic remarketing enables displaying customised ads to users, based on the product or service they have looked at on your website.

These ads are structured in several templates, which Google serves to searchers based on their search history. The dynamic remarketing campaign goal is to get the most value out of existing customers.

7. Test campaign performance

You can test several aspects of your remarketing campaigns, such as:

  • Ad copy testing
  • Custom audience combination testing
  • Frequency cap testing
  • Bid testing
  • Landing page testing

Remarketing campaigns are worth the trial and analysing time, as returning customers are said to spend 67% more on websites that new ones.

Wrapping up

UK based PPC advertisers often see very strong performance from running a remarketing campaign. However, a lot of advertisers use a ‘set it and forget it’ approach to remarketing campaigns where they don’t optimise it. Use these seven remarketing best practice tips to running a successful remarketing campaign to further improve your remarketing campaign performance.