Google Remarketing Strategies
Remarketing allows retailers to show ads to people who have previously visited their website or used their mobile app. Dynamic remarketing takes this a step further by allowing retailers to show previous visitors ads that contain products and services they viewed on their site.
With messages tailored to your audience, dynamic remarketing is helpful to retailers who want to build leads and sales by bringing previous visitors back to their site to complete what they started. Google Dynamic Remarketing efforts are available through the Google Display Network.
Traditional remarketing allows merchants to display ads to shoppers who have visited their site. However, these ads are often limited for ad content. Instead of remarketing using product specific ads (e.g for purses), sellers are only able to remarket for their website.
So instead of saying “Hey remember this sundress?” marketers were limited by displaying ads which are site-targeted only.
Dynamic Remarketing changed all of that by allowing retailers to remarket product-specific ads.
According to Josh Brisco, at CPC Strategy, categories such as apparel perform well with Google Dynamic Remarketing due to the fact most of those products are very visual.
“Retailers should be leveraging remarketing efforts to reach out to their audience. Even if someone made a purchase 2 years ago – it indicates an interest in your brand, which means they are likely to be more targeted and further down the purchasing funnel in comparison to a raw prospect,” he said.
Although Google Dynamic Retargeting isn’t necessarily new, we will take a closer look at two specific tools in the program many retailers may not be aware or using to their full potential including Customer Match and Remarketing Audiences.
Dynamic Retargeting: Customer Match
We’ve had the opportunity to test Google’s Customer Match feature on many of our clients and have seen favorable results.
With Customer Match advertisers can target ads against customer-owned data through Google AdWords. Its allows advertisers to upload their customer and promotional email address lists into AdWords. From these email lists, retailers can build campaigns and ads specifically designed to reach their audience.
According to Google, 70% of online consumers agree that the quality, timing, and relevance of a brand’s message influences their perception of a brand.
Now, Google can help retailers reach customers that they already have a relationship with — like those in their loyalty program or those who have made a previous purchase — in ways that are most relevant to their intent and context.
Although Google Customer Match is designed to help retailers reach their “highest-value customers” by strengthening connections with their known customer base on Google Search, it also helps retailers forge new relationships across other channels including YouTube Trueview & Gmail Native Ads.
With Google Customer Match, retailers can:
- Generate awareness with customers that are likely to be interested in a product based off of past purchases
- Utilize valuable customer data to tailor messaging in marketing campaigns (ex: target shopping cart abandoners)
- Drive purchases through upsell or crosssell strategies
- Leverage customer relationship management (CRM) data to promote repeat purchases and increase loyalty
According to Brisco, Customer Match allows retailers to get around some of the limitations that accompany most remarketing efforts.
Because most retargeting efforts are based off of cookies – which customers can block or easily avoid since they are not typically optimized for mobile – Customer Match uses email addresses and user- sign ins -which are considered more reliable across all devices.
“If you’re not signed into Google, data can get lost cross device. Customer match should do a better job of bridging that data across different devices and you can track emails for the past 90 days,” Brisco said.
What You Should Know About Google Customer Match:
Upload Email Addresses – Google Customer Match allows advertisers to upload a list of email addresses in AdWords under the ‘Audiences’ tab. Google currently requires the customer email lists to have a minimum of 1000 email addresses.
Verify Emails with Google – For each list uploaded, Google will match the email addresses with users’ primary Google account email address.
Generate Similar Audiences – Corresponding Google accounts are generated into an audience list, which is ready for targeting like any other remarketing list. Retailers can generate similar audience lists to reach new customers on YouTube and Gmail who are likely to be interested in their products and services.
Hashed Emails – It is not required that advertisers use hashed emails. All email addresses – hashed or otherwise – will be uploaded via SSL. Emails that do not match to Google account email addresses, as well as duplicates, are ignored, and the file is deleted after matching and compliance checks.
For more on Customer Match requirements and setup check out our recent post, Google Customer Match Allows Retailers to Target Consumer Emails.
Dynamic Retargeting: Remarketing Audiences
Retailers can also use “audiences” (previously called remarketing lists) within Google Analytics to reach their consumers on Google Search Ads, with no tagging required. Now retailers and marketers can leverage more then 200 dimensions and metrics within Google Analytics to create and activate their audiences for remarketing.
They can also use those audiences to re-engage shoppers with a “consistent message across both Google Search and Display”.
For example: Previously, if a shopper named Sara visited a brand page and another shopper named Michael also visited the brand page – both shoppers were placed into a single group and targeted exactly the same way.
Thanks to Google’s updates – retailers can see that Sara spend 30 seconds on the brand’s page while Michael spend 5 minutes on the website.
Marketers can segment “time spent on page” and invest more into retargeting Michael since they know she spent a longer amount of time browsing the site and is more likely to convert.
Although Analytics Lists are not new, many marketers are not leveraging this data to influence their strategy.
According to Brisco, this data can help retailers track things like:
- Product /cart value.
- People that called in for directions.
- Visitors that viewed 2 or more pages on your site.
- The duration a visitor spent on your site.
- If a visitor purchased more than once (2 or more purchases would be an ideal group)
Below are two screenshots of how a retailer might use the Audience builder feature to segment “behavior” and “conditions” to filter data.
According to Google, when a user’s activity on your site or app meets criteria you’ve specified for an audience, the cookie or ad ID associated with that activity is added to the appropriate Remarketing Audience (unless it has been already been added).
Any of these users who later visit a site on the Google Display Network or use Google Search may be shown one of your remarketing ads (depending on whether you win the ad auction).
Retailers should keep in mind there are some limitations including:
- Limit of 2000 Remarketing Audiences per Analytics account.
- Remarketing Audiences are currently not supported for User-ID views. You can create an audience, but it will not populate.
- The In-Market Segment dimension is not available for Remarketing Audiences.
- The Days Since Last Visit metric is not available for Remarketing Audiences.
For more on dynamic remarketing, email [email protected]