The Best Strategies for Google Display Network Remarketing

Are you taking the necessary steps to reach out to your audience?

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In an increasingly competitive advertising landscape, captivating the attention of your audience can be difficult. Particularly, drawing back in customers that have visited your site already can be a whole different challenge.

However, retargeting provides businesses with another way to reach their desired audience, which can be particularly useful when trying to convert a user that has shown interest, however, has not yet purchased.

Below, we’ll go into detail about the best strategies for Google Display Network retargeting in particular, a popular platform that can generate some impressive results for online advertisers.

What is Google Display Network remarketing and how does it work?

Before we give you our top tips and tricks, you’ll need to understand exactly what remarketing, and Google Display Network remarketing, is.

Essentially, remarketing ads appear to users who have visited your website or, in some cases, used your mobile app. Remarketing is a way for businesses to reconnect with their audience, while continuing to build brand awareness.

With Google Display Network remarketing (GDN), the idea is the same, whereby businesses can re-target their chosen audience through the network. The ads can be completely tailored to the audience and their preferences, allowing for strategic positioning on websites that are part of the GDN.

Using small pieces of code placed on your website, Google can track new users’ cookies, which are small files automatically saved on the individuals browser that stores information such as preferences.

This code can then be used to create an anonymous list of users who visited your site. Once they’ve visited and left your site, their unique cookies will alert Google Display remarketing ads to appear on relevant sites as they continue to browse.
 

How does Google display remarketing ads?

As previously mentioned, Google Display remarketing ads appear on sites relevant to your own, and that are part of the Google Display Network, or when users search for related terms on Google.

Remarketing ads can appear as a banner ad across the top of the page, or on either side of a page. With Google Display remarketing, you have the choice to display ads that incorporate images, text, videos, or rich media.

What are the benefits of Google remarketing display ads?

There are many benefits associated with Google Display retargeting. From increasing brand awareness to driving sales, here are some of the major benefits for businesses looking to capitalise on the platform:

• Broad reach – Google Display Network remarketing allows you to target more than two million websites and apps across multiple devices, broadening your reach like never before.
   
• Budget friendly – thanks to Google’s real-time bidding feature, you can carefully calculate your bids for the people seeing your ad. This can help to create high converting ads that are still cost effective.
   
• Great targeting options – Google Display Network remarketing allows you to create highly targeted ads. For example, if you have a lot of customers who abandon their baskets at the checkout, you can retarget them and hopefully bring them back to your website to complete their purchase.
   
• Reporting capabilities – Google’s accurate and in-depth reporting lets you see exactly how well your campaigns are performing, which can be incredibly useful when it comes to campaign optimisation (something we’ll cover a little later on).
   

With some clear benefits associated with Google Display Network remarketing campaigns, we’re sure you’ll be eager to get started.

There are two ways you can create Google Display Network remarketing campaigns, and we’ll tell you how to do the remarketing that works best for your business.

How to create remarketing lists in Google Analytics

Before you can make a campaign, you’ll need to make sure you have a Google Analytics account. You can sign up for one for free.

1. Create your remarketing list – to do so, you’ll need to link your Analytics and Ads accounts. You can do this by doing the following: on your Google Ads account, click “tools”, then “linked account”, and then “details” under the Google Analytics section. Find the account you want to link and click “link”.
    
2. Now, from the Google Analytics dashboard, click “admin”. Then, navigate to the property column and click audience definition > audiences > new audience.
    
3. Choose who you want to target from the dropdown menu provided. Alternatively, you can import a custom audience.
    
4. Once you’ve defined your target audience, choose where you want to publish your ads.
    
5. You can save your list to both Google Analytics and Google Ads. We recommend doing both so you can have it readily available.

How to set up remarketing lists on Google Ads

1. Log into Google Ads and click on “shared library”.
    
2. Then, select “audiences”.
    
3. From here, you may be faced with a message stating you do not have a remarketing tag. You can resolve this by clicking on “tag details” and accessing a tag that you can install on your website.
    
4. Now, you have to decide who you want to remarket to, and you can choose from four options:
   1. website visitors
   2. mobile app users
   3. customer emails
   4. YouTube users.

And now you have your desired list.
 

For making a campaign, we’re going to outline how you can make a remarketing campaign that is based on the “website visitors option”, as, for many businesses, this will be the go-to-choice.

1. Go to your Google Ads account and click “campaigns”.
    
2. From here, select the plus (+) button to create a new campaign.
    
3. Choose from one of the goal options that appears in the grid, e.g., sales.
    
4. For the campaign type, choose “display”, then “standard display” campaign.
    
5. Enter in your business URL and click continue.
    
6. Now, you can set the parameters of your campaign.
    
7. Go to “audiences” in the people section and click on the browse tab. Then, click “how have they interacted with your business” and find your remarketing list you made previously.
    
8. Either create your ads now or later (bearing in mind your campaign won’t run without ads) and then, click “create campaign”.

Strategies and optimisation for remarketing campaigns

Now you know what Google Display Network remarketing ads are and how to make them, here are some of our top tips and tricks to maximise your return on investment.

Our first piece of advice is to avoid placing your remarketing ads on mobile game apps. This is because, often, people accidentally click on ads, which means pointless clicks end up costing you and bringing in no return. While it may seem like a great idea at the time to target a wide range of users, often, it can produce fruitless results.

Secondly, we recommend you specifically target users that have abandoned their baskets. It can be an extremely valuable opportunity to target people who did not complete their purchase, as they’re already close to making their purchasing decision. Often, all it can take is a reminder of your business for them to return to complete their purchase on your site, as opposed to going to a competitor.

Did you know that you can also use Google Display Network retargeting ads to cross-sell or up-sell to existing customers? Customers that have made one purchase from you already may be interested in complementary purchases. You can do this by creating a retargeting list called “converted customers”. While it may be a smaller list, the users you’ll be targeting will already be familiar with your business.

Finally, we recommend using responsive display ads. This is because these ads can automatically adjust their size, format, and appearance to fit almost any available space. Responsive display ads can help to save you a lot of time, and ensures your ads always appear to users in the best format.

Do you need help with Google Display Network remarketing?

The team at Diginius are experts at creating, managing, and optimising Google ad campaigns for a variety of businesses. Contact us today to find out more about our PPC management services and how we can help you to maximise your advertising success on Google.