Google Ads provide an effective way to increase your conversions and enquiries from your target audience. In particular, remarketing to past visitors to your website is one proven targeting method to deliver impressive results for businesses.
Past visitors have already shown an interest in your business and are aware of what you offer, therefore have a high intent and likelihood to convert into new customers or repeat customers.
This opportunity can be maximised through remarketing to visitors with Google Ads after they have left your site. It can also help to increase the value of a customer through running remarketing campaigns, to create a loyal base of customers for your business.
Our blog post will look at the main benefits to using Google Ads remarketing for your target audience and the opportunities, such as audience segmentation and the precise targeting that it brings. First, let’s look in more depth at what we mean by remarketing.
What Is Remarketing?
Remarketing also referred to as retargeting refers to the marketing efforts made towards people who have previously visited your website. There can be many reasons why someone doesn’t commit to taking an important action or convert to make a purchase or enquiry the first time they visit your website.
It could be they didn’t have enough time when on your website and got distracted with something else at home or work, therefore having no reflection on your business, they simply ran out of time. It could be due to your products or services they need to think about it further or do more research before committing to spending their money.
Running a remarketing campaign on your Google Ads account allows your ads to be shown to users after they have left your website. Putting you front of mind, instead of your competitors, when they are visiting other websites throughout the Google Display Network with your remarketing ads.
You can create remarketing audiences by being broad, such as if a user went to the homepage of your website or used your mobile app. This extends through to website visitors going to certain products or services on your site, who are then shown relevant ads to users which are tailored to trends in their behaviour and interest on your website. We will look at this more below.
Cost Effective
When considering the sales funnel to gain a customer, naturally a completely new customer is likely to cost more to market to in order to convert into a customer. At that point, they have no awareness or knowledge of your business. Whereas the conversion rate for customers gained due to successful remarketing campaigns can both be higher and with a lower ad spend.
This is due to there already being familiarity of your business for that target audience which will have a higher intent of making a purchase or enquiry. A study found that compared to new visitors, previous site visitors will click a Google ad at 2-3x the rate of a new visitor.
With the remarketing feature available within Google Ads once the set up is enabled it allows you to be very specific with your targeting which is a huge advantage. For example, targeting visitors who choose to navigate to a specific category, products or services on your website.
Or, showing ad group ads which are tailored to those products or services they have already shown interest in or already viewed on your site. This means you can deliver a bespoke set of ads that focus on their interests already shown.
With this method of targeting and the level of data that can be reviewed from campaigns running, it allows for the ad spend to be fully maximised, achieving a high return on ad spend with remarketing when done effectively.
Target Groups
We touched on this above, you can create a new remarketing campaign in Google Ads and create remarketing lists using their Audience Manager. Ideally, choose to begin broad such as users who visited your website in general, and then through testing and optimising bring the targeting in further. It will be a benefit to narrow down the remarketing list targeting over time to maximise the return on ad spend.
If you are specific with targeting using an effective remarketing campaign, it can identify those most likely to translate into leads/conversions and with the highest intent. This helps to limit wasting Google Ads spend on broad advertising; especially if your goal is to increase conversions and sales, for example, if an e-commerce business.
An example of audience groups and a way to maximise them would include targeting visitors to the checkout page who then abandoned their cart. You could run remarketing through Google Ads to incentivise them to complete their purchase such as free shipping as a limited time offer.
Or, to remind them of the products interested in, to get them back to your site to complete their purchase. This second method works great with the Google Ads Display network, as it provides a visual element to the remarketing campaign. A bonus of this is that Google Display Ads normally have a lower bid price too, maximising the available budget to draw in more conversions.
Alternatively, you could specifically target from your Google Ads remarketing lists to people who already made a purchase on your website, rather than new customers; encouraging building a loyal and repeat customer base. It could be a special offer to thank them for shopping with you, promoted through your ads.
Other segmentation can include looking at geographical or demographical data and targeting based on other specific pages that have been visited. The above just gives a few examples but there are a whole host of additional settings that can be combined to narrow down your targeting to relevant website visitors.
Track Your Success
Google Ads are a powerful pay-per-click marketing tool to reach your goals, which includes remarketing campaigns. One main reason is because of the black and white results which can be viewed in your Google Ads account or with your Google Analytics.
This gives a business valuable data to identify what has been the standout performance with the highest results and what would benefit from further improvements and testing to optimise the campaign.
Regularly reviewing how the Google Ads remarketing campaign is performing, it gives you the opportunity to continuously test and optimise your marketing efforts. It is worth taking this time and effort on a regular basis. This will help to ensure getting the best return from your ad spend and limit wasting any of your marketing budget.
It could be that want to fine tune further the landing pages which a user clicks through to from the ads, or the Google ads themselves which may want to optimise and test alternatives. Or it might be the audience targeting and how it has been grouped. Having this valuable reporting data ensures that your ad spend is being used effectively to reach the right potential customers with a high intent to purchase or enquire with your business.
How Can We Help?
We hope our blog post has been useful in learning more about the benefits of Google Ads remarketing to businesses. When creating remarketing lists and campaigns are delivered effectively they are a powerful marketing tool to help convert visitors to your website, into new customers.
As well as increasing the value of existing customers with further repeat business or increased basket value due to the ads seen whilst on other sites from remarketing through a Google Ads account. All whilst achieving a high return on ad spend, due to the precise targeting and the already high interest in your business.
At 1PCS Creative we are a Google Partner giving us the right knowledge and experience to deliver effective Google Ad campaigns, including remarketing ad campaigns for businesses. If you would like to discuss how we can help, please feel free to get in touch with one of our team who would be happy to help.
Ben Webster
Creative director at 1PCS. Addicted to design, SEO, pizza and helping companies big and small succeed online.