REMARKETING LISTS FOR SEARCH ADS
Remarketing lists for Search Ads are a incredible way to re-engage with visitors that have viewed your website in the past. This allows behavioral marketing to act upon lists of users that you create via Google AdWords or Google Analytics. It has multiple uses such as target users with different behaviors and actions with display ads, search ads, Gmail ads, and many more. These actions are meant to drive the user to take action upon your website, either with a phone call, form fill, an E-Commerce transaction, etc.
Google AdWords has the ability to do this easily, by creating custom lists through Google Analytics, go to Admin, Property Settings, Audience, and create a new Audience. There, you can view recommended audiences, or create your own. You can choose from demographics, technology used, behavior, date of first session, and traffic sources. You can variate audiences depending on your marketing goals and objectives.
Your audience builder is essential in creating custom audiences. An example would be if audiences come from a traffic source, let’s say organic Facebook posts. Would should re-market to these users through AdWords a text ad adding a promo or a deal for your Facebook users in rewards of the follow in that social media platform.
SHOULD YOU RE-MARKET THROUGH CUSTOM AUDIENCES AS MUCH AS YOU CAN?
Yes! Because it is a simple to do feature with many benefits, leveraging re-marketing is something really important in the marketing funnel. Let’s say you want to create an audience with users who visited a specific section of your site, let’s say the cart page, wouldn’t you re-market your audiences through ads, “hey there, you have items in your cart, proceed to checkout?” or some other text of their items in their cart. This helps push the user to convert a sales transaction, hopefully for a few cents (depending on the bidding on AdWords) on the Google search result pages. This is but a small example of the infinite ways you can advertise through remarketing lists for search ads depending on user behavior and engagement. This saves a lot of cash instead of going to the route of a normal PPC campaign, where a click can cost you way more than if it is in a Remarketing list.
WHY DO WE USE IT?
Why should you use RLSA? Cost: The cost of the user is lowered depending on many factors that include in AdWords such as AdRank, competitor’s bidding, bidding automation, quality score, and many other factors that Google involves in the process. By my experience, it won’t cost you more than an original AdWords campaign, and sometimes the bidding price can be reduced up to 1/6! Another reason to use RLSA is targeting: you already have a list of users with specific criteria about their behaviors and interaction. Let’s say you want to target users who completed a conversion goal, you might want to add keywords in that RLSA campaign in a broader way, such as up-selling, cross-selling your products or services. Let’s say you offer tennis shoes, and they enter a query on Google about finding some socks, this person can have an ad shown to them that includes a discounted price for the socks you offer, plus an ad on top of the GRSP(Google search result pages). This can be a great way to up-sell your customer with other products, that he might want to research in other pages, that, as a great digital marketer, took care of that by Re-marketing.
SHOULD YOU TEST DIFFERENT AD COPY, KEYWORDS, AND LANDING PAGES?
By all means, you should always a/b or multi-variable test keywords, ads, and landing pages, even with remarketing lists for search ads. You don’t just one ad copy in one adgroup to be the definitive solution to all your problems. Instead, try at least 3 compelling text ads that are accompanied by different keywords, but with similar semantics, as well as 1 to 2 landing pages to test. This by my experience always helps to determine the winner, and replace the loser for about 2-4 weeks testing. This is my experience, but you can test with more or less keywords, ads, and landing pages, and different time frames depending on your marketing meetings, objectives, and deadlines.
RLSA CONCLUSION
This form of marketing is intermediate to advance strategies that can greatly benefit your online digital strategies. This strategy is intended to any website that has already a decent number of audiences that can be segmented or has already a streamline of traffic. New websites might not benefit from these marketing strategies, due to the lack of audience, but other websites such as for lead generation or e-commerce, this is a tremendous help to keep users inside the marketing pipeline and to cross-sell up-sell. I encourage you to play around with creating different audiences, ads, landing pages, give out promo codes and deals, and check out the results through Google AdWords. Always check the performance and KPI’s of your campaigns, adjust as needed, check for CPA cost, conversion rates, click through rates, and other important performance indicators that you think is important for your business objectives/goals. Always keep an eye for expanding your marketing strategies considering budgeting, and ask the stakeholders for their opinions(they might increase the marketing budget overall). If this is not for you, there are plenty of marketing strategies to try out, but this one is a great one to put to use.