San Francisco — Say you clicked on an online ad from Google’s paid search listing. But while on the landing page, you suddenly withdrew from the site in a confused state as whether to finalize an ad conversion or not. To facilitate AdWords publishers, Google has rolled out a new “Remarketing” feature designed to make it easier for companies to target consumers long after they have initially made contact with an online site or brand.
Remarketing, or retargetting as Google addresses it, is pretty simple in concept. It allows brands continue to reach out to potential customers that have previously visited or shopped at their website or engaged with an ad campaign. It empowers them the ability to follow website visitors as they are off browsing the Internet via a Google cookie and then retarget those users with messages to compel them to return to re-engage.
In other words, if you are an AdWords publisher exhibiting those ads, the company can keep targeting them with ads on other sites enhanced with Google’s ads, hoping that user would change his mind and finally do something that will lead to ad conversion for your campaign.
That is what Google AdWords’ Remarketing strategy is intended to achieve. According to the Inside AdWords blog, “remarketing” has been on a trial run since last March and has became popular with companies seeking to boost brand awareness, drive sales and increase their clicks.
Here is an example given by Inside AdWords: Assume a customer is looking to take a vacation in the Caribbean. They visit your site but find it is too expensive, so they leave for now. However, they may eventually end up making the trip. How do you reach them? The remarketing program lets you serve ads to them on other Google content sites like blogs or YouTube.
“We have received a tremendous response from the hundreds of advertisers who have been using it in recent months, across all industries — including automotive, retail, local and finance,” says Product Manager Aitan Weinberg. “We have witnessed that remarketing has worked well for many different kinds of advertisers — whether they are looking to boost brand awareness, or drive clicks and sales, and whether they use display or text ads.
Ad Remarketing is part of Google’s Interest-based ad targeting program. To set up a remarketing campaign on your AdWords account. Simply click on the “Audiences” tab on your AdWords account.
AdWords’ help center gives a good run-down on how remarketing works. Remarketing functions by embedding a small piece of code on to a site’s product page which allows marketers to show relevant ads — to highlight, for example, last minute discounts — to all previous visitors to that page as they browse the Google Content Network.
Advertisers can operate multiple remarketing campaigns at once. “For example, you could offer discount game tickets to users who have previously visited your tickets page, advertise VIP hospitality packages to users who clicked on your ‘How to get to the arena’ page, and advertise a sale on team merchandise to users who previously visited your YouTube brand channel,” says Weinberg.
“We are really enabling success for these marketers,” said Brad Bender, director of product management for the Google Content Network. “This runs the entire range. It works for brand marketers and direct-response marketers.”
This is sure to stir-up a number of privacy concerns. Google is trying to pacify those by enabling users to opt-out of viewing remarketing ads using Google’s Ads Preferences Manager, as mentioned in Google’s announcement, but in case users have not seen that particular link, “Clicking on ‘Ads by google’ or ‘i’ (in rich media ads) alongside all ads we serve takes you to this page which explains our ad practices and leads to the Ads Preferences Manager,” the company says.
Earlier this week, AdWords announced the release of Search Funnels, a group of reports that expand the information on how consumers interact with ads in the shopping process by highlighting first and last clicks, aided conversions and path lengths to purchases.
For more detailed information about Ad Remarketing can be found here.