How to Optimize Remarketing Campaigns (Google Ads) Campaigns

Remarketing is a great way to continue advertising to people who have already visited our websites, but there are many things that could be done beyond just showing them ads over and over. With following optimizations, you can get remarkable results.

This post will get you through some guidelines on AdWords (Google Ads) remarketing best practices for optimization, but don’t forget to discover the most effective ways of doing things.

Optimization in remarketing comes in a few different forms:

• Ad testing
  • Strong branding may work well in your ads. Start here as a control, but experiment with other messages. Treat remarketing ads similarly to how you would treat other ads, just keep your audience in mind. These users are already familiar with your brand, so you may need to go a bit further to win them back to your site. Experiment with different offers, calls to action, images and everything else you can think of.
• Custom combination testing
  • We mentioned earlier that you may find different results when combining interest categories with previous site visitors. Keep testing and find what works best for your account. Experiment with different combinations of cookie lengths. Messaging for visitors that visited between 7 and 30 days ago may very well end up not working for users who visited between 30 and 60 days ago.
• Frequency cap testing
  • You don’t want to be too annoying, but you also want to maximize the number of interested visitors to your website. Monitor your audience size in combination with the number of impressions your remarketing ad groups get. Maybe your cap is too high and you aren’t limiting anything at all. Maybe you’re setting it way too low and you’re severely limiting your ads’ exposure.
• Bid testing
  • Impression share is something worth monitoring in an AdWords remarketing campaign. You’re following users and not sites, so if you get to 100% IS you may be annoying some of those users. Monitor your bids both for cost-effectiveness and return on investment, but also for impression share.
• Landing page testing
  • The user that you’re bringing back to your site already has a certain level of familiarity. You should experiment with landing them on the same page and somewhere completely new. Is your messaging catered to someone who’s been there before? Are you asking questions on the landing page that a previous site visitor would already know the answer to? Test to find out which type of content connects most strongly to previous visitors.

While your results may vary, we’ve found the most success with remarketing ads when they are brand focused. This is because the people you’re targeting are familiar with your website. They might not pay any attention to a random creative advertisement, but they may be much more likely to notice an ad that’s touting a brand they’re familiar with. This is especially true if you plan on testing special offers for remarketing visitors. They may not notice a discount or sale if they don’t notice that it’s for a site they’re familiar with. Our best advice is to start with ads that match your website and your brand as a control set of ads and test from there.

For the most part, you can probably direct remarketing visitors back to wherever they came from. If they got a remarketing cookie from a product page, it’s probably safe to land them back on that product page. However, if you’re planning on offering specials to them, you’ll want to create a custom landing page that reflects that deal. If they come back to the site and don’t see anything about the deal they were promised in the ad, they’re likely to bounce.

It’s a bit tricky to do placement exclusions for remarketing. If you’re not familiar with what we mean, placement exclusions happen when you download a placement report and decide which sites your ads are performing poorly on that you should block from showing your ads. This is a very easy task when you’re dealing with topics or contextual marketing on the Display Network. Then, you can look at performance and relevancy at face value. However, with audience targeting, such as remarketing or interest category marketing, then you’re targeting the person who happens to be on that website. Content relevancy of the page itself may not be as important in AdWords remarketing campaign as it will be in other Display campaigns.

So, what do you do? You’ll still have websites that perform poorly, and you should still exclude them. Even though we’re targeting the people visiting the site, some sites attract bad people (i.e. people who don’t want to give you money) more than other sites, display your ads in such a way that invite accidental clicks, etc. We recommend being more tolerant with your Adwords remarketing placement performance. Give those sites as much tolerance as you can within your goal margins.

Most importantly, Something that goes extremely good for one account may not be the most effective for another Google Ad account, so it is recommended that keep on testing and trying new ideas within your remarketing campaigns and finalize the best running campaign based on its performance.

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments or contact us if you need any PPC service to grow your business through Google Ads.