If you want to make sure you’re reaching your audience, or a subgroup of your audience, with a particular message or offer, remarketing is a great tool to have in your business toolkit.
Audience lists are a list of people that you identify in a certain way, it’s simply a list of some or all of the people who make up your audience. The most common use of audience lists is for remarketing, which is marketing again to people who have already been introduced to you in some way. But you can build lists of people who are similar to your audience in certain ways, and those are technically new people, so you are not remarketing to them. This is one of my many favorite tricks in audience lists, and we’ll get to that below.
“Audience lists help you reach people who have visited your website, watched your video, engaged with your app, or shared their contact information. Set up an audience source to reach the right people, with the right message, at the right moment.” – Google Adwords
In Adwords open the account you want to work on. Then click on the wrench icon in the top right to open the Tools, billing and settings menu, and click on Audience manager, under Shared Library.
You’re going to start by setting up an audience source.
Click on Set Up an Audience Source, and then Set up Tag, in the box for Adwords.
Select ‘Collect standard data’ and check the ‘user id’ box.
Then click Save and Continue.
Now you’ll see the Global site tag. You need to copy and paste this block of code and put it somewhere in your site management tool (WordPress, etc.) that will add it to every page of your site. You’ve probably already added Google Analytics code, and if so you can add this Adwords tag wherever your Analytics code is, right below it.
Click Continue and then Done
Next Step – Create a Remarketing List
Now click on Audience Lists – you’re still under Audience Manager – and click the plus button.
From the pop up list that the button opens, choose Website Visitors.
For your first audience I recommend starting with All Site Visitors. For this option all you need to do is give it a name, leave ‘List members’ set to ‘Visitors of a Page’, and leave ‘Visited page’ as ‘match any rule group’. After ‘URL contains’, type in your domain name, for example I put in energyformompreneurs.com.
The default duration is 30 days. I like to change it to 90. I’d recommend increasing it at first – set it to 60, 90 or 120 days. For initial list size, you can include people from the last 90 days or start with 0.
In the description you can leave yourself a note. This is a good habit to start even if it seems silly. I put in ‘All site visitors for last 90 days’. As I get into more detailed lists, I’ll continue to record a description and then I’ll be able to look back and remember why I created a list. Trust me, you will love these and over time they can become hard to keep track of, even when you name them well.
Now click Create Audience
It will look like this, empty. Just make yourself a note to come back and check in a few days to see if data is beginning to show. You will be able to run ads once your list size reaches 100 people.
Additional Lists
You can repeat the process and set up a few more lists. Click on the wrench icon in the top right, then Audience Manager, then Audience Lists. Click the circle blue plus and select Website Visitors.
Two good options for lists are to identify visitors to a certain page or group of pages that get a lot of traffic, or to identify and referring site you’d like to group readers by.
I’m going to create a Remarketing List of all visitors to my site from Pinterest. To do that I give it a name such as ‘Visitors from Pinterest’ and then for the rule choose ‘Referrer URL’ and ‘contains’ and then type in Pinterest.com.
You can look in your Google Analytics account to identify your highest traffic pages and strategic referral sources, and use those to create remarketing lists that may be useful later.
It doesn’t cost you anything to set up several lists you might need. Then you can come back and decide which ones to use in campaigns and run ad spend on.
The options for types of visitors you can target include:
- visitors of a page
- visitors of a page who also visited another page
- visitors of a page who did not visit another (specific) page
- visitors of a page during specific dates
Then you can choose a rule or set of rules to apply.
Adwords will automatically generate a list of all your site visitors for the last 30 days, as well as a list of similar to site visitors. This similar to visitors list is a fun way to try reaching new readers that are part of your broader target audience, but haven’t discovered you yet.
Running Remarketing Ads
To set up remarketing ads to run to your audience lists, go to your main dashboard and click on Campaigns in the left menu. Then click the blue add button.
Next you choose the goal of the campaign. Each campaign can only have one goal set for it.
For this campaign, select Brand Awareness and Reach. (You could pick Website Traffic instead.)
Then select Display as the campaign type. Below that put in your domain name and click Continue.
Give your campaign a name, and select your location and language settings. If you want to go more narrow than the United States, you can pick a city or list of cities.
Because we selected Brand awareness and reach, the bidding settings have been set accordingly. You can leave the default settings and for this campaign you will focus on viewable impressions and that is how you will pay for.
Scroll down and enter $1 or $2 for the Budget. Then on the right you’ll see estimates for cost per thousand impressions, and total number of impressions.
Name your ad group and then under Audiences you have several options for who to target your ads to.
To set up a remarketing campaign you’ll click the middle link. Now you’ll see three headings and you can open each to see your options for lists to attach to your new campaign.
Under website visitors you’ll see all of the lists you’ve created, you may have to scroll down. Under similar audiences you’ll see all the options you have to target lists of people that adwords has identified as being similar to some of your audience lists.
There are many ways you can structure your campaigns. One good way to start is to create a campaign for remarketing to all site visitors, and and add your list of visitors for the past 3 or 6 months, and then create a separate campaign for remarketing to similar to site visitors. Then you can set separate budgets for these two purposes and, even more importantly, show different ads to return visitors than to new potential readers.
Another strategy for the similar to site visitors campaign would be to select web traffic as the goal, and focus on clicks instead of impressions.
You can select several lists, as you click them they will show on the right side.
In the next section below that, click to open the Demographics options. You can see below I’ve narrowed it to show to my target audience of moms age 25-44.
You can explore the options in Content Targeting, but pay attention to the number over on the right which will tell you if you’ve narrowed your reach too much and need to remove some constraints.
For your ad group bid put the same amount as before, it’s fine to start with $1 or $2.
If you have an ad you can add it here, but it’s fine to create the campaign and get that finished and saved and then create the ads either right away or once you have them.
When you’ve filled out the page, click Create Campaign.
On the following page you can click to create an ad, or scroll down and click Continue to Campaign.
Congrats, You Did It!
This is an ok place to take a break. Getting the campaign set up with your remarketing audience lists attached is a great step. Hopefully this also got you thinking about creating some ads.
A Quick Intro to Ads
Much can be said about display ads, but to get you started here is an example, and I’ll tell you the sizes you can create, as well as the ones I’ve found to be the most popular.
For remarketing ads I typically include the logo and a tagline, and then make versions with or without buttons with varying calls to action and some additional text. Think about the goal of your campaign, starting with whether you are reminding your readers about your site, or getting your brand in front of new readers. With your goal in mind, make a set of images that are variations on that message. Run them all in an ad group and then you’ll see over time which versions perform the best, and that can inform future ad creation.
The sizes for adwords ads are:
250 x 250 – Square
200 x 200 – Small Square
468 x 60 – Banner
728 x 90 – Leaderboard
300 x 250 – Inline Rectangle
336 x 280 – Large Rectangle
120 x 600 – Skyscraper
160 x 600 – Wide Skyscraper
300 x 600 – Half-Page Ad
970 x 90 – Large Leaderboard
320 x 50 – Mobile Leaderboard
These are the sizes that sites who include ad space can choose from. Some sizes are more popular with them and therefore more available. And some sizes tend to go in spots where readers are more or less likely to pay attention to them. I know there is a whole science to this, but I’ll just tell you that from my experience the ones I like the most are the square ones that work well in a sidebar. And if you want your ads to show on mobile, then the mobile size is a good one to try. It is tricky to design an ad that small, but worth the effort if you want to show on phones.
These are the sizes I make for my remarketing campaigns:
250 x 250 – Square
468 x 60 – Banner
300 x 250 – Inline Rectangle
336 x 280 – Large Rectangle
320 x 50 – Mobile Leaderboard
To create an ad, click on Ads & extensions in the left menu, and then on the blue add button.
Ad Types
You have two great options here: display ads and responsive ads.
If you select upload display ads, this will let you upload images you have created in the above sizes. This is a good option if you have strong branding you want to use in a group of images and want to really control the appearance. If you have the time to create the images or a designer who can make them, this is the way to go.
The other option is to create responsive ads, which means you have photos and then pieces of text that you put in, and then adwords fits that content into a few different ad sizes and styles. This is a great option for getting started without a big time investment. It’s also a good way to test a new idea, before you take the time and potentially money to create the image ads for a campaign.
So there you go, everything – hopefully – that you need to get started with remarketing in adwords.
While everyone else is focused on getting traffic and showing ads on their site, I say flip the script – put your message on their site.
Let me know if you have any questions!
– Alicia
Alicia Eichmann