What is Remarketing?

Remarketing is a digital marketing practice to connect with people who previously interacted with a website or mobile app and didn’t convert. 

Not everyone who comes to your site is ready to convert today so, it allows you, as brand or advertiser, to strategically position your ads in front of these audiences while they are browsing on Google, visit a website/mobile app or watch a video.

Photo source:Wordstream.com

How does Remarketing work on Google?

This is how remarketing looks from the user’s perspective:

• The user visits a website;
• The user accepts the cookie policy of that website;

• The cookie tracks the site visits;
• User leaves the website and starts browsing other websites;
• The tracked user starts to see ads on the websites he/she is visiting;

From a brand, company or advertiser perspective, the remarketing looks this way:

• The advertiser places a code on all the website pages he/she wants to track user behavior;
• The advertiser creates the cookie policy the user has to accept in order to see ads;
• The advertiser create different audience lists (users who visited the website in the last 30 days, users who visited specific website pages or a number of pages, users with a session duration longer than 30 seconds, etc.) based on the goals he/she wants to achieve (complete a specific action on the website: subscription, download, purchase, sign-up, etc.)
• The cookie tells the ad platform (for example, Google Ads) based on the audience lists you created beforehand when the user visited another website, what kind of products or pages, etc.

What are the benefits of a remarketing campaign?

Compared to a regular marketing campaign, where the aim is to bring people to your website and make them aware of your products or services, the remarketing only targets users who have visited your website before. Thus, the main benefits of a remarketing campaign are:

• Ability to target or exclude specific audiences in your campaign. For example, you want to target all the users who have visited your website in the last 30 days, but to exclude the ones who have already completed an action;
• Remind people to complete an action on your website and improve your conversion rate;
• On average, only 2% of your website visitors convert. Remarketing goes after that other 98%. In fact, customers who see retargeted ads are 70% more likely to convert on your website. (Source: Blue Corona)
• Upsell new products, recommend complementary products to users who already made a purchase (for example, for a user who bought a dress, you could recommend a pair of sandals or a clutch), offer discounts to people who visited your website several times and didn’t convert, etc.
• Increase brand awareness;
• Great reach - Google’s Display Network allows you to follow a user on almost every site he/she visits.

Resources:

1. What Is Google Remarketing And Why Is It So Powerful?
2. About remarketing
3. What is Remarketing?