What is Remarketing and How does it Work?
Sandro Salsi| March 25, 2021
Remarketing is about targeting users who have shown interest in your products and services by visiting your web property in the past. Remarketing is a powerful tool that can help you grow your business by driving more leads or prospects and help with brand recognition.
What is remarketing?
Also known as retargeting, remarketing is the act of showing ads to people who have visited your website in the past. When people visit your site, remarketing helps you reconnect with them by showing relevant ads across different devices. Since these users have already been exposed to your company or website, they are most likely to convert.
While remarketing existed prior to the Internet, its use online is extremely common and effective.
In creating remarketing campaigns, we show ads to people who demonstrated an interest in your products or services on the Google Display Network or on YouTube videos (as well as on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and premium remarketing networks like Adroll) to past website visitors.
How does remarketing work?
Google Ads remarketing allows you to run remarketing ads on the Google Display Network, YouTube and even the Google Search Network (remarketing lists for search ads).
Remarketing campaigns target website visitors in two ways:
- using code
- using a list
Most remarketing campaigns use analytics code to identify people who have visited your website in the past. With Google Analytics, you can create audiences and remarket to people who have visited your website or specific pages of your web property. The code drops a cookie onto their browser that tracks them wherever they go online.
Another way to remarket to people is to use your existing customer lists. Imagine a visitor has arrived at your site, has signed up for your newsletter but did not purchase the products or the services. Not all is lost as list-based remarketing uses emails to track and target your ads.
To summarize, audiences are groups of people who have:
- Completed specified actions, like visiting your website or visiting specific pages on your website (remarketing).
- Demonstrated specific behaviours; for example, they are interested in specific products/services and are interested in buying them online (affinity, in-market and custom intent).
- Opted in to share their email address with you (customer match audience).
Is remarketing worth it?
Remarketing is definitely worth the investment. Is it creepy? It can be—however, it is the settings of your campaign that will make the difference between your ads coming off as creepy and being useful to the user by displaying an ad at the right time.