Last Updated on 4 September 2024 by Stu Edwards

How many times have you seen an ad while browsing the internet to visit a site again and start your journey where you left off?

Probably loads!

These are most likely Google Display remarketing ads, and are very common as they are known for increasing brand awareness and conversions with the aim of steering users back to your site.

ultimate guide to Google Ads remarketing

It’s commonly known that you need several interactions and touch points with a visitor to generate a successful sale or lead.

Competition, short attention spans, and tons of ads make it hard for your ideal customers to remember you after they’ve moved on with their day..

Across the Google Ads network of campaign types, Google Ads remarketing makes it easy for businesses to keep their product or services front of mind and reconnect with people who visited their websites and apps previously.

So, how to get started with remarketing?

Let’s find out!

Google Ads Remarketing: Definition

Google Ads Remarketing allows you to target people who have interacted with your website with a variety of ad creative across different Google Ads campaign types.

The aim being to bring those people back to your site so they can continue their journey where they left.

There are a ton of different ways to do this, which we’ll cover – from dynamic remarketing ads that show products users have interacted with based on your product feed data, to RLSAs (remarketing lists for search ads) that show specific Search ad creative only to past users…

Here’s loosely how Google Ads remarketing works:

what-is-remarketing

Google Ads remarketing works across all Google Ads campaigns types, Search, Display, Shopping, Demand Gen, Pmax etc etc.

5 Advantages of Using Google Ads Remarketing

Retargeting in general offers numerous benefits, as they’re typically targeting users who already have some brand affinity, meaning they already know about your product, service or offering.

Here’s our list of the top reasons why you should be using using Google remarketing ads:

1. Granular messaging

When you know the actions users have taken on your site previously, you can very targeted with your subsequent messaging.

Take these 2 examples:

  1. A user visits your pricing page. You can promote a limited time discount, or white-glove onboarding service.
  2. A user downloadeds a PDF or industry research piece. You could then show them ads around booking a strategy call related to their specific interests or needs.

Research shows that 66% of customers expect businesses to understand their needs and 71% of customers get frustrated when their shopping experience isn’t personalised.

As much as 80% of consumers say that they are more likely to buy from a brand that offers them tailored experience across all channels.

What happens when people see personalised, relevant remarketing ads? It leads to a better user experience and more conversions.

2. Conversion focused

Because remarketing targets people who have already interacted with your site in the past, it has the potential to increase your conversion rates significantly.

It’s much easier to sell to someone who has already engaged with your business and is aware of your and what you offer.

Let’s think of an example from Growth Minded Marketing for instance, If we decided to run a Display remarketing campaign broadly promote our Google Ads audits.

Compare these 2 audiences and their effectiveness if we were promote our audit service:

  • Audience 1: A cold audience of users (people never been you our site)
  • Audience 2: Users who have previously visited our audit page, our Google Ads Agency page, or have +5 sessions in the past 30 days

Audience 2 would convert at a much higher rate, because they’ll hopefully remember the brand and know that we’re probably experienced when it comes to audits!

On average, it takes a minimum of 6 touches to generate a conversion.

This is because an average person is bombarded with lots of ads and information online which makes it necessary to remind them of your existence.

3. Cost-effectiveness

Google ads remarketing activity tends to have a higher ROI due to lower cost.

Generally with remarketing, you target audiences are users who have moved further down the marketing funnel, and are at the Interest, Consideration or Intent stages:

the marketing funnel

These audiences sizes are likely much smaller than a typical ‘cold’ audience, meaning you don’t need as big a budget to reach these users.

Since these users are more likely interested in your products or services, if we take a Display ad as an example, they’re more likely to convert after seeing your first wave of remarketing ads – as opposed to ads that are shown to people at the Awareness stage who have no idea about your business and offering.

4. Increased brand recall

Standing out from the crowd in the online space is challenging due competition, market saturation of services, and lack of product differentiation.

Google remarketing helps you enhance brand recall, which refers to the degree a person will remember your brand after seeing an ad or having an interaction with your brand.

High brand recall means your ideal customers will remember your brand name when making a purchase decision leading to high sales and improved brand awareness.

Personally I hate aggressive, prolonged remarketing, and some brands in my experience very aggressive.

If I think ‘meal replacement drinks‘, I think of Huel.

If I think of ‘fitness watches‘, I think of Whoop.

Both have been very aggressive and sustained on the remarkeing side, and even if I’ll never buy from them or have reason to go back to their site, I’ve remembered them and what they offer.

5. Audience segmentation

Research shows that 77% of marketing ROI comes from segmented and targeted campaigns and such campaigns can bring as much as 760% revenue growth.

You can create remarketing audience segments in many different ways – from pages visited, products purchased, customer journey stages, and first party data like email lists.

How to Create a Remarketing Campaign in Google Ads?

Getting started with a Google Ads remarketing campaign has three steps:

  1. Setting up your remarketing tag
  2. Creating remarketing audiences in Google Ads or GA4
  3. Then layering in remarketing activity into your campaign strategy!

Setting up your remarketing tag

You need to set up a method that ‘tags’ people who visit your website.

This helps you target them again later through your remarketing activity.

You can set tags in multiple ways but the two most popular methods include:

  1. Google Ads tag is the basic and recommended version that you can set up in your Google Ads account (more on the process below)
  2. Google Analytics remarketing gives you more control and targeting options for campaigns. You can set up advertising features in your analytics account. You can do this by enabling GA4 on your website, connecting your GA4 and Google Ads accounts, enabling remarketing and advertising features in your analytics account, and creating remarketing audiences in analytics and sharing it with Google Ads account. You can check out more details in this guide by Google.

You can set up all types of tags through your Google Ads account.

Head to Tools > Audience manager > Your data segments in your ads account:

Google ads audience source

If this is your first time and you haven’t set up tags yet, you’ll be asked to set up an audience source.

You can choose the method you want to use for tagging from the list that includes Google Ads tag, Google Analytics, GA4 and Firebase, App analytics, and others:

Google ads tagging methods

Select Google Ads tag as it’s the recommended method for its simplicity (and is suitable for standard remarketing campaigns). Click Set up tag:

Google ads remarketing tag setup

Choose remarketing type and restricted data processing. Select Only collect general website visit data for standard remarketing campaigns and select specific actions that people perform for advanced remarketing campaigns where you can target people based on what action they performed on your site.

Click Save and continue after selection.

Google ads remarketing tag process

Install the tag on your website by selecting a method of your choice. Follow the instructions and click Continue:

Google tag installation on website

Click Done to finish setting up your remarketing tag:

Google ads tag final step

This tag will start collecting visitor details that’ll be used to retarget visitors through a remarketing campaign.

Remarketing audiences in Google Ads

After implementing a remarketing tag, the visitors to your site will be tracked. You can create advanced remarketing audiences based on how visitors interact with your site.

For example, you can create an audience list for people who visit a landing page and another list of people who complete a purchase.

This helps you target visitors based on what actions they performed on your site which improves personalisation and targeting.

Once your audiences are populated, you can use them to remarket to!

remarketing tags in Google ads

You can create more remarketing audiences via audience manager. Click the + sign to add relevant segments such as website visitors, app users, custom lists, and combinations:

remarketing lists in Google ads

Add relevant details and save your remarketing audience. Each segment is referred to as a list that can be accessed via Your data sources in Audience manager:

Google ads remarketing lists

You can check details of the segments and active users from Your data segments tab:

remarketing data segments in Google ads

You can create multiple segments based on how you want to target people who visit your site.

Setting up remarketing ad campaign using an audience

Create a new campaign in Google Ads by selecting an objective and campaign type. Add budget and bidding and move to Targeting to select the audience.

Click Audience Segments to choose the remarketing list:

Google Ads audience segments

Click Browse and select How they’ve interacted with your business and select the remarketing list you created above:

custom segments in Google Ads

Finalise your campaign by adding ads and publish your remarketing campaign.

What about Google Remarketing Audience Sizes?

Google Ads has minimum audience size requirements for remarketing campaigns to ensure user privacy and campaign effectiveness.

These minimum sizes vary depending on the campaign type:

Display Campaigns

For Display Network campaigns, the minimum audience size is 100 active users within the last 30 days. This relatively small minimum allows advertisers to create more targeted campaigns, even for niche audiences or smaller businesses.

Search Campaigns

Search Network campaigns (RLSA) require a larger minimum audience size of 1,000 active users within the last 30 days. This higher threshold is necessary because search remarketing relies on users actively searching for related terms, which typically requires a larger pool of potential audience members.

Shopping Campaigns

Shopping campaigns have a minimum requirement of 100 active users within the last 30 days. This allows retailers to remarket to users who have shown interest in their products, even with relatively small audience sizes.

YouTube Video Campaigns

For YouTube video advertising, the minimum audience size is 1,000 active users within the last 30 days. This requirement ensures that there’s a sufficient audience base for video remarketing efforts.

Demand Gen Campaigns

Discovery ad campaigns also require a minimum of 1,000 active users within the last 30 days. This higher threshold is similar to Search Network campaigns, likely due to the nature of how Demand Gen ads are served.

Performance Max

While Performance Max doesn’t have the same strict audience size requirements as traditional remarketing campaigns, it’s still beneficial to provide as much relevant audience data as possible to help the campaign optimise more quickly and effectively.

7 Best Practices for Effective Google Ads Remarketing

Here’s a list of the tips and techniques you should follow to turbocharge your Google Ads remarketing:

1. Properly segment your audiences

The power of remarketing ads lies in audience segments.

In our experience, Google Ads remarketing works better when you identify and create specific audience segments as discussed in the previous section.

You can use segments to run extremely targeted remarketing campaigns as the ads will be highly relevant.

In the absence of proper audience segmentation, you’ll end up retargeting everyone who interacted with your site with the same ad which might lack personalisation – which might not be a bad thing depending on the user awareness stage – but going deeper with your audience segmentation will provide better results

Not sure where to start?

Begin by creating the following audience segments:

  • People who filled out a sign-up form particular page
  • Cart abandoners
  • Repeat site visitors
  • Viewers of service or pricing pages
  • People who interact with a blog post
  • Visitors from a specific location or geo

The segments you create should be driven by your business model, conversion length and buying cycle.

2. Use RLSAs

You can remarket to users via Google Search ads via RLSAs (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) when they search for queries you target.

RLSA’s only show to remarketing audience segments who have interacted with your website in the past. Very cool!

Here’s how RLSA works:

how RLSA work

This is an ideal way to drive targeted traffic from search by reaching people who know your brand and products.

We have an audience segment of email subscribers, and target these users specifically when they search for things like Google Shopping Agency, SEO agency etc.

The best thing about RLSAs is that it can work across your entire funnel.

Let’s say you’re a SaaS business – you can target users who have visited your pricing page and left, then show them more targeted ads later when they search in Google for your competitor, review, or price comparison.

Since your ads are targeted to reach a specific audience, it gives you more control over bid management and ad relevance based on their brand awareness and funnel stage, leading to higher conversions and ROI.

3. Leverage Dynamic remarketing

Dynamic remarketing is essential for ecommerce stores that use a product feed via Merchant Center.

Your tagging will need to accommodate for dynamic remarketing with all the relevant events and parameters

To set up dynamic remarketing for Display campaigns, you need to add the following elements to your Google remarketing tag:

  • Dynamic remarketing event snippet: This code snippet needs to be added to your website pages to capture information about products or services viewed by visitors. The snippet should include:
    • Event name (e.g. view_item, add_to_cart, purchase)
    • Product details like ID, name, price, etc.
  • Custom parameters: Add custom parameters to your remarketing tag to pass dynamic values from your data layer. These typically include:
    • ecomm_prodid: Product ID
    • ecomm_pagetype: Page type (e.g. product, cart, purchase)
    • ecomm_totalvalue: Cart value or purchase amount

Once set up, Google will automatically show previously viewed products in the Display ads, pulled from your product feed.

how dynamic remarketing works

The process of which products are shown is then automated, and works fantastically well for ecommerce businesses.

4. Set a frequency cap

It’s advised to set a limit the number of times (the frequency) your remarketing ad is shown to a specific user.

Google Ads lets you set a frequency for certain remarketing campaigns, either at the campaign or adgroup level, to avoid spamming ads to the same person again and again!

The frequency can be set for day, week, and month.

It gives you full control and lets you manage your remarketing campaigns effectively by controlling impressions and cost.

Frequency management is available for Display and Video campaigns only. You can find it in campaign Settings > Additional settings > Frequency management:

Google Ads frequency management

By default, frequency capping is set to ‘optimised’ by Google, where it decides the right frequency of your ads and ad groups.

5. Test! Test! Test!

Like any other ad campaign, remarketing ads need to be tested to ensure the best ongoing performance.

Just because you are re-engaging with an existing audience doesn’t automatically mean you’ll see a high conversion rate.

You’ll still need to test and optimise ad copies, creative, offers, landing pages etc.

The landing page and ad copy should be consistent with the visitor’s last interaction with your website.

For example, if you are showing an ad to people who left an item in the cart, you should show them the same item in the ad.

Here’s an example:

Google remarketing ads example

The discount code is shown right in the ad with the favourite items the visitor has interacted with.

Here’s another remarketing ad example:

google ads remarketing example

This remarketing ad gently reminds of an item they added to the cart.

There aren’t any discounts but the ad focuses on guaranteed price match and free shipping and store pickup offers.

6. Exclude recent converters / purchasers

On the ecommerce side, remarketing to existing customers to make follow up purchases is a great strategy, but you should ensure that these ads are shown to past buyers after a certain time period.

The same goes for a ‘cart abandonment’ strategy.

You don’t want to hammer past purchasers with ads about ‘coming back to finish your purchase’ when they’ve already done it.

It’ll annoy them, they might not want to buy from you again, and you’ll be wasting your ad spend.

Segment these users, and make sure they’re excluded from the relevant campaigns and adgroups.

Poor Google Ads account management and lack of proper account auditing are other reasons why your remarketing ads might be doing more harm than good.

If you haven’t audited your Google Ads account yourself or through an expert audit agency, chances are, you’ll be wasting money on poorly targeted remarketing ads.

How to address this particular issue in the case of resent purchasers? It’s easy.

Google lets you set up a recent purchasers audience by setting a certain time period when they’ll start seeing remarketing ads.

The process is explained by Google in this article.

Google recommends adding a 7-day gap for recent purchasers when they’ll be added to the audience list.

Depending on your business model and buying cycle, this might be too short or too long.

For a SaaS company that offers a 30-day free trial, 7 days is too short a period to persuade free users to switch to a paid version.

You might appear too pushy and desperate (which might negative for your brand).

In this example, you’d need to adjust accordingly to make sure you don’t annoy new customers with unnecessary ads.

7. Bid correctly based on your audience segments

As we’ve covered, you should segment your remarketing audiences, and you shouldn’t treat them all equally when it comes to bidding.

Your audiences, if segmented correctly, should be broken down into different consideration stages.

Here’s a SaaS Google Ads example:

Top of the funnel visitors who interact with your blog should have a lower bid (generally) as they aren’t as high value as those in the mid or bottom of the funnel.

People who visit your SaaS’s pricing page, comparison pages, and other key pages are probably more likely to become customers.

Users in these audiences are more valuable, and should have a higher bid than the top funnel example.

Use should use Google Analytics and other data sources to identify what type of pages and content your audience interacts with based on their stage in the sales funnel.

This’ll help you prioritise and optimise your remarketing ad budget and bidding strategy accordingly.

Conclusion

Google Ads remarketing is a proven, cost effective option to re-engage with people who interact with your website.

Getting started with remarketing in Google is easy, but creating proper audience segments, dealing with tags, product feeds, and the ongoing optimisation often require a helping hand from the expert, and that’s where we come in.

If you need help with Google Ads remarketing, schedule a call now and a growth expert from our team will get back to you ASAP.