What Is Google Remarketing And Why Is It So Powerful?

April 15th, 2021

Google remarketing is a powerful type of digital advertising that lets websites show ads to users who have already visited their website using the Google ad platform. But what is

If you want to become an expert in digital advertising, then understanding the concept of Google remarketing is essential.

Not only is it a super popular marketing strategy, but it’s also incredibly cost-effective. So cost-effective in fact, that it’s actually possible to get leads and conversions for just a few cents. With costs as low as that, it’s clear why Google remarketing is a crucial marketing strategy to learn.

No matter if you’re entirely new to online marketing or you’ve been using the likes of Google Ads and Facebook ads for a while, remarketing isn’t always the most preferred strategy.

Many advertisers will regularly run traditional search and display ads but will often stop at that. If only they knew how supporting a regular campaign with a remarketing campaign would significantly increase their sales and conversions, then maybe they’d stop to learn how they work.

To help you under what Google remarketing is and how it works, we’re taking a closer look at the inner workings of a remarketing campaign. From how the campaign differs from a traditional campaign, to why they are so darn effective, we’re covering everything you need to know.

To get things started, let’s take a look at the definition of remarketing and see how these campaigns differ from regular paid search campaigns.

What Is Remarketing?

remarketing examples

Remarketing can be defined as:

A type of marketing campaign that specifically targets a group of individuals that have already visited your website via another paid search campaign or directly.

To explain it further, a remarketing campaign only targets individuals that have visited your website before. In order for a user to become part of the remarketing group, they need to have visited your site and received a cookie.

Compared to regular marketing campaigns that you often find on Google and Facebook, this is entirely different.

Normal campaigns are aimed at getting users to your website for the first time by making them aware of your presence and products. A remarketing campaign, however, is specifically aimed at people that already know about your site and have visited it before.

This means you’re not advertising to these people for the first time; you are in fact doing it for a second time (or more), hence the term remarketing.

There are plenty of benefits and reasons why someone would want to use a remarketing campaign as part of their advertising strategy, but we’ll cover them later.

Now you know what a remarketing campaign is and what it means, how exactly do they work on websites such as Facebook and Google?

How Does Google Remarketing Work?

remarketing explained

The foundations of a remarketing campaign are built upon those delicious cookies that have been around for basically forever. When a user visits a website, there is often a tracking pixel (also known simply as a pixel) on the site which places a cookie on to the user’s computer.

The cookie holds lots of important information such as the last time the user visited the site and what page they were looking at.

The information within this cookie gets relayed back to the main advertising network such as Google, which then allows them to change the ads for that specific user only. Of course, this assumes that the website owner has a remarketing campaign set up in the first place!

This means when a user visits another website that happens to be running AdSense (Google) banner ads, they will be met with highly targeted ads. By taking advantage of Google’s massive display network, these ads can follow the user around on almost every site they visit.

And there you have it, a massively oversimplified version of how networks such as Google allow users to create remarketing campaigns. The most important thing about the whole process is the pixel. Without the pixel, you can’t have a cookie and without the cookie, you can’t pick what adverts users will see.

The same remarketing idea with Facebook ads is also similar. But instead of ads showing up on 3rd party websites, the highly targeted remarketing ads will only show up on Facebook. That’s why running these types of campaigns across multiple ad networks is very common to get the most exposure.

Now we’ve got all the technical stuff out of the way, what exactly are the benefits and advantages of using remarketing campaigns in the first place?

The Benefits of Google Remarketing

benefits

Remarketing campaigns can benefit advertisers in several ways, from their extremely low cost, to their ability to target specific individuals.

Here are some of the top reasons advertisers love remarketing campaigns and why you will too!

Extremely Cheap

As we’ve mentioned time and time again, remarketing campaigns are incredibly cheap. If you’re running an ad campaign in the financial niche, then you can expect to pay anything over $10 per click. Yet with a remarketing campaign, you can get highly targeted clicks from people who have already visited your website from as low as just a few cents.

Considering many people require a lot of convincing before they actually buy a product, getting a user back on to your site dramatically increases your chances of them converting. And with remarketing, you can do this at a low cost compared to getting fresh new visitors.

Target A Specific Audience

Another great benefit of Google marketing is the fact that it allows advertisers to target a specific audience. Knowing full well that these adverts will be targeting people that have already landed on a certain site, this allows marketers to fine-tune their adverts even more.

Instead of your regular adverts that are aimed at getting people to visit a site for the first time. Remarketing ads usually focus on deals, discounts, coupon codes and special offers. Anything that will make someone revisit the website and turn them into a paying customer.

Improves Conversions

As you can probably guess by now, the main reason advertisers love remarketing so much is the fact that it increases their conversions.

Why spend $100 on trying to get 10 new users to visit your site when you can spend $100 on getting 1000 previous visitors to visit your site again.

If a user has visited your site in the past, then they probably were interested in your product or services at some point. By using remarketing to remind them of your product and to offer them a deal, this greatly increases the chances of them converting.

Why spend all the time and money trying to convert someone from scratch into a customer when you can just focus on those that are already 90% of the way there? This is essentially what remarketing is so good at.

Reduce Your Google Remarketing Costs Even More

As you probably know by now, remarketing is incredibly cheap. From just a few cents per click, you can have high-quality traffic visiting your site in minutes. However, just because these people are clicking your ads doesn’t mean they always have the intention to buy.

The Google display network has the highest rate of fraudulent clicks compared to Google’s search ads.

And since remarketing campaigns utilize Google’s display network, even your remarketing ads could be at risk of increased fraud.

Luckily we’re here to help you weed out the bad clicks from the good ones and help you improve your return on investment.

To help advertisers get the most out of their budget we released our display network exclusion list that includes over 60,000 low performing websites. By excluding these from your Google Ads campaigns you can ensure that all your money is only going to genuine users with an interest in buying.

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