Many of you have taken the first steps toward setting up Google Display Network (GDN) remarketing campaigns. It may be time to review and refine those strategies.
This exercise should give you clarification about your remarketing objectives, show you where you may be overlapping audiences across campaigns and show you where you may be missing exclusions. It may open up some creative thoughts that lead to additional audiences, tags and campaigns.
Remarketing Review Objectives
Using a spreadsheet, make a list of your all your current and/or potential remarketing audiences. Here is a list of columns to get started:
Objective
Site pages (to tag)
Tag or rule name
Audience (positive list)
Exclude (negative list)
Cookie duration
Maximum exposures (frequency)
Landing page for remarketing campaign
Ad strategy (incentives, sequence, call to action)
Active / inactive
Audience size (if active)
Notes
Make sure you are listing all remarketing tags including other media buys and ad networks outside of Google. Google offers a free tag manager that allows you to manage all your of your Google and non-Google tags and rules from one location.
Remarketing Action Items
Once your spreadsheet has been created, start another spreadsheet or a document called “Remarketing Action Items.” As you do your remarketing review, you will want to outline your action items by priority. Here is an example for how that list and outline might look:
Remarketing Audiences (tags, lists) to be created:
Conversion – Contact Form
Conversion – Order
Conversion – PDF download
All site visitors (these audiences are based on length of sales cycle)
i. Days 1-3
ii. Days 30-60
i. Days 1-3 (aggressive campaign and frequency)
ii. Days 30-60 (light frequency, special incentives)
Form Abandons
Category and/or Topic targeting
Gender targeting (example: men’s or women’s clothes)
State campaigns as audiences become large enough to target states individually.
Google AdWords campaigns to be created:
All site visitors who have not converted.
Form Abandons
Topic targeting
Gender targeting (ad design, incentives, wording on landing page)
State campaigns as audiences become large enough to target states individually
Conversion upsells and promotions
Image Ads to be created:
All site visitors. Days 1-3 days. Free shipping. Similar images/colors to match our site
All site visitors. Days 30-60. Similar images/colors to match our site
Form Abandon, Topic, Gender, State images ordered as needed
Conversion upsells and promotions
Landing Pages to be created:
All site visitors. Days 1-3 days. Free shipping
All site visitors. Days 30-60
Form Abandon, Topic, Gender, State images ordered as needed
Conversion upsells and promotions
Remarketing Campaign Review
Now that you have outlined your new remarketing strategy or refined your existing strategy, I would like to challenge you to take the next step and do an additional review of your current remarketing campaigns.
Evaluate which campaigns, AdGroups and ad copy are working for you and make notes for ways to improve those. Run placement performance reports and look for the types of sites and URLs that are converting. It may be time to move away from the “cast a wide net” remarketing strategy with virtually no restrictions on where your remarketing ads show to more of a refined remarketing strategy.
For example, I just did an audit where the placement URLs showed that most of the conversions were coming from business-related sites (this is not the same as micro-targeting like we do in a traditional display campaign). In other words, weather and social sites were not converting, but any website that had anything to do with business was.
Tell me about what you have learned from your remarketing experiences. What mistakes did you make and how did you resolve them. What is your system for managing, reporting on and optimizing your remarketing campaign?
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