Google Ads Remarketing Tips to Boost Performance

Written by Darren Taylor | View the original article here

It’s a fact that 95% of people who land on a website don’t complete the desired conversion action. These remarketing tips will help ensure that you don’t miss a trick in getting previous visitors to your website to come back and convert.

1.Don’t Preach to the Converted

When somebody lands on your website and doesn’t convert, remarketing is great. It isn’t so great when somebody has already converted and you continue to follow them around the internet like a crazed stalker. Ensure that you negatively target those who have already converted to ensure that they don’t become members of your hit list and become frustrated by your brand or initiative.

The best way to do this is to build a remarketing list that fires on your conversion action when a successful conversion is completed. When the remarketing tag fires because someone completes the conversion action, they get added to a list. This list should be used as a negative targeting method within the campaign.

To do this, go into the Google Ads interface and go into the “Audiences” tab
Then go into the “Exclusion” sub menu and select “How they have reacted to your business” and find your conversion remarketing list.

If you have successfully created a list where the criteria is based on a converted user, add this list to the exclusion targeting to your remarketing campaign to stop preaching to the converted.

2.Don’t Forget Responsive Text Ads

When remarketing, engaging image banner ads are excellent, but some people just prefer text ads. Sometimes they can be more descriptive, and there has been many an occasion I have seen where the text ad variations outperform visual banner ads. Responsive text ads also mean you won’t have to worry as much about creating banner ads for niche ad sizes.

You should always ensure that in addition to your most popular banner ad sizes you also run text ads in your remarketing campaigns. You may be pleasantly surprised at their performance.

Using text ads also allows you to display remarketing banners on pretty much all ad sizes across the Google Display Network as they are responsive and can be accommodated on most websites.

3.ABT – Always Be Testing

So, you have run your remarketing campaign for a while and have a ton of data on which ads are performing and which ones aren’t. Best practice dictates that you should always test at least 2 ad variations per ad group.

Once you know which ads performing better, use elements of the performing ads to create some new ads to test against the current best performing ads. Once you have created new ads to run a new A/B test, ensure that you enable Google Ads to run a fair split test by sending equal traffic to both ad variations to determine which ad is the best performing in terms of CTR and conversion rate.

Google usually has a setting that automatically optimises ads for clicks and conversion, which is good when Google has enough data, but when you create a new ad, there can be issues with this as Google often gives the existing ad preferential treatment.

Go into your campaign settings and change ad rotation from “Optimize” to “Rotate indefinitely” if you’re seeing that Google isn’t giving your new ads a fair shot.

4.Cap the Impressions

There is nothing worse than browsing the internet and seeing the same banner ad time and time again. It is frustrating, it destroys your brand affinity and people will opt out of seeing your ads. Make sure that when you run your remarketing campaign, you cap the impressions.

A good impression frequency cap is completely dependent on industry and conversion cycle. For example you may want to serve ads more frequently to somebody looking for a car service than you would for somebody looking for a new supplier for management consultancy, as both have vastly different sales cycles.
To cap impressions, go into your Google Ads campaign within the interface and select your remarketing campaign then go into “Settings:

At the bottom you will find “Advance settings” where you will see an option called frequency capping. Select how many impressions per day you would like to serve users of your website.

5.Be Brand Savvy

I can imagine for 99.9% of people, you really don’t want your brand to have an affinity with certain websites that promote inappropriate adult material. To ensure that your brand is only seen with more reputable websites, you can again add a negative targeting within your settings under “content exclusions”.

The same way you would add a negatively targeted remarketing list, you can add negative site category options. Other good category options to exclude are game and app categories, as these tend to have low engagement. (Unless you are promoting a game or app). Other categories are obvious to exclude, like “below the fold” ads and parked domains. Make sure you exclude everything that could provide poor quality traffic.

Darren Taylor is a guest speaker for the IDM.

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