If you’ve ever visited a website, particularly a consumer goods/retail one, and then, had ads presented to you on another website or web property related to the products you  looked at on that original site, you’ve been remarketed to or retargeted. Last Friday, I was looking at some home furnishing stores’ websites for some new bar stools. I spent a fair amount of time on Wayfair’s site, looking at various stool options, and now the below ads are regularly being served up to me. This is as I go about my various day-to-day work activities on my computer, not because I revisited the Wayfair site.

Like many savvy marketers, Wayfair knows that remarketing advertising is an easy, and quite effective way, to remind individuals who have already shown an interest in certain products and services you offer about those particular products and services. And, Wayfair surely knows that click-thrus rates and sales generated through remarketing display ads are higher than for non-remarketing/general display advertising.

Remarketing Isn’t Just For E-commerce And/Or Consumer Goods Companies

Remarketing isn’t just for large retailers and consumer goods companies, though, and you don’t need to have the ample marketing budget they likely have to take advantage of remarketing. Whether you sell services vs. products, or whether your target audience is businesses vs. consumers, what I consider to be reasonably priced and fairly easy-to-set-up display advertising (think an ad with an image that appears on a variety of websites, including YouTube) is available through Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords) and their associated Google Display Network (GDN).

Using your Google Analytics account (this is also very easy to set up if you don’t already have such an account), you can create very targeted remarketing lists to whom you want your Google Ads display ad presented.  At the broadest, more general levels, you can remind individuals who visited your site of your product and service offerings by having your ads presented to all site visitors, new site visitors (visitors who came to your site for the first time), or returning site visitors (visitors who came to your site for the second time or more).  You can also target your remarketing advertising based on:

• the page(s) individuals visited on your site
• actions individuals did or did not take on your site, such as completing and submitting an inquiry form or making a purchase

Retargeting Using Google Ads: Both Search and Display

While this post’s focus is about display advertising remarketing, since that is most well-known, most-used, and best-understood, advertisers can also remarket to individuals using what’s known as Remarketing Lists for Search Advertising (RLSA) in conjunction with Google Ads search advertising.  This latter form of advertising allows for ads to be shown to individuals who enter search terms (keywords) into a search engine. Google Ads search remarketing allows an advertiser to only have their ads presented to individuals who both type appropriate search terms into their browser AND who have visited the advertiser’s website in the past. It also allows you to set up your search advertising to indicate to Google Ads your willingness to pay (bid) more to have your search ad shown to individuals searching on appropriate terms who have visited your site before vs. to individuals who haven’t.

Whether you are already running Google Ads display and/or search advertising, or you are in the planning process for launching your very first Google campaign, you should consider adding one or both of the above-mentioned forms of remarketing to your online advertising campaigns. You’ll be reminding visitors who land on your site because of display or search advertising, as well as individuals who visit your site from non-advertising sources/channels, about how the outstanding products and services you offer are just what they are looking for!

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