Remarketing Theory
- The deeper a user is in your sales funnel, the more likely he is to buy. A shopping cart abandoner is more likely to buy than a product browser who is more likely to buy than someone who briefly visited your homepage.
- The more recent the user’s visit, the more likely he is to buy. A user who visited your site yesterday is more likely to buy than a user who visited your site 10 days ago.
- The more likely a user is to buy, the more you want to bid on that user.
Audiences
Please read the post Essential Google Ads Remarketing Audiences and follow the instructions to create your remarketing audiences.
Campaign Setup
Create one campaign per major market you are targeting, and give them a descriptive name:
- USA: Display Remarketing
- Canada: Display Remarketing
Generally, but not always, you will want a separate campaign for every unique currency and language you are targeting.
Core Ad Groups
1. Cart Abandoners
This ad group will target cart abandoners: Visitors who added a product to their cart but never purchased. Dynamic Product ads perform particularly well with cart abandonment, as your visitors are shown the exact products that they added to their cart.
Audiences:
- Cart Abandoners – 7 day
- Cart Abandoners – 14 day
- Cart Abandoners – 30 day
- Cart Abandoners – 90 day
- Cart Abandoners – 180 day
2. Product Viewers
This ad group will target users who visited a product details page but who never added a product to their cart.
Audiences:
- Product Viewers – 14 day
- Product Viewers – 30 day
- Product Viewers – 90 day
- Product Viewers – 180 day
- Product Viewers – 365 day
- Product Viewers – 520 day
3. Past Buyers
This ad group will show ads to people who have previously purchased. This is a good place to push micro conversions such as joining a loyalty program, joining a community, new product launches or related product up-selling.
Audiences
- Past Buyers 14 days
- Past Buyers 30 days
- Past Buyers 90 days
- Past Buyers 365 days
- Past Buyers 520 days
Other Tips
Exclude Mobile App Placements
Exclude placements where users are unlikely to interact with your ad, or where they may accidentally click your ad, such as in mobile apps and games.
To exclude mobile apps, go to your ad group and then select:
- Placements > Exclusions tab > Exclude placements
- App Categories > Expand All App Categories, and exclude all app categories individually
- Repeat for all your display ad groups
Exclude YouTube Placements
YouTube tracks View Through Conversions as if they were Click Through Conversions. This leads to attribution poaching, and makes your display campaigns appear to perform much better than they actually do. This ultimately causes you to increase bids and budgets, and overspend.
To exclude YouTube placements, go to: Campaign Settings > Additional Settings > Content Exclusions and select all of the following for exclusion:
- Live streaming YouTube video
- Embedded video
- In-video
Exclude GMail Placements
Gmail “clicks” don’t necessarily result in a visit to your site, and usually only represent the expansion of your ad. This can lead to attribution poaching, in particular if you have a newsletter that you send our regularly.
To exclude gmail placements, go to Placements > Exclusions and exclude mail.google.com
A word about View Through Conversions
View Through Conversions are conversions where a display ad appeared on the screen, was NOT clicked, but the user ended up purchasing on your site sometime later. In general I recommend that everyone IGNORE View Through Conversions, in particular in remarketing campaigns.
What usually happens, is that an ad is displayed on screen, the visitor may not even see it, but clicks instead on a cart-abandonment e-mail and makes the purchase. AdWords will credit that conversion to the view through.
The one exception is for “brand unaware” customers. These are customers that have never visited your website before. If such a customer sees you ad, and purchases, then the odds are better that it was a result of your ad.
In an ideal world, there would be a simple way to test the value of your view-through-conversions, as they are different for every segment, and every business.
Alex Czartoryski 