Google Ads Retargeting Overview

We talk about Retargeting a lot on this channel, but it occurred to me recently that we’ve covered more of the targeting options or kind of cross channel strategies. We haven’t really covered the foundational pieces of it. So in this video, I want to go back to the basics and show you how to set up and create your first Google Ads remarketing campaign.

I want to start off by giving a quick overview of what Retargeting is in the first place. And I also have remarketing down here because, in my experience, most of the time people say Retargeting or remarketing, they mean the same thing. I know there are some people who think that they mean something slightly different, but for the most part, I think most people are talking about the same strategy.

The overall principles behind Retargeting or Remarketing are pretty simple. It starts off with the user engaging with your brand. There’s a variety of ways that they can do this, and across each of those different ways, that user is then tracked through a number of different methods. And then, based on those tracking methods, we can utilize advertising to bring the user back to your site.

So effectively, it’s just a big circle that starts off by targeting somebody; whether they engaged with your brand through organic, social, paid advertising, TV, doesn’t really matter. We use some sort of tracking method to retain that user in an audience, and then we use advertising to bring them back to the site. That’s effectively what Remarketing is from a high level.

So because of that, there are three main components that we need for a Retargeting campaign setup. We need the user tracking to be in place; we need to create an audience based on the users who were tracked, and then we need to apply those audiences to a campaign. So at this point, we’re going to jump into the Google Ads interface and start to work through each of these to show you how to set up your remarketing campaign.

As you can see, I’m now in Joe, and I’s Google Ads placeholder account that has literally nothing going on. And I’m going to start by talking about how the user tracking and audience creation portion of your Retargeting strategy work hand in hand. And I’m going to do this and maybe a little bit of a backward method, but I think it’ll make a little more sense to those of you watching.

So I’m going to start off by going to the Audience Manager portion of Google Ads, which is going to be up here under Tools and Settings and then Audience Manager. Now, depending on the type of audience you want to use, that is going to inform the type of tracking that you need to use. So let’s come over here and start off by creating a new remarketing list.

And here, we can see the five different types of remarketing lists that we can create website visitors, app users, YouTube users, a customer list, and a custom combination. A custom combination is a little bit of a cheat because it’s really just a combination of the four previous types of lists, which is why there’s this tiny little line of demarcation right here.

So we really have four types of audiences that we can use. The first is going to be a customer list. This is where you upload a list of users to the Google Ads platform. Google will then take that user information and match it to the information it has for the users that it has on Google and then create an audience based on that list of users.

So for a customer list, the type of tracking you need to have is effectively just a CRM that can be something very robust or very basic. It really just needs to be a list of users’ names, emails, phone numbers, state zip code, all of those little Identifiers to upload here. You wouldn’t need anything else to create a customer list.

I’m going to skip YouTube users for just a second, and then next, we’re going to talk about app users. You can see here that this audience is going to be created based on people who’ve downloaded your mobile app.

So if I click on App Users, the audience creation portion will then show me that I need to select my app, which I don’t have. But here you can see that to view your available apps; you need to link a Firebase account or a third-party app analytics platform to Google Ads.

So effectively, to use any sort of app retargeting audience, your tracking needs to be based on an app on either that third-party platform or Firebase. Unfortunately, I don’t have an example of that because we don’t have anybody who’s using an app currently. But if you need to set that up, there’s plenty of information in Google’s Help section that can help you out with that.

The next type of audience is going to be Website visitors. These are going to be people who visited your website or your landing pages. And to track these users, you need to have your Google Ads tag in place or a Google Analytics tag in place and have your audience imported from Google Analytics.

So to have your Google Ads tag in place, you can click Website Visitors. You can then come down here for visitors of web pages, visitors with a specific tag, and then you can utilize either the tags that are already here or you can create a new one. The other option for creating your Google Ads tag and getting that set up, it’s going to be up here in Tools and Settings and going to the Google Tag page.

We already have a video where Joe runs you through how to create your Google Tag and apply it to your website. So if you’re interested in seeing that, you can check that video out at the top of the screen right now. But for now, I’m going to go back to the previous page, and I’m going to talk about the type of audience that I’m going to use for the example today, and that’s going to be YouTube users.

This is where you can create audiences based on people who interacted with your YouTube channel or videos. As you can tell, since you’re watching this video, most likely on YouTube, we do quite a bit on YouTube. So this is an easy audience for us. For us to create an audience based on YouTube users, we need to make sure that we have our YouTube account linked to our Google Ads account first.

So to do that, you would go up to Tools and Settings and go to Linked Accounts. Here you can see that we already have ours in place. But if you didn’t, there would be a YouTube option down here in this list below. And you would need to run through the steps of how to link those two platforms.

Since ours is already set up, we can go ahead and get started building that audience. Back in Audience Manager, I’m just going to click YouTube users. I’m not going to go through all of the different targeting options you can use for this YouTube users list builder. We do have another video that walks you through all of the Google Ads retargeting options. You can check that video out of the top of the screen right now if you’re interested.

But for this example, let’s say that I really just want to engage recent viewers of the YouTube channel, maybe anybody who’s watched a video from Paid Media Pros in the last seven days, just to keep them coming back if they’ve been interested in something recently. So I’m going to give my audience a name that will tell me that it’s a YouTube user. They watched a video past seven days.

I then need to choose the YouTube channel. We only have one, and then the default action is going to be view any video, which is really what I wanted, and I’m just going to adjust this to be the past seven days’ easy audience to build, and then sure, go ahead and prefill with people from the past 30 days. And I don’t need a description, so let’s just hit save.

My audience is already populating down here, and that will take a little bit to actually finalize how many people are there, but it is able to be applied to a campaign. It just won’t start running until the audience is populated. And I’ve met the minimum size requirements for retargeting. So overall, depending on the type of audience you want to create, you need to make sure that you have the applicable user tracking in place to actually be able to make that audience, so you can then target them with a campaign.

And as I just alluded to, the third step that we talked about earlier in the slides for creating a remarketing campaign is to create the actual campaign. So I’m going to hop back to the regular campaigns tab. As I mentioned, you can see we don’t have anything running, so we’re just going to create a new campaign. Just to make things easy, I’m going to create a campaign without a goal.

And then, for the different campaign types, we can create remarketing only campaigns for search, display, and video campaigns. I believe you can still make them for Shopping currently, but over time shopping is going to morph into Performance max, which does not let you target only returning users, but the main three types of remarketing campaigns that we tend to see at this point in time are going to be for Search, Display, and Video.

I think the two most common that all viewers of this video are probably the most interested in are going to be Search and Display. And I’m going to tell you that rather than go through Search today. We already have another video where Joe goes through all of the different setup and potential strategies for remarketing lists for search ads, or RLSA as they’re commonly known.

So if you’re interested in search retargeting, you can check out the video at the top of the screen right now. So for today, I’m actually going to use a display campaign because I do think that’s one of the most common types of remarketing campaigns is just pure display targeting people around the Google Display network. Just like we do with all the other campaigns, I’m going to really skimp on anything that’s not specifically pertinent to this video.

So I’m going to skip over the conversion goals. I’m also going to skip over giving it any sort of good name because I don’t actually intend on running it, and I’m going to go ahead and start new just because the previous draft isn’t usable; same thing here. Just cover my basis. I’m going to do just United States, language looks good, and there are no additional targeting options that we need to change for a regular display remarketing campaign.

So just click next. Just so it doesn’t yell at me. I’m going to give it a $1 budget a day, and we’ll just maximize conversions for now. Now the targeting is where we’re going to need to pay attention and make this a retargeting only campaign. So you can see here optimized targeting is set up for you, but we don’t want to use that. We want to use our manual targeting.

So we’re going to come down here to add targeting. There are the five different types of targeting you can use on display campaigns, but for remarketing, we want to use our audience segments. We could just search for the audience that we want and I’ll do that just to show you how it works. I know that past seven days is in the list name, so I can just type that, and you can see the list showed up right here, and I could check the box there.

But I do want to show you how browse works because with browse, you have all the different types of audience targeting, whether that’s detailed demographics, affinity audiences in market and life events, and then the custom combination and custom segments are down below. But the one that you want if you are going to just use the browse function for remarketing is your data and similar segments.

You can see here the different types of audiences we have created in the account. They don’t match up perfectly to the four different types that I showed you in the Audience Builder. But that’s only because we haven’t created app users, and we haven’t created an uploaded list of users for a customer list just yet.

So we’re only seeing YouTube and website visitors here. I’ll open the drop down here, and then you can scroll to find the audience that you want to use for your campaigns, which again it’s going to be this YouTube video viewer’s past seven days that we just created. And now, at this point, you are half done with your targeting for a Remarketing campaign.

You scroll down a little bit because you’ll see here that even though we’ve added some targeting to the campaign, optimized targeting is still ON. That means that it will go beyond your remarketing or retargeting list that you’re using above to find new people. That categorically means that it’s not a retargeting only campaign because it will be prospecting.

So to create a true remarketing campaign, you need to uncheck the box next to optimize targeting. So you’re focused only on the people in your existing audience. You still have the option to add targeting down here, but these are also going to do the same thing that optimized targeting is demographics, keywords, topics, and placements, unless you’re layering them in specifically, are going to extend the reach that your campaign has.

So I would suggest not doing that and targeting only the audiences that you want to use. So now, let’s go ahead and click Next. And here’s where you will create your ads. These are going to be Responsive Display ads by default, and just like we do for all other ads on this channel, I’m going to create something super ugly based on what’s in the ads library already just to get something up and running.

So give me just a second. And now, I have a responsive display ad in place that I can use for this campaign. It’s got an image of Joe speaking. It has a link to a few of our different videos, and then it’s got our logo as well as some descriptions and headlines, all that good stuff. So if I scroll down, I will just go ahead and say next because I’m finished.

Since I just created this campaign, it says our targeting signals are too narrow because that audience is still populating, and that’s fine. I’m actually going to go ahead and give this one a name just so it’s a little easier to find in a minute. You can then review all the different things you have set up, and I’m going to go ahead and click Publish Campaign.

And with that, we have our Remarketing example campaign running. To review the performance of any of the audiences that you have, you just click into the campaign itself, head into the Audiences tab, and then you can expand this show table part in the audience segments, and you’ll see the audience is listed.

You can apply any number of Remarketing audiences into an ad group. My main suggestion for you would be to treat your audiences the same way that you would for Keywords. If your messaging needs to vary by the different audience or you need to have some other form of control, whether it’s a different target CPA or different campaign settings, make sure to have them in different ad groups.

But if all of them can work together and the audience isn’t too terribly large, then go ahead and group them all together because you will be able to see line by line just the same you can with Keywords how each of the audiences is performing and you can make adjustments accordingly. Just so we don’t spend any money. But I don’t want to. I’m going to go ahead and turn this OFF.

And now, the last thing that I want to talk about in this relatively high-level overview of remarketing is talking about calls to action. Given that remarketing campaigns are meant to reengage people who have already been in touch with your brand in one way, shape or form, whether it’s visiting your website, they were part of a customer list, or they watched a video on your YouTube channel, for example.

There are a number of different calls to action that you can use to get further value and provide further value to those audiences. In some scenarios, it might make sense to use the same conversion action. Think about if somebody was conducting a search and you offered them a free phone call consultation with a salesperson. Maybe you would want to utilize that as your call to action in a remarketing campaign.

In a number of scenarios, I’ve seen that work relatively well. But if that doesn’t work very well for you, maybe you can go to the second option, which is ask for a lighter call to action. Maybe that very bottom funnel conversion is just too much to ask. So maybe you take a step up, and you offer a different piece of content or you offer a slightly less intrusive call to action like a calculator or a brochure download something along those lines.

The name of the game here is just to get people to continue to engage with you, learn a little bit more over time, and eventually become a customer. You can also utilize retargeting for brand messaging. Maybe you know that you have a really long sales cycle, but you just want to stay top of mind every once in a while.

There doesn’t have to be a specific call to action other than bringing users back to the site or even just a pure impression play. Maybe they don’t have to come all the way back; you just want to make sure that they see your logo while they’re browsing the Google Display network.

And then lastly, Remarketing isn’t only for people who aren’t already your customers. You can use Remarketing to get back in front of people who already work with your brand, but either cross sell them to a different service or product or upsell them into a better pricing tier for you, and something may be a little bit more robust for them. So just because they’re already a customer doesn’t mean that you can’t bring them back.

Overall, Remarketing has been a staple strategy in Paid Media for as long as I’ve been in the business, and I think it’s only going to continue even with all of the different privacy concerns. We’re just needing to get a little bit more creative on how we’re tracking those users, putting them into audiences, and then getting back in front of them again.

So hopefully, this overview gives you more confidence to get a Google Ads Remarketing display campaign set up for your accounts or for your clients. But if I missed anything, or if you have any other questions, feel free to leave us a note in the comments below.

Written by Michelle Morgan