Did you know that only 2-4% of a typical website’s visitors actually make a purchase or tack action? It’s not uncommon for users to browse an e-commerce site, add a product to their shopping cart, and then leave without following through with the checkout process. Just because a visitor left without taking action, however, doesn’t necessarily mean they are a lost sale. With Google’s remarketing feature, you can capture these lost sales, converting them into paying customers.
Google Remarketing: The Basics
Remarketing is a feature in Google’s pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform Adwords. It lives up to its namesake by allowing webmasters to “remarket” visitors who’ve left their website. Using this feature, webmasters can tag visitors with a special cookie. And once the visitor has a cookie on his or her computer, they will see Adwords ads created by the webmaster.
Whether you realize it or not, you’ve probably been remarketed to at some point or another. If you left a website and later saw an advertisement for that website somewhere else, it was Google’s remarketing feature. Normally, Display Network ads are chosen based on relevancy, meaning you’ll probably see ads for automotive stores if you are visiting a website about cars. With remarketing, however, relevancy goes out the window, as ads are chosen based on whether or not you’ve visited the website.
Benefits of Remarketing
There are several benefits of using Google’s remarketing feature, one of which is higher conversions. Because you are targeting visitors who’ve already accessed your website, you’ll generally experience a higher conversion rate. Google cited a success story in which a tire company saw 22% more sales and 163% higher conversions just by using remarketing. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll experience the same results, but remarketing is undoubtedly a great way to boost conversions.
Google also notes that remarketing allows advertisers to bid higher due to the increased quality of traffic. If you cannot turn a profit on high-traffic keywords within your Adwords campaign, perhaps you should use remarketing to only target visitors who’ve left your website.
“In standard search campaigns, your bids, ads and keywords are the same for every search and every searcher. But if you knew which searchers represented higher value prospects, you might want to bid higher, show on broader keywords or present different ads to these customers to improve your results,” explained the Mountain View company.
How to Get Started
Remarketing is actually easier than most people realize. After logging into your Adwords account, you’ll grab the remarketing code, plug it into each page of your website, and then target those users from your campaign settings. Whenever someone visits a webpage on which the code is installed, it will place a cookie on their computer. Google uses these cookies to determine who should see the advertiser’s ads.
For more information on how to set up remarketing, check out Google’s help page at https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/3210317?hl=en&ref_topic=3122877.
