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Using Ad ReTargeting In Google Adwords

Written by Martin Wong on August 27, 2010

When Google launched Adsense in 2003, it revolutionized online advertising by contextually matching content with relevant ads. This made online pay-per-click and cost-per-impression ad campaigns extremely cost-effective for businesses and led to a significant overall increase in click-through rates for online ads.

In 2010, the online advertising industry is again being revolutionized by a new ad-matching technology called Ad Retargeting.

What Is Ad Retargeting?

Ad Retargeting is a way to re-engage people who have previously visited your website. Let’s say someone clicks on one of your online ads, visits your website for a few minutes to browse your product and then leaves without making a purchase. In most cases, this potential customer will not return to make purchase and you will have lost a potential sale. What ad retargeting allows you to do is direct ads specifically at potential customers who have already shown interest in your products by browsing your website.

As you can imagine,the possibilities for re-engaging these people and gaining their business with ad retargeting is huge. You can target them with ads specifically tailored to the products they were viewing or you can coax them with a special offer to return and finally make a purchase. They see these ads while they are surfing the web, searching on Google or browsing another website.

The result is that ad retargeting is hugely effective at increasing conversion while minimizing your cost-per-click. It is already proving to be one of the biggest advances in online advertising since contextual advertising went mainstream earlier in the decade.

Ad Retargeting With Google Adwords

To make it easy for online advertisers to take advantage of the possibilities of ad retargeting, Google is now offering it as part of  its Adwords platform (although Google calls in remarketing). I highly recommend that all online advertisers include ad retargeting in their marketing strategy.

To get started with Adwords Retargeting, you need to embed remarketing tags (a small snippet of code) on your homepage and important product pages. Google Adwords then adds this information to the browser-based “cookie” of your Adwords visitors, allowing you to retarget messages specifically to people who have visited the individually tagged pages on your site. To attach an audience to each remarketing tag, open the Audience tab in Google Adwords and there you can segment your different audiences and ads for your retargeting campaign.

Now, when these potential customers visit a website that has Google Ads from the Google Content Network – which are everywhere since it is the largest display ad network online – you can target them with another ad or a special deals to give them an  incentive to return and make that purchase. It’s as simple as that, but remarkably most online marketers don’t include this under-utilized technique in their marketing strategy.

Marketing studies have shown that it results in up to 500% increases in click-through rates on your retargeted ads and a significant reduction in your overall cost-per-conversion. Try it out for yourself and the results from ad retargeting will speak for themselves.