Google Display Ads are the perfect way to build brand awareness and create a community around your product or service. But more than that, it can help you increase sales, that is—if you know what to do.
It's common knowledge among expert marketers that remarketing is the key to better ROI in ads. Remarketing lets you reach people who have previously visited your website or you have engaged with your other display ads on Google's search and content networks.
How Does Remarketing Work with Google Ads?
As its name implies, remarketing means you will market to the same audience again. Now, why would you do that? Simple: it's because people who have seen your brand before or have shown interest in your products in the past are more likely to make or complete a purchase.
This follows the Psychological Principle of Familiarity, wherein people favor brands they are familiar with over brands they have seen for the first time.
With Google Ads, you can remarket to audiences who have previously visited your website. To do that, advertisers need to add conversion tracking on their web pages.
This tracking tag must be placed on all pages that you want to monitor. Once your audience visits this page, the tag will send your Google ads manager information that this person saw the page.
You can also add specific trigger conversion actions, such as visiting your product page, signing up for a newsletter, adding products to the cart, or making a purchase. Google will then add such people to your remarketing list once they perform the action you specified for remarketing.
So when you run Google Display Network remarketing ads, these visitors will be eligible to see your ad again because Google has already identified them as someone interested in what you have to offer (and more likely than not willing to buy).
What Two Types of Remarketing Can be Used on Google Display Ads?
To start with your remarketing journey, you must first understand the kinds of remarketing you can do. There are a couple of remarketing types that can be used on Google Display Ads. Let's dive deeper into them.
Standard Remarketing
This is Google's default remarketing ad format, and it is used to target website visitors who visited your site, regardless of whether they perform a specific action or not. Your website drops a cookie on the user's browser, giving Google the information that this user showed interest in your products by visiting your website.
Once Google is "triggered" by this piece of information, your ad shall be displayed in Google content properties that the user visits next.
What kind of ad will be displayed?
Well, this is actually the main difference between Standard Remarketing and Dynamic Remarketing. The ad shown with the first type of marketing is constant—it does not change variably.
Once your Google ads account determines that this person is eligible for remarketing, he will be shown standard banner ad designs that you have uploaded. Some online stores show images of all products in their lineup, such as shown in the ad below:
As you can see, the advertiser displayed their whole product lineup in one banner ad. The intention here is to recapture your attention towards the brand.
Dynamic Remarketing
Now, if you want a personalized approach to remarketing, then you should opt for dynamic remarketing. This type of remarketing allows Google to use your Google ads manager platform and website visitor data to serve up customized ad content.
What does this mean? Well, when a user sees your ad served by dynamic remarketing, Google can pull information from different places such as:
- Your product catalog (including attributes like color or size)
- Audience lists stored in Google Analytics or in Google Ads Manager
- Data collected by third-party tools that integrate with Google Ads Manager via the API or tag management system.
Dynamic Remarketing lets you present highly targeted one-to-one messaging in real-time for more significant results and ROI.
For example, you visit a website and get interested enough in a product that you proceed to add it to the cart. However, you got distracted and switched to a different tab or simply navigated away from the online store.
When you visit a website that is part of Google Display Network's properties, you see a banner ad for the exact product you added to your cart a while ago!
Will you click on the banner ad and proceed with your purchase? You will likely do so.
Every person who has gone online has experienced this kind of remarketing at least once in their lives, showing how effective Dynamic Remarketing really is.
What Kind of Ad Will Be Displayed with Dynamic Remarketing?
Unlike Standard Remarketing, where you have a limited number of variations of ads based on what you upload, with Dynamic Remarketing, the limit on the variations of ads that your audiences can possibly see is limited only to your number of products!
With just one dynamic ad, you can show your products based on your audience's interest. If the customer has added a product to his cart, you can show ads focusing on that specific product:
As you may notice, the banner ad features an exact product and not an entire product line.
While Dynamic Ads may be more enticing to use, it is also more complicated to set up. It requires an auto-updating product feed and a properly set-up audience list.
Which Should You Choose Between Standard and Dynamic Remarketing?
Dynamic Remarketing is Google's latest way to target the customers that show interest in your product—whether it be through visiting your site, or by browsing Google properties such as Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Google Maps—by displaying ads tailored specifically for them.
Standard Remarking is also targeted but instead relies on pre-defined ad variations rather than basing them off of data collected from either website visits or feed searches. Google Ads using this select from pre-defined banner ad copy, images, and headlines to display on Google properties.
So When Should You Use Dynamic Remarketing?
Dynamic remarketing's ability to show personalized ads based on visitor shopping cart data or search history is a great way for retailers to get back into their visitors' good graces. You can show relevant products that are already being considered for purchase—or maybe even abandoned during checkout!
Creating a dynamic ad campaign would be better if you have dozens of products with multiple variations per product. It is also a good choice if you want personalized ads. However, you must go for dynamic remarketing only if you have the technical know-how.
A bonus requirement that we believe can help you make the most out of remarketing is having a platform that can help you easily monitor and understand the status and trends of your dynamic ads. A good example is Brax, a native advertising platform that specializes in monitoring, managing, and optimizing campaigns based on pre-determined rules.
And When Should You Use Standard Remarketing?
Standard remarketing is suitable for eCommerce websites where there are a limited number of product variations. The process of creating such remarketing campaigns is much more straightforward than dynamic remarketing (even though Google Display Network will benefit if you have Google Analytics tracking set up correctly).
Standard Remarketing is also a great choice if it is your first time setting up a remarketing campaign. It is not too complicated, and the process can teach you how to run dynamic remarketing campaigns in the future.
Final Thoughts on Remarketing via Google Ads
Google Remarketing is an effective way for businesses and marketers alike to gain back lost leads by displaying personalized banner ad content that can generate more visits, clicks throughs, conversions, and purchases from the very same people.
The key with Google Remarketing is ensuring that it's set up correctly so as not to serve remarketing ads too often—which could result in those visitors tuning out from seeing them over time! Ad fatigue does occur when users are served the same type of advertising too many times.
If you don't know where to begin with remarketing with Google Ads, fret not! We are here to help. Book a Demo on how to use our platform and we'll show you how to set up remarketing campaigns in Google Ads properly.
