Remarketing: A Definition

If you missed my last post on remarketing or you’re chomping at the bit to learn more, then this is the right place.

What is Remarketing?

PPC Remarketing, also known as retargeting, is the process of reintroducing your product or service to your target market through paid online advertising platforms like Google Adwords. For a straight forward explanation on how this works check out our remarketing page.

When a user visits your website a tracking cookie is placed in their browser. Then when this user leaves your site to browse around the web your ads will show on the other websites they visit. Your ads will follow them around and reminds them about your product or service.

Just to note, this tracking cookie doesn’t capture any personal information. You can think of it as something similar to the GPS you may have on your phone. All it does is tell the Adwords platform its location.

Remarketing Audiences

As users visit your website, and the tracking cookie is placed on their browser, they’re sorted into groupings based on certain criteria (which we will define later in this post). These groupings are called audiences. Through your retargeting ads you’ll communicate your offering to these audiences.

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For all you marketers out there you could think of (and even define) these groupings as consumer segments. Next I’ll show you how to set up these audiences.

Being able to segment or define these audiences allows marketers or online advertisers to customize ad messaging, promotions, landing pages etc. based on a certain criteria. For example, John Smitty visits a particular product page on your website for rope sandals. He reads the description and the customer reviews but doesn’t commit and purchase. He’s satisfied with the great customer reviews, but can’t justify paying your asking price. So he leaves your site.

Wouldn’t you want to re-capture visitors like this and offer them a promotion so they’ll purchase from you and not your competitor?

You can define an audience to target, that will consist of users who visit this product page but don’t purchase. This means that you’ll be able to show these users a specific ad and promotion that may clinch the deal!

Getting Started

There are many ways to setup remarketing, some if not most of them are complex. So stay tuned for more blog posts over the next few weeks where I will walk you through how to do it. For starters, download this checklist. You can use it to keep track of where you are at in the setup process.

Do you have any comments, questions, or concerns about remarketing? Please feel free to comment below.