Google transformed the face of retargeting for online businesses this June with the release of Google Dynamic Remarketing, making retargeting specific to user search available to retailers of all sizes.
What is Google Dynamic Remarketing?
Merchants who sell online often use retargeting as it displays ads to shoppers who are more likely to make a purchase since they’ve already been to the retailers website.
Imagine if you went to Target, then they paid someone to follow you around for the rest of the day showing you things from Target you looked at. Shoes while you get coffee, sneakers at the gym, flats as you drop off your Redbox movie rental.
Target knows you’re more likely to buy shoes than the guy next to you since you’ve already been to their store. Moreover, Target can show you specific shoes you looked at, and items that relate to those shoes (shoe categories, related shoes, etc.) to increase the likelihood of you being interested in checking out those products.
Remarketing: Then and Now
Prior to Google Dynamic Remarketing, smaller online marketers were often unable to retarget using solutions such as Adroll due to spend limits. These merchants could retarget using Google, but were more limited with retargeting options (where to retarget, who to retarget, when to retarget).
Google Dynamic Remarketing overhauled Google’s retargeting functionality, making it more accessible and functional to retailers of all sizes.
Google Dynamic Remarketing Features
- Google Auto Optimized Layout Feature: Merchants can choose from a pre-made list of ad templates and A/B test based on ad performance.
- Google Product Recommendation Engine: Chooses ads for product ads based on what shoppers have viewed.
- Google Real Time Bidding Algorithm: Determines bids for each impression.
Google Dynamic Remarketing Visitor Segmentation
Another large change for Google Dynamic Remarketing is who marketers are able to remarket to. Google Dynamic Remarketing allows online retailers to retarget to:
- Everyone: All site visitors
- General Visitors: Shoppers who visited your site but didn’t look at any product pages.
- Product Viewers: Online shoppers who have looked at particular product pages.
- Shopping Cart Abandoners: People who have visited your site, added a product to their shopping cart, and then decided to leave the site without completing the purchase.
- Past Buyers: Online customers who have purchased items from your site in the past.
Retarget Using Google Dynamic Remarketing
You can liken remarketing with Google to using Product Listing Ads. A little up front leg work, definite maintenance and testing, but proven return on investment.
If you want to remarket with Google Dynamic Remarketing, you can get started here:
- Send a data feed to the Google Merchant Center Login: You’re already doing this if your listing on Product Listing Ads or AdWords. If you are sending a data feed, be sure it’s up to date and follows Google’s data feed rules.
- Install a Google remarketing tag on your site: You can test and validate your tag using Google’s remarketing validation tools.
- Build Google Remarketing Campaigns And Ad Groups: Google’s remarketing webinar is a great place to get started with Google Dynamic Retargeting.
Google Dynamic Retargeting Best Practices
- Include images in your ads: Product Listing Ads convert more and have a better ROI than text ads. Remarketing ads with images reflect the same trend.
- Bid more on shopping cart abandoners: There are a whole host of things which can lead an online shopper to abandon the shopping cart. Regardless of the cause, these shoppers had intended to purchase from you at one point. The likelihood of these shoppers converting compared to all visitors or general visitors is much higher.
- Bid less on visitors who didn’t view products: If an online shopper browsed on your site and didn’t look at any products they are less likely to ultimately purchase something. You should still retarget to these customers, just don’t spend as much here.
- Adjust bids based on visitor variables such as gender, age and website: Since Google Dynamic Remarketing is feed based, you can change make feed changes and add labels to target different variables of visitor groups.
- Consider Member Duration and Google Dynamic Remarketing Ads Frequency Capping Times: How long Google retargets to someone and how often visitors see ads are important variables which impact conversion.
- Google Remarketing Member Duration (or how long a Google cookie follows someone) can last up to 180 days – you’ll likely want to retarget for 30 days.
- Google Remarketing Frequency Capping can be tailored by day week or month for impressions. Best practice for how many ads you serve varies for different merchants, but AdWords and Analytics should help you identify which time periods are best for your website.