5 Audience Remarketing Lists to Boost Your AdWords Game
It happens.
A visitor lands on your website and even adds a product to their shopping cart but then suddenly abandons the process halfway through, losing your business a potential sale.
Typically that visitor would be gone forever, but remarketing makes it possible to reach visitors who have previously interacted with your site. Remarketing is a Google AdWords feature that gives your business a second chance of reconnecting with visitors by showing them relevant ads as they browse the web.
The result is ultimately more conversions. But the key to making remarketing work for your business is segmenting your audiences and getting the right ads in front of them. Your own site analytics provides insightful data that can significantly boost your PPC efforts.
For example, data from visitors who abandon their shopping carts can be segmented into an audience. You can show them ads that offer discounts for items in their cart. Similarly, existing customers can be shown a completely different set of ads to bring them back to your site.
Being able to segment your visitor data is what makes audience targeting so powerful. It allows you to create more effective ads.
How to Create Remarketing Lists
Building audience lists allows you to create more effective ads for customers throughout different stages of the purchasing cycle. Your ads are better able to reflect their needs and drive more conversions as a result.
To create your own remarketing list, click on Audiences under the Shared Library section (found on the left hand side). Click the red +Remarketing List button on the next page to get started:
With remarketing you can segment your audience by the following users:
- Website visitors
- Mobile app users
- Customer emails
- YouTube users
Select the first option for now. The next page provides additional instructions on creating your new remarketing list.
Here are several audience lists that we recommend building for your remarketing campaigns:
- Homepage viewers
- Category page viewers
- Product page viewers
- Cart abandoners
- Existing customers
Each helps to broaden your reach and allows you to tailor your ads accordingly. Let’s look at how to build each of these remarketing lists in more detail.
Homepage Viewers
These are people who landed on your homepage but didn’t view other pages. This kind of interaction doesn’t reflect the same degree of interest compared to a visitor who landed on a product page. So your message would be broader to increase brand awareness (e.g. “Discover Great Products From Our Company”).
To target these visitors, create a new remarketing list and choose “visitors of a page” from the drop down. Then create a rule so the URL equals your homepage:
Choose an appropriate title so you can easily refer back to this list. Adding this list to an ad group lets you target visitors who have only visited your homepage without visiting other pages. Then click Save when you are finished.
Category Page Viewers
Chances are your business offers more than one product.
If you sell electronics, then your site will have category pages such as computers, televisions, phones, tablets, etc. Visitors on the tablets list have already expressed interest in that product category. So you can add this list to an ad group that highlights different products from that category.
Create a new rule that targets visitors who land on a URL that contains the category keyword:
To prevent any overlap with your lists, you could also use custom combinations to exclude any users that perform any other actions (e.g. viewing products, abandoning shopping carts, etc.).
Product Page Viewers
Next, you’ll want to create lists that go even deeper.
Visitors who have viewed a specific product are farther along the sales cycle. They have narrowed their options down but have yet to complete their purchase for whatever reason. By targeting visitors who have viewed a product page on your site, your ad can contain discounts or other incentives to get them to return to your site.
Create a new list that includes visitors to a certain product page by creating an appropriate rule that contains the exact URL:
The product page viewers audience list alone can greatly boost your PPC efforts.
Cart Abandoners
According to data compiled from 37 different case studies, the average shopping cart abandonment rate is approximately 69%. This is a troubling figure if you run an e-commerce store as it means that on average more than half of your shoppers are abandoning their shopping carts. Re-engaging cart abandoners is an effective and proven way to bring more sales back to your business.
You can create a cart abandoners list by using a custom combination. You will need to combine a list that includes visitors who have been to their shopping cart and a list of people who have not been to the purchase confirmation page:
With this setup, you can maximize profitability by targeting visitors who have abandoned their shopping carts and re-engage them with relevant ads.
Existing Customers
Existing customers are a huge potential source of source of revenue. You can either upsell or cross-sell products that are related to their previous purchases. These individuals already recognise your brand and are far more likely to buy again.
Target existing customers by creating a list for visitors who have been to your purchase confirmation page:
This is only a small selection of what is possible with audience lists.
Start with these lists so as not to overwhelm yourself too much in the beginning. Have fewer lists also makes it easier to organise your efforts. Then as you become more proficient, you can create new audience lists to segment your visitors even further (e.g. blog readers, etc.).
Remarketing is a powerful tool made even more so with audience lists. Segmenting your audience lets you fine-tune your campaigns to drive more sales to your business. The result is a major competitive advantage as most businesses don’t even bother with setting up remarketing on their Google AdWords campaigns.