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PPC Agency Blog

How to Get Coaching Leads Through Cost-Effective PPC Campaigns
How to Build Better PPC Campaigns for Your Law Firm
The Electrician’s Guide to Running PPC Ads That Actually Bring In Paying Customers
High-Performance PPC for Roofing Contractors: A Tactical Guide to Lead Generation
PPC Tips to Help Plumbers Get Real Leads Without Wasting Money on Clicks
Strategies for Maximizing ROI with PPC Management
How to Use Google Ads in a Restricted or Sensitive Category
Google Ads vs. Linkedin Ads: Which is Better for Commercial Targeting?
9 Reasons To Fire Your PPC Agency
How To Start A PPC Agency?
What are the Right PPC KPIs to Track?
How to Write Great PPC Landing Page Headlines
Basic Guide to Retargeting in Google Ads PPC
Display URLs: Optimizing Display URLs for Google Ads & PPC
What Marketers Should Know About Automated Bid Algorithms in PPC
Ultimate Guide to PPC Remarketing: Bring Users Back When They Don’t Convert
Should You Avoid Automated Bidding With Google Ads?
How To Dial In Your Cost-Per-Lead Using PPC?
How to Find the Best Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Services
PPC Management Pricing: What Should I Pay My PPC Agency?
How Much Does it Cost to Sell On Amazon?
10 Most Important PPC Metrics to Track
What Makes a Good Click-Through-Rate in Google Ads PPC?
Implementing Flexible Bid Strategies in PPC
How to Set Up Facebook Retargeting
How to Increase Landing Page Conversions
Understanding Google’s Ad Rank Formula in PPC
How to Improve Facebook Ads Conversions
How to Implement a Successful Video Ad Campaign
Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads: Which is the Better Advertising Medium for Your Business?
Negative Keywords: The How & Why of Negative Keywords List Building in Google Ads
How to Use “Not Provided Keywords” to Maximize Google Ad’s Impact
How to Avoid Choosing the Wrong Ad Rotation Setting
Chiropractor PPC: Google Ads Guide for Chiropractors
PPC Keyword Match Types & Why They Matter
PPC Marketing Management for Law Firms: A Comprehensive Guide
Broad Match: Best Practices for Targeting Broad Match Keywords in PPC
How to Use Shared Campaign Budget in Google Ads
How to Adjust for Seasonality in PPC Advertising
7 Alternative PPC Ad Networks
Improve Your PPC with Conversion Funnels
How to Use Google Keyword Planner
How to Avoid Keyword Cannibalization in PPC
12 Best Tips for PPC Calls to Action
Dynamic Search Ads for Beginners
How to Take Over Management of an Existing Google Ads Account
How & Why To Leverage Amazon Sponsored Brand Video Ads
Dayparting: Setting Up Time Of Day Bid Adjustments In PPC
How to Use Video Ads to Build Trust
How To Warm Up Your Instagram Audience
8 Tools for Analyzing Your Competitors in PPC
How To Create Better Ad Groups In PPC
How to Target Competitors On Facebook With Interest-Based Audiences
Most Common PPC Questions & a Few Answers
8 Best Link Building Tools for SEO
How To Calculate The ROI For PPC & Improve It
Strategies for Increasing Click-Through Rate in PPC
Exact Match Keywords: How to Target Exact Match Keywords in PPC
How to Perform B2B Lead Generation on Linkedin
Google Ads Suspension: ‘How-to’ Guide for Fixing a Suspended Google Ads Account
The Ultimate Guide to Google Ads Quality Score
How Often Should You Update Your Google Ads Campaigns?
How To Estimate Conversions In Google Ads
eCommerce PPC Strategies for Maximum Sales Growth
What Is ROAS? Complete Guide To Return-On-Ad-Spend For PPC
How to Scale Your PPC Campaigns
9 Pointers For Increasing The CTR For Google Ads
13 Tips for Optimizing Paid Search Campaigns
Why Aren’t My Google Ads Showing & What to Do About it
PPC for Accountants & CPAs: A Beginner’s Guide
8 Reasons to Bid on Branded Keywords in PPC
PPC Automation Tools for Scaling Campaigns
SEO vs. PPC: 21 Best Practices for Organic & Paid Marketing
When to Increase Your Bid in PPC (Pay Per Click)
Branded Search: Why Branded Searches Give the Best Conversions
How to Create Your Own PPC Project Checklist for Optimizing Time Management
5 Reasons to Use Dynamic Keyword Insertions in Google Ads
11 Effective Pop Up Ad Strategies in Paid Marketing
5 Local Lead Generation Tactics Using PPC
Complete Guide to Local PPC: How to Target for Local Paid Search
A Guide To PPC Competitor Analysis in Paid Search
Why You Should Use Dynamic Landing Pages in PPC
How to Improve Google Ads Conversions
How Much Do Instagram Ads Cost
What is Cost Per Click in PPC?
Google Ad Extensions Explained
Understanding Ineligible Clicks in Google Ads
Optimizing “People Also Search For” in PPC
Landing Page Conversion Rate Optimization for SEM/PPC Campaigns
How to Perform Keyword Research with Google Ads Keyword Tool
Optimizing PPC Campaigns for SaaS Businesses
8 Landing Page Test Ideas for PPC
9 Excel & Spreadsheet Tips for PPC Managers
How to Beat PPC Seasonality Issues
How to Do Cross Channel Lead Generation With PPC
How to Use Micro Conversions for Lead Generation with PPC
The Eventual Deprecation of Third Party Cookies
A/B Testing for PPC Lead Generation Success
12 Must Have PPC Certifications
Optimizing for Profit (Instead of CPA, CPL, or even ROI) in PPC

All Blogs

Samuel Edwards
|
January 3, 2025
Basic Guide to Retargeting in Google Ads PPC

We’ve all been there: sitting in front of the computer or scrolling along on your phone and seeing the one-millionth ad of the day. You can often ignore them but sometimes the ads jump out, not because they use bold fonts or bright colors but because you were just thinking about the very same product or service that’s being advertised via PPC.

As the consumer this can feel wild, like the device is inside your head, watching your every move and making note of your every thought. But as a business owner, you should know better.

This is the practice of retargeting ads and it’s a valuable one. No witchcraft of telepathy required.

When you’re paying to advertise your product or service, you want those ads to cut through all the noise and actually reach people who are interested in buying what you’re selling. That’s why you need retargeting.

What is Retargeting?

First, let’s start with a typical series of events without retargeting.

A customer is looking for something similar to what your business provides. They enter some keywords into a search engine and end up on your website. Great news, right? This is a success of SEO and maybe even pay-per-click advertising. Not so quick.

The customer browses around the site, maybe even adds items to their cart or chats with the support, but ultimately leaves without making any purchases.

Without retargeting, this story ends there. So close to making a sale, yet still so far away. It’s frustrating and it can happen over and over again with piles of potential customers slipping through the cracks.

Here’s how the story can end differently, with a happy ending for everyone involved.

The same sequence of events takes place, but in this version, your business practices retargeting.

After the customer leaves your website, they are shown additional ads, often specifically referencing the items or pages they originally viewed on your site. You use the information you gleaned about them to show them just the right ad to make the conversion.

One of these ads catches their attention, so they click on it, come back to the website, and make the purchase, sign up for the email list, fill out a form, whatever the final desired action is. They’re happy, you’re happy; it’s all worked out and the credit goes to retargeting ads.

Although, if you want to tell people it’s all due to your superior business skills and product, we won’t argue.

The simple premise of retargeting is to show potential customers who have expressed some interest in your business highly relevant ads that convert them from potential customers to customers.

This can take a variety of forms so let’s look at some of them and compare.

Different Types of Retargeting

Pixel

Pixel marketing is the most common kind of retargeting. And no, it doesn’t mean the ads are blurry and pixelated.

Pixel-based retargeting works by putting a line of code (otherwise known as a pixel) on your website. The pixel then puts an anonymous browser cookie in each of the visitors’ browsers as they come to your website or landing page.

They then leave the site but the pixel allows your ad provider (e.g. Google Ads, Facebook retargeting) to start showing your specific ads to these visitors.

You’ll be able to glean lots of information about visitors to your website through this method and retarget them accordingly. Want to target a visitor who clicked on a specific product page but didn’t follow through to adding to the cart or checking out? You can do it with pixel retargeting.

Sometimes pixel retargeting can come in the form of serving very specific ads showing visitors the exact products they viewed on your site, a practice called dynamic retargeting. It can be beneficial in that potential customers are reminded of the exact thing they were interested in, but some may find it intrusive and disquieting.

Lists

List-based retargeting is a more traditional kind of retargeting where you show ads to existing customers or visitors who provided you with some level of personal information like an email address.

You can email these people directly or upload the list to your retargeting platform of choice and have the retargeting campaign address them according to what you already know. It’s a slightly less sophisticated technique but it can still be extremely effective.

The major con with list-based retargeting is that you won’t be able to go after customers who have only minimally engaged with your website, but you can achieve that through other methods.

On-Platform

On-platform retargeting is most used on social media platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. If you post a video on Facebook, you can choose to retarget specifically those who watched the majority of the video.

It’s a different way of gathering information on the potential customer’s interest in your business and can also work well.

Showing users things they’ve expressed an interest in is already how these sites work, so your ads will generally fit right in.

Does It Really Work?

Going back to our little story from earlier, what if the customer targeted in the retargeted ad campaign sees the ads for the business they were interested in and decides they aren’t actually interested at all? Isn’t it all a big waste of time and money?

Simply put, no. And there are a few reasons for that.

Marketing and advertising are always going to be a numbers game. There may be lots of fish in the sea but you’re never going to catch them all, even the ones right near your boat.

What you can do is narrow the holes in the net you’re casting so fewer fish get away. But enough with the fish metaphors.

Let’s put it into hard numbers. If you liked math in school, this will be your favorite part.

Website visitors who have been retargeted with display ads are more likely to convert by a whopping 70%. That’s 7-0 percent. Not good enough for you?

How about the fact that retargeted ads have a click-through rate that is 10X higher than regular display ads?

What about the evidence that retargeting campaigns can produce crazy returns on investment, as was the case with one company, Watchfinder, which achieved a 1,300% ROI over six months?

Of course, every business will see different conversion levels with their retargeting campaigns, but the numbers show they can be incredibly effective. So effective, in fact, that you’d really be silly not to get in on the action.

But if you really want to increase the success of your remarketing campaign, follow these tips:

Tips for Retargeting & Remarketing

1. Just the Right Number of Impressions

This may be the most important tip of them all, which is why we’ve put it at the top. Do you hear that? If you’re only going to pay attention to one of these, make it this one!

One of the worst things you can do is to bombard potential customers with too many ads. Customers have expressed frustration and annoyance regarding repetitive ads that seem to follow them around wherever they go online.

Don’t be the creepy business harassing would-be customers. It’s not a good look or a good strategy.

On the other side, use too few impressions and your ads may never breakthrough, even to the interested customers you are specifically going after. Show them enough to keep them thinking about your business but not so many you turn them off of it.

Essentially, you want just the right number of impressions. A Goldilocks amount, if you will. Not too many and not too few.

2. Don’t Neglect Ad Design

You may think that just because retargeting goes after customers who have already expressed an interest, that the ads don’t have to be as eye-catching the second (and third and …) time around.

Well, cast that thought from your mind. Lock it out and throw away the key.

Ad design will always be important. It may even be more important in retargeting.

You need to make sure the ads are recognizable and tie directly to your brand. Variety in ad type is also valuable here since customers can find the same ad over and over again much less appealing than a bunch of different ones.

3. Be Mindful of Recent Customers

This goes with tip #1 but it deserves its own shoutout. Don’t go after recent customers right after they’ve made a purchase.

If a customer is won over by your ads, decides to buy something, and then is immediately inundated with more ads, it will feel more like a punishment than a friendly suggestion.

An annoyed customer is not likely to become a repeat customer. And if you happen to make the critical error of serving them an ad for the very product they just purchased? Forget it.

4. Segment, Segment, Segment!

You should be conscious of where each potential customer is in the sale funnel and make sure that your retargeting campaigns reflect that.

The value of the retargeting campaign compared to any ordinary ad campaign is that you already have additional information about the potential customers and their interest in your business.

Don’t waste that information by doing nothing with it. Create specific ads and different campaigns depending on what level of interaction the customers have engaged in and what product types they showed interest in.

5. Watch and Evaluate

As with any marketing campaign, a critical component is consistent monitoring and evaluation.

Tracking conversions, whichever conversion you’re aiming for, whether it’s sales, email signups, or views, is a great way to know how your retargeting campaign is going.

If something’s not working right, this is how you can find out and fix it. And if everything’s perfect, well, you’ll want to know that, too, so you can keep doing what works.

Find the right metrics that work for you and track them religiously.

Getting it Done

As you may be able to see at this point, retargeting, while very beneficial, isn’t always the simplest strategy to implement. There are lots of different factors and best practices to stay on top of to get the process to pay off the way you hope.

If you want to be sure that you get the full rewards of a retargeting ad campaign, go to the professionals.

At PPC.co, we have a team of marketing experts that will help ensure your first-time visitors don’t stay one-time visitors. We do the heavy lifting on the retargeting front so the potential customers who are most likely to make a purchase are right there, ready to be wowed by your business.

Play your cards right and you’ll have swaths of new customers who keep coming back. That’s the potential for a crazy high return on investment.

Don’t leave money on the table by using a poor performing PPC marketing agency. Start using retargeting by engaging our PPC retargeting service.

Samuel Edwards
|
January 3, 2025
Display URLs: Optimizing Display URLs for Google Ads & PPC

Many users may not know the difference between the display URL in a Google Ad and the destination URL. For one, understanding the difference between the two is important for understanding how to use and optimize display URLs for search engines.

Optimizing display URLs is key to the success of your ad campaign, especially if your business is not that well known or does not have a large web footprint. It also helps google tie the ad to your business when your business does not use keywords that describe the type of business that it does.

For example, if you sell toasters, but your website’s URL is dave.com, obviously Google isn’t going to have any clue how to tie an ad for toasters to dave.com if you don’t optimize the display URL.

Display URL versus Destination URL

To be clear, the Display URL is what users see if they look at one of your ads. This is different from the destination URL, which is where the user will land if they click on the ad. A display URL isn’t an actual web address and so, does not have the same requirements or restraints placed on it as a clickable link.

To think of it literally, the display URL is the unique identifier tying that ad to the business that it is associated with. That’s why it is so important to optimize the URL to allow the Google to properly identify the ad and the business it is associated with.

The next question you’re probably going to ask is why this matters in terms of advertisements? It matters because it affects your ad score, high score ads mean better placement, cheaper prices, and other benefits as dictated by Google. A highly optimized display URL improves your score ranking and your overall ad campaigns success as a result.

Rules for Optimizing Your Display URL

Display URLs have some strict guidelines that have to be followed, unlike normal URLs. Learning how to optimize your display URL while staying in these guidelines will take some work.

Google only allows up to 35 characters in display URLs and for mobile WAP ads that limit is cut to 20 characters. That’s right, you read that correctly, characters, not words. This means careful selection of every letter is important when building your URL.

Additionally, the domain name of both the display URL and the destination URL has to match. That means that if the destination is taco.com, then the display URL must also have taco.com in it. This is very specific but it is done to tie the ad to the destination.

The destination URL does not have the same character limit mind you, just the display URL.

One thing that display URLs can do is show folders or subsections. If the character limit allows. This means that your URL could be taco.com/steaktaco. Prefixes for subdomains are also allowed.

How to Optimize Your Display URL

Now that you know the rules that you must follow when building a display URL, you can figure out the best means to optimize the URL. We’ll break down the keys to optimizing your display URL so that it’s easy to digest.

Use Ad Campaign Keywords in Your Display URL

We know you are limited on characters, but the display URL should contain at least one keyword that is also a target in the ad itself. Since the display URL isn’t a live link, you can use prefixes and folder names to reference keywords even though actual pages with those names won’t exist.

This allows you to bend the rules a bit and add keywords to improve PPC optimization.

If you’re an ecommerce business running PPC ads, then a display URL that includes the product in a shortened way may help optimize click-throughs and conversions.

You’ll also want to consider Google ad extensions along with how you choose and showcase your display URLs.

Use Capital Letters in File Names

Another tip is to use Capital letters in filenames to improve search engine visibility. The domain name and prefix are always written in small caps, but you can capitalize the very first letter in a file name and it will be more visible in the Google.

Use All the Characters to Describe the Product or Service

35 characters isn’t a lot, but if your domain name is short, then use the remaining characters to create a files name that will tell users as much as they can about the product.

Here’s an example: “dave.com/lightweight2slicetoasters”. Now if you read the file name at the end of the domain name, you can see that the ad is for lightweight two-slice toasters. If that’s what you were looking for when you saw the ad, then you know exactly what you’re going to get. Examples aside, it’s important to give potential customers as many details as you can for your valuable ad space.

This also minimizes waste, as users who aren’t interested won’t click because they can see what they are getting beforehand. Remember that each click costs money, even if the person clicking doesn’t buy anything from you.

Use Your Data to Judge Your Progress

After you’ve performed all the different tactics to optimize your display URL, it’s a good idea to use Google analytics data to see how your ads are performing and see if there are any other changes that you can make, such as tweaking ad keywords or further improving display URLs. Every bit of data is important to help you rank as high as possible and make the most out of your ad campaigns.

Once you learn the rhythm of designing display URLs, you can improve future campaign success by tailoring the domain, keyword, and URL to each other to form a cohesive and search engine optimized ad structure.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, this guide has taught you what you need to know about AdWords display URLs, their value, and how best to optimize them. Using the tips we’ve outlined here you can increase the ad rank of your ads and score more premium ad space and cut marketing costs.

All of these things mean better ad campaigns and marketing success for all of your ads. This will help drive more traffic to your business and best of all, it is more.

Need help with managing your PPC ad spend? We’re here for you! Contact us and start with a free PPC audit.

Samuel Edwards
|
January 3, 2025
What Marketers Should Know About Automated Bid Algorithms in PPC

PPC automation can be a great driving force behind any marketing campaign, provided you know how to use it properly. Several factors go into how well your automated bidding algorithms work and mismanagement can mean a completely wasted ad budget and a useless PPC ad campaign.

The first thing to think about is the fact that automated bidding algorithms are essentially learning machines. This means that you’re trusting that machine to do work for you that you will otherwise have to do yourself. By now you’re probably going “gee I already know that, why are you telling me this?”

We say this because oftentimes the automated machine is not allowed to function as it normally should to make the PPC ad campaign as effective as it could be. That’s why we’re going to go over some things that every marketer should know about Automated Bid Strategies and how to make them work properly for your PPC ad campaigns.

How Budget Constraints Affect Automated Bidding

Yes, that’s right, budget constraints can negatively affect your automated bidding strategies Or algorithm. The way the program grows is by learning behavior and adjusting to match that behavior to get the best results possible based on ad data.

However, if your budget is such that you can only spend ad dollars on auctions that will result in clicks and your return needs to be exceptionally high, this will result in your automated bidding strategy algorithm only Automated bidding strategies/bid strategies on auctions very sparingly and may result in diminished traffic and diminished returns.

Instead, your automated bidding targets should be set based on realistic expectations of return on ad spend based on actual cost per ad data that you’ve used recently.

Relevant data helps the algorithm learn what it needs to do in a particular situation as opposed to setting target guidelines with no predefined data.

The algorithm must learn the patterns of data over time. Setting unrealistic goals on little to no data will only result in wasted spending or ad spend.

How to Properly Set Your Algorithm For Targets

It’s important to remember that you are teaching the algorithm how to target the best auctions for display ad space on your behalf. To do this you should follow a few certain steps to get the best results.

Target strategies focus on hitting a certain ROAS or CPA and not on the bulk-buying of ad space. Because of this, how you manage these values in telling the algorithm what to do is crucial to having any success what so ever in your ad campaign

If this is your first time using an automated bidding strategy algorithm and you’re trying to target auctions accurately rather than forcefully, you should start by feeding the algorithm your CPA and ROAS data from about the last month or so.

It takes the algorithm a couple of weeks to get up to speed so you’ll want to avoid making any changes until the program has ended its initial learning phase.

When attempting to make adjustments to your ad targets, you should work in small increments. For instance, if your ROAS is 10x, don’t wait two weeks and immediately try to jump to a 15 or 20x number, move slowly from 10 to 11, wait a few weeks and then move again. This gives the algorithm time to learn and adjust.

Otherwise, you end up in the same situation as we stated before, the algorithm will likely seldom Automated bidding and result in diminished returns.

Lastly, allow your algorithm to observe other sets of data by setting it to observe other audiences. As we said, you’re teaching the algorithm, so the more data it has access to, the better it will perform.

Set Your Strategies Based on Campaign Type

For ad campaigns that run on a stringent budget, you can set your automated smart bidding algorithm to maximize the number of maximize conversions/maximize conversion value on a particular ad. While these strategies are indeed effective if your ad campaign is strapped for cash, they have some limitations that make them ineffective for certain types of ad campaigns.

For one, setting your automated smart bidding to maximize conversion is like telling it to charge into battle without considering anything but beating the enemy. What this means is that the algorithm will forego any other data other than maximize conversions, such as demographic data, customer preferences, or even automated bidding strategies adjustments.

It will also continue to bid and buy ad space so long as the budget allows until it hits the pre-defined limit.

This type of strategy also doesn’t care about cost per click targets. If you have an ad campaign with these targets set, this strategy will be wholly ineffective.

Just like with target-based strategies, maximize strategies require time to learn the strategies you want them to perform. Automated smart bidding algorithms aren’t designed to make quick and sudden changes and if you try to do so, you’ll end up with a non-functional algorithm that is constantly readjusting.

This rule applies doubly to marketers who are constantly seeking concrete proof of success and every time they don’t achieve it they want to switch and try something new. You’re more likely to achieve success with your algorithm if you allow it the time and space to grow properly. You may even find that a given strategy that you thought was underperforming, may do better than as time goes on.

Success is not guaranteed, but allowing the algorithm to work as it is meant to be better than constantly changing strategies and hoping something sticks.

Final Thoughts

Automated smart bidding algorithms are great for taking a lot of the procedure out of Smart bidding Strategies for ad space and can save you a lot of time and effort in your marketing strategy that would likely be better spent elsewhere.

The problem is, many marketers want instant gratification and maximum results. If you can manage to follow through with the advice we’ve outlined here though, you’ll find that an automated smart bidding algorithm is much more efficient and successful than you ever though.

In addition, many of today’s automated algorithms are strategically built so the house always wins.

Instead of immediately accepted all bid adjustments suggestions, it may be worthwhile to take the time and do it manually.

Remember, Google Ads are strategically designed to make Google money (and now they are using AI for PPC), not necessarily to always perform the best in every situation for every business.

Are you looking for PPC management services? You’ve come to the right place! Get in touch with us today!

Samuel Edwards
|
January 3, 2025
Ultimate Guide to PPC Remarketing: Bring Users Back When They Don’t Convert

Remarking and retargeting are useful components of Google Ads and a crucial part of any PPC marketing campaign, that is if you understand and use it correctly. Before we break down how best to use PPC remarketing campaigns, banner ads to increase the return rates of online advertising customers, we’ll explain exactly what it is, how it works, and ways to use it.

Marketers may know what remarketing campaigns is, but even experts may find they don’t know everything about it. This guide will help to plug those gaps and become the ultimate resource for people using PPC remarketing Campaigns.

What is Remarketing?

Remarketing Campaigns is essentially targeting ads to existing customers based on customer data. The types and variety of ads will differ based on customer preferences, market data, and a number of other factors.

This type of marketing is highly effective at getting existing shoppers to return to a site once they have already visited. It works by showing them things they may be interested in. This can be sales, new products, add-ons to existing products and services, new content on the site, and other types of marketing material or promotions.

The purpose is to increase the rate of repeat customer traffic through highly specific targeted ads marketing.

The one thing to note about remarketing campaigns or strategies is that they rely on existing customer data to perform well. Remarketing compaigns is not a customer acquisition strategy so the distinction should be made. You can’t collect customer preference data on people who aren’t your customers yet right?

So basically, before you even create remarketing campaigns you need customers who are already interested in your site (which means past visitors), and who have at least visited your site before or past visitors). That’s step one, remember it.

How Remarketing Data is Acquired

How Remarketing Data is Acquired, banner ads

The reason customer data is needed for remarketing  Campaign(besides the fact that it targets customers’ interests) is that the primary way that remarketing data is collected is through everyone’s favorite internet snack food, cookies. In this case, we’re talking about specific tracking cookies that are stored on users’ browsers and then used to follow them around the web and show them remarketing ads, ok maybe it’s not that specific but you get a general idea.

This can be done with the click of a button in Google Ads, it’s a button labeled remarketing. It allows you to set the tracking cookie requirements based on several different factors, duration of stay, pages visited, etc.

Every time a customer visits your site, cookies are collected which store a variety of user data that is relevant to your marketing work. Part of that data allows you to target customers with ads so that they will be more likely to visit your site and shop again. This is essentially why it’s called PPC remarketing, you’re performing targeted marketing/targeted ads marketing to existing customers or interested parties, hence you’re remarketing to them.

This doesn’t always mean that you’re targeting people you’ve already converted, but people who may have visited your site and not yet converted. In a sense, you’re marketing to existing customers and potential customers who’ve shown interest enough to visit but haven’t actually made that purchase yet. If you think of it as shopping, they’ve clicked add to cart, but haven’t yet pressed that checkout button. You’re giving them that last little push to come back and checkout with their cart full of goodies (or whatever else it is you’re trying to get them to do).

Remarketing Strategy: How it Works

Now that you know a bit about remarketing Campaign and how the data is gathered as well as what it’s used for, you can begin to formulate a remarketing Campaign strategy to get those customers and potential customers returning and converting, hopefully again and again. To facilitate easier understand of the strategizing process, we’ll break down the process into pieces that’ll be more digestible, even for the marketing novice (we realize some of you reading this may already have a great deal of marketing space, but we like to cover our bases, this is the ultimate guide after all).

Separate Your Website Visitors Into Difference Audiences

Also called segmenting, this basically means dividing your potential remarketing audience into different groups or ad-target types. This should be fairly straightforward and based on the data acquired.

Segmenting your audience ensures you’re not targeting the wrong type of ads to the wrong people. You want your remarketing ad usage to be as highly targeted as possible with remarketing Campaign and dividing up your audience helps to facilitate that.

Deciding What Types of Remarketing Ads to Run

There are numerous types of ads and deciding which type of ads to run for your target audience will be based on the data you have available and what works best for that particular audience.

There are enough ad types to create an entirely separate section, so we’ll break down the ad types and their uses elsewhere. One thing to note about picking your ad types is that Google allows you to create lists based on your ad type preferences for the audience.

Additionally, you can filter data and sort targets based on many factors, this helps you to decide what types of ads may work best. After all, different types of people have different search habits, such as how prone they are to search on mobile, how likely they are to watch video ads, and other things.

Test and Retest Your When Remarketing

As with anything in marketing, before you know what really works, you’ll have to test it first. In the case of PPC retargeting ads, you may have lots of customer data, but that doesn’t mean you can always account for individual taste.

That’s why it’s important to test your marketing efforts and allow the data to coalesce until you’re sure of what is and isn’t working. Like any other marketing strategy, pulling the plug too early on a campaign means wasted efforts, but by the same token, letting a bad campaign run too long is wasted money and effort as well.

Test your methods and figure out what works, what kinda works, and what doesn’t work at all.

Optimization is Key

Like every other ad you’ll ever run, search engine optimization is key. Once you have a good idea of what works, you can begin to optimize for search engines. This is pretty much the same process as regular ads, just more specified to your target audience.

This includes optimizing for conversions too. Sale ads, special features and other types of ads that show customers what they’re missing out on is a great example of ways to optimize conversion when remarketing.

Getting the Audience Together

Before we talk any more about Remarketing Campaigns ad types and getting your specific strategy together, let’s talk about narrowing down and filtering your audience so that you know you’re targeting the right people. No matter the strategy, if you’re targeting the wrong audience, it’s likely wasted effort.

Imagine folks wanting to see a comedy show arriving at a talk on timeshares, you’d instantly lose your audience and nobody would buy a timeshare.

You can honestly target an audience in any number of ways. You can eliminate targets on the same basis as well. But essentially you’ll want to break your groups of targets down into manageable groups.

Beyond the basic demographic targeting options, which serve to narrow down audience gender, age-range, and other factors, there are a number of other things to look out for when trying to decide who to target.

For instance, one strategy is to target customers who hover on particular product pages. You could assume they are looking for a particular style of product or looking to see which one is cheapest or has the fastest delivery, factors such as that.

Knowing these possibilities you can create an audience category and then select ads that will target their interest.

As we said earlier, there is an endless number of ways to target a potential audience. Think about what you’re trying to do, what customers you’re trying to increase, and target according to those metrics.

It’s just as important who you don’t target in some sense. If you already have a segment of your market that regular ads are working for, then you don’t want to waste time and money remarketing to them.

One last tip on audience targeting is to narrow things down as much as possible. Target particular customers for particular URLs and make that a separate list. Say you want an audience to target sneakers, you can select the audience and target the ads to get them to shop specifically on your sneaker product pages.

In many cases, the more precise the targeting, the better.

Google Ads to Set Up Lists and Remarketing Targets

Once you have all of your data, or before if you prefer, all of the setup to create lists of audiences and to target them for tracking and data collection can be done from the admin tab of your Google Ads account.

From the admin tab, you can set audience definitions based on a wide array of factors. This lets you customize your target audience to a great degree and gives you control over data tracking.

You can then create lists of those audiences and name them whatever you choose or even sub-divide them even more so that you can keep track of them even better. You’ll need to agree to some terms and conditions and be an active Google Ads Remarketing user, but once the “paperwork” is complete you’ll have access to create lists and also to determine how long you’d like your tracking cookies to stay stored on a user’s computer. This helps you set the targets for short-term or long-term campaigns or for whatever duration you’d like.

You can even set the frequency at which any given user will be shown your ads. It’s a good idea to set reasonable limits on these as too many ads can turn users off entirely. Remember, the idea is to nudge them into conversion, not scream at them until they convert.

Remarketing Options and How to Use Them

Remarketing Options and How to Use Them

There are a number of remarketing campaigns options that Google Ads allows you to choose from. Rather than just list them for you, we’ll discuss the main ones and ways they can be used to target an audience.

Standard Remarketing

You can think of this as baseline marketing. This feature shows ads to browsers as they search the web or use apps on Google display  network/display ad network. These are the conventional ad type and are best targeted towards the “browsing” type of users. Those people that go from page to page and typically like to look at lots of different things.

Dynamic Remarketing

This type of remarketing shows ads to users of products that they’ve looked at before. This is good for those users that “shop” a lot (perhaps on an ecommerce site) but leave the cart full without checking out with it. This works on window shoppers too, the ones that don’t add to the cart but like to view product pages.

Mobile App Remarketing

This is targeted remarketing optimized for your mobile website visitors or mobile app. As we said at the beginning, all that data allows you to know what users are browsing on and how often. If you know that your audience is frequent mobile browsers, then this option will help you target them.

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

This is just what it sounds like. It targets audiences and shows them search ads as they search Google. This display ads in their search results. This type of marketing works best on those users that just need a subtle reminder of what you sell or do. Those users that are on the doorstep of converting and just need a nudge are good for these ads.

Video Remarketing

Just as it sounds, this shows video ads to users as part of the Google display ad/ads network or for users of Youtube. This is great if you know that users are constantly watching videos. A short impactful ad can grab attention and make people want to traffic your site again and hopefully convert.

Email List Remarketing

The most specific of the marketing types, if you correspond with customers via email, you can upload these to your Google Ads account and it will serve up ads as long as customers are signed into Google services.

Optimize to Improve Success

Now that you know all about the ad types and how to use them, the last thing to worry about is SEO. Just like any other Digital marketing campaign, you’ll want to optimize all the elements of these ads to maximize rank and conversion chance.

We’ll break it down into sections so that you understand the different optimization strategies to make your ad campaigns work best.

Test the Ads

This sounds simple, but you want to make sure your ads will work to drive traffic and convert. This can be a long process as you test and retest to ensure accurate results but this is key to the whole campaign.

Test Your Settings

As we talked about, you can adjust your audience settings and frequency of ads on the fly. You should be routinely checking and testing these to ensure your target market is correct and that you have the ad density correct.

The wrong audience target can mean wasted ads. Too much ad saturation for users can make users less prone to revisit instead of more prone. Finding the balance is tricky but worth putting the time into to get it right.

Monitor Your Bids

This should be self-explanatory but you’re looking at three things in particular. ROI, CTR, and IS. That’s the return on investment, how much money you’re getting for every ad dollar spent, click-through rate, how many times customers follow through and click to your site, and impression share, basically how much recognition your ads are getting. One quick note on impression share, if this is too high, you’re likely upsetting some customers.

Landing Page Optimization

Just as tricky as with standard Digital marketing campaigns, making sure the page is relevant, the text is useful and the page is able to tell potential customers what they want to know about the product or service is key.

You should be used to optimizing your landing pages for keywords and user experience. The process here is the same, make sure the users are getting what they want out of the landing page and continuing on to convert.

A Few Final Tips

There’s no magic formula for remarketing but the general rule of the thumb is to target customers who have the potential to revisit and convert. You’re not mass marketing to everybody who’s ever visited your site. Some of them can’t be converted and others will return on their own.

That’s why we said to make your audiences as specific as possible. This lets you target just the niches of customers that are useful to you and eliminates a lot of the non-contenders.

Our other tip is to stay focused on whatever it is you do. You might call it brand focus. You want to draw in people who’ve visited your site. They likely already know a bit about you, so stay on brand and on point. In this way remarketing and PPC can help to do nothing more than improve your brand online.

Lastly, accept what you can and let go of what you can’t. You won’t win every target audience, not everyone you remarket to will convert and some campaigns may have more success than others. Particularly during sales or the holidays, you may see more from your remarketing than during other periods. Accept it and limit your risk or change your strategy so that you don’t waste ad dollars. Once you find your own rhythm, you’ll likely be winning more conversions and spending less.

Final Thoughts

There you have it, our ultimate guide to PPC remarketing. Hopefully, it’s taught you everything you ever needed to know about run remarketing campaigns’ target selection and everything in between to make your campaign a success & up on Digital marketing.

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