What if we told you that approximately 19 out of every 20 people who visit your website leave without completing the action you wanted them to (be it a newsletter subscription, filling in a form or making a purchase)? Doesn’t sound too uplifting, does it? But it makes the concept of remarketing all the more exciting!

Remarketing has an astoundingly simple premise to it, revolving around the idea that the more times your potential customers see your marketing and sales messages, the more likely they are to finally act upon them. We’re sure that you experienced it yourself many times. For example, when an ad for the product you saw a few days before on its official page popped up seemingly out of the blue while you browsed the web. Most likely, the owner of the page used a special remarketing tag (like the one provided by Google which we’re going to tell you more about later), which caused your cookie ID to be added to their remarketing list.

How can remarketing be of use for your eCommerce business?

Still not convinced that remarketing can be useful? Consider these scenarios:

• Your online shop sells winter clothes and equipment. It’s undeniably true that relatively few people shop for such products in June or July. But there are plenty of those who research their available options months before they plan to actually buy something. In the process, they may find your website. Without remarketing, they may leave immediately and forget. With remarketing, you can talk to them and show them your ads periodically and maximize the likelihood of closing a sale. Remarketing is perfect to target customers interested in seasonal products all year round.
• Your shop sells food items for everyday use, such as milk or sugar. People buy them every day, often in bulk numbers. The internet provides many shopping options. Since the buying process is recurring, wouldn’t it be great if you could keep your customers close to you? With remarketing you can show your content to the people who already made a purchase at your store. Make them come for more.
• This time, you’re in the business of electronics. You noticed that your turntables sell really well. And it’s hard to deny that turntables go hand in hand with a good pair of speakers. How do you like the idea of displaying ads for speakers to those who purchased or looked at turntables in your store. This sort of cross-selling can be done easily with remarketing.
• And what about the cart abandonment rate? As we already mentioned, its negative influences can be countered with smart remarketing. All you need to do is reach out to those who abandoned your cart. You can do that with ads or via the email channel if they left their email address behind.

Remember that your average Joe is not aware of the fact that marketing specialists use these sorts of strategies. As a result, if they see your ads on multiple occasions, they may perceive your company as particularly big and far-reaching, which will greatly increase their trust in your company. That way, remarketing also proves useful for branding purposes.

Remarketing with Google

There are many ways to go about remarketing. Most major advertisers such as Facebook, Twitter, Bing, and of course Google, provide their own solutions. We’re going to go with the last option to show you the basics of how the process works.

Prepare your website

In order to create a remarketing list for use in the Google advertising platform, you need to add a certain piece of JavaScript code at the bottom (before the closing HTML tag) of each page you want to track. Most of the time, you want to track all of them. When you use WordPress or another popular CMS platform, you can usually use an extension to add the piece without having to meddle with the source of your website. To find the remarketing code, log in to your Adwords account and navigate to the “Campaigns” tab. Under the “Remarketing Tag” option, click “Tag details” and then “Setup.” You should see something like this:

That’s your code. Alternatively, if you use Google Analytics tracking on your website, you don’t have to go through this process. The GA code will do for your remarketing purposes as well.

Link your Adwords and Analytics accounts

The process of linking your Google Adwords and Google Analytics accounts is easy and provides many benefits aside of the remarketing feature. The setup allows you to track the actions of the visitors of your website who click your Adwords ads. It’s an easy way to find out whether your PPC Google campaign delivers the goods.

Back to remarketing, the reason why linking your Adwords and Analytics accounts is necessary is that it is in Analytics where you create and manage your remarketing lists. Adwords, on the other hand, is where you can run your remarketing-based campaign.

The process is very easy. Just click the “Gear” icon in your Adwords accont (see the image below) and choose “Linked accounts.” Next, pick the Google Analytics section and choose which Analytics property should be linked.

Create remarketing audiences in Google Analytics

Now you can create your remarketing campaign. Would you like to…

You can do all of that and more! Choose the property of your Google Analytics you would like to work with, pick “Audience Definitions,” and then “Audiences.” You should see something like this:

Play with the options to create just the right kind of setup for your needs. Say, if you want to create a list just for people who visit a specific product category, use the “exactly matches” option and type in the name of your web directory that contains the product category of choice.

Import your audience and run an Adwords campaign

Depending on how narrow your remarketing list is and how much traffic your website enjoys, the time to populate your list with leads may vary. Once it’s big enough, you can use it to target your Adwords ads. Just remember that in order for your ads to show up in the Google Display Networks (ads on various sites partnered with Google), you need to have at least 100 leads. With the search ads, the minimum is 1000.

Remarketing allows you to target your visitors in a way that generic campaigns can’t, taking advantage of the purchase decision process that sometimes may take quite a lot of time and varies for each customer. Once you understand how your customers make decisions, then you can use the full power of remarketing to boost your sales and brand.