Building remarketing lists is a matter of a few settings
The cookies of all your website visitors automatically end up in the all visitors list.
From this list an infinite number of other lists can be created. Each list has certain conditions that the cookie/visitor must meet. For example, you can think of:
- List of cookies that placed an order
- List of cookies that viewed a particular product
- List of cookies that visited the website from the newsletter
- Etc.
You can make lists meet as many conditions as you think are necessary to make the target audience as relevant as possible. And in this case actually lists of visitors that are not that relevant, after all, it is an exclusion. In addition, Ads also offers the possibility of combining these lists. It is important to note that these lists can be excluded by campaign and ad group. Building and excluding remarketing lists costs nothing, it is a matter of a few settings that can save you a lot of money.
Example 1: web shop for game consoles and games
Suppose a visitor buys a PlayStation 4 in your webshop. And let's assume that this visitor has been hesitating between the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 and he is not going to buy both. This visitor leaves his cookie in the list Game Computer Customers. In the Google Ads campaign Game Computer (aimed at consumers who want to buy a game computer), the list Game Computer Customers can be excluded. So your ads in this campaign will no longer be shown to consumers who already bought the PlayStation 4 from you.
So this customer bought a Playstation 4. Chances are he will be buying games in the near future. In your Ads campaign Games there are 3 ad groups. Xbox games, PlayStation games and Nintendo games. So you can exclude this particular customer for 2 of the 3 ad groups, namely Xbox games and Nintendo games. This is simply going to save you unnecessary clicks!
Example 2: requesting a quote for shutters
Someone who wants to have shutters installed wants to compare a number of prices from different shutter installation companies. This person googles the term roller shutter quote, sees your ad, clicks and then requests the quote. Yes ... a desired conversion. She looks at the clock and realizes she doesn't have time to search further because she has to hurry up to get to her Zumba class.
A day later, she performs the same search. Now she clicks on your ad for the second time because she is not really paying attention or simply clicks on the top search result. She recognizes the website and returns to the search results again to click on another provider and request a second quote.
Suppose the cost per click on this search term is €2, that's a waste of money, because it certainly won't yield anything. After all, this person is not going to request the same quote from the same company twice. If a list had been defined as Quote request done, and it had been excluded in the campaign then in this case you could have saved € 2. Or you could have spent this €2 on the next potential customer who has not yet requested a quote.
For many industries, remarketing list exclusion is interesting
Excluding customers in certain campaigns is often a quick win. Travel companies can (temporarily) exclude people who have booked. Count on the fact that these people will often search for terms like: attractions + [their vacation destination] in the coming period, and for searches with an informational intent you obviously don't want to pay!
Also consider:
- Wedding business (buying a wedding dress is something you only do once, right?).
- Telecom providers (subscription you do a maximum of once a year)
- Sports stores (you usually buy soccer shoes/tennis racquet once a season)
Any idea what target audience you want to exclude?
It must be a coincidence if I just cited the example of the industry in which you operate. Hopefully I did get you into a certain thinking mode and you too can see many opportunities to optimize your Google Ads campaigns by excluding target audiences. Remember, we're here to help. Feel free to contact us and join us for coffee to exchange views on this matter. This is completely non-committal.
I wouldn't be an Internet marketer....
If I didn't want to achieve growth. Excluding target audiences initially provides savings and higher ROI. Using remarketing lists to precisely target specific audiences will provide growth. In the game console example, you want to reach precisely someone who ordered the PlayStation 4 from you again when he searches on PlayStation 4 games. The recognition and trust he has in your shop (if it's good) will make him convert sooner in your shop than at the competitor.
Tip!
Remarketing lists based on Google Analytics offer many more options than remarketing lists based on the Google Ads tag. Google Analytics allows you to segment lists based on click behavior, that is, based on all the statistics available in Google Analytics. Some examples of remarketing lists that you cannot create with Google Ads but can with Google Analytics:
- Visitor duration (suppose you want to remarket anyone who visited the website for longer than a certain amount of time).
- Visitors who come to your site via an iPad or iPhone (suppose you sell phone cases).
- Remarketing on all visitors who came to the site thanks to your newsletter.
- Remarketing on only organic visitors or those who came to the site through Facebook.
