Google Remarketing

During our recent meeting with Google, I heard about an interesting Google’s service called Google remarketing.

What is Google Remarketing?

Remarketing is a new beta service offered by Google to qualified Adwords’ clients. The product helps you reach users who have previously visited your website and is used to drive increased conversions on the Content Network using display ads.

You will be able to define groups of users that you want to target, such as shoppers who have abandoned after adding items to the cart. For example, Google Adwords will serve ads to them as they browse other sites on the Content Network after leaving your site. You will be able “re-market” your products to visitors in real time. All you will need to do is install a small amount of JavaScript onto your site to provide tracking and to configure Adwords to target specific users.
Effectiveness of Remarketing Technology

According to Advertise.com, remarketing has been shown to improve ad response up to 400 percent across several Advertise.com clients. According to this SEMPO article, remarketing is the most-under utilized marketing technology.

Here is how the technology works:

- When a user visits your website, a cookie gets dropped in to the user’s computer.
- The cookie tracks where the user left your site (for example, abandoning the shopping cart, just visited the home page and left or left the membership page without signing up)
- When the user (using the same browser) visits other sites that are in Google;s content network, based on which page the user visited or from which page the visitor exited your site, you can display the ads (promoting no shipping fee, a coupon, membership benefit, etc.) to the user in those content sites.
- The user clicks the ads and comes back to your site and converts.
- Based on your sales cycle, you can tell Adwords how many days the ads are to be displayed(1 to 180 days) and the frequency.
- After the user makes a conversion in your site, the display ads will stop showing to the user.

Benefits

Remarketing technology has these inherent benefits:

- Customizes the message based on user’s browsing and purchase history
- Recognizes user intent
- Controls the frequency of views
- Governs daily advertising spend
- Excludes ads from appearing on select domains.


Issues

The two issues we are:

While privacy concerns are always a hurdle for behavioral targeting, Google confirms users can opt out. After you opt out, you will not receive interest-based ads.

Also, since the cookie is set for the browser, if the same user uses a different browser, Google will not get the information stored in the other browser.

Interested?
Since Google remarketing service is still in beta, it is not publicly available. If you want to catch the boat sooner, you need to contact your search marketing agency or your Google rep.