Killer Tips to Make the Most of Google AdWords

Every successful advertiser sets up and manages AdWords campaigns with a checklist.

Just like a recipe, you need key ingredients for to work.

One doesn’t have to spend a great deal of money or over-complicate things. Just keep it simple to begin with, by doing as little as the system allows you, in the beginning. And most of all be patient. If you quit too early you won’t see any benefits.

Let’s see the key ingredients:

1. Customer Demand

You need to start by verifing there is in fact search volume for what you’re offering.

The tool for the job is the Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool, which acts a lot like a thesaurus.

You enter in phrases you think your potential customers are looking for, and Google gives you other similar, relevant phrases.

Keyword Planner tells you how frequently words are searched, how competitive they are in (searches per month), and what the advertising cost for each keyword is likely to be.

Having this info will help you decide which keywords to use in your first campaign.

The following questions will help when deciding whether or not to advertise a particular keyword.

  • Is the keyword searched in Google? (how high is the month search volume)
  • Is it possible that the person searching this keyword will buy my product or service?
  • What is the intent of the keyword?
    • Transactional – ‘Mount Everest Base Camp Trek’
    • Research – ‘Who has climbed Everest’
  • Is the keyword affordable (average Cost per Click), and will it bring return-on-investment (ROI)?

2. Basic Math

The key question is whether you can afford to bid for the keyword.

You will need to calculate your maximum cost per click (Max CPC) and compare your max CPC to the estimated keyword CPC in the Keyword Tool.

This formula will help:

Max CPC = (profit per customer) x (1 – profit margin) x (website conversion rate)

3. Competitor Intelligence

This is important because you can reduce your risk by weighing competitor intelligence, and you can do it by using a tool called KeywordSpy which gathers, organises, and provides access your competitors’ advertising information history.

All you have to do is sign up, and log in after setting up an account at www.KeywordSpy.com and then clicking on the free trial button.

Spyfu.com is another option to use. It will show you the average CRT and also which companies have advertised with a specific keyword the last three months, and also what other keywords have done well.

4. Powerful USP

Your USP, or unique selling proposition, is what makes your business stand out from your competitors and gives your customers a reason to click your ad.

Three important reasons for creating a strong USP are:

  • A strong USP will create more traffic from qualified prospects
  • A strong USP will greatly increase your sales conversion rates
  • A strong USP can abolish comparison shopping

It is important to ensure that your USP isn’t the same as a competitor’s…

Powerful USP

Direct your attention to your strengths, and what you’re better at than your competition.

Price is an effective tool to generate clicks, but ensure that the prices you have listed are the real.

Percentage discounts are also effectibe.

Talk and listen to your customers for feedback on why they use you.

Lastly, examine your competitor’s ads, websites, and marketing materials for inspiration.

5. Irresistible Offering

Your offer should consist of the following 4 components:

  • Valuable

Your product or service should have more intrinsic value than the price.

This basically means that the value your product or service provides, is more significant to the end user than the price they pay.

Value can come in many forms.

  • Convincing

Provide a believable reason why your offer is true – e.g. why are you offering a big discount.

  • Successes:

If you’re ‘award-winning’ let potential customers know!

Using customer review scores from Feefo or Trust Pilot also work well.

  • Call to Action

If you want your customer to phone you, make it simple for them to do so when they land on your site

The more complicated the search around your website, the more you will lose.

A strong call to action should be simple.

6. Effective and Compelling Ads

With AdWords when people click on your ads, you pay.

An advert is an opportunity to introduce your brand/to a new audience and sell your product or service.

An advert needs a few key elements:

Adwords ad Contents

You need to prevent persons from clicking who will not be potential customers, thereby wasting your ad budget.

The result will be more traffic, sales, not as much wasted money on unqualified traffic, and more profits.

Keep in mind that since there isn’t much space (even with ETA), you must be simple and direct when writing.

The components of the text are:

  • The most important component is the headline since it’s what will be read first.
  • Your keyword should be included in the headline of your ad because Google will bold it, and that way it will stand out from other ads. AdWords allows 25 characters for your headline.
  • Description Line 1 and 2. In the two description lines, mention the benefits of your service, state your USP, describe your offer. You have 35 characters for each description line.
  • Display URL. Your domain name shouldn’t just be copied and pasted. Use your Display URL to include your offer, call to action, your USP, anything that will make your ad be noticeable.

7. Killer Landing Pages

The landing page should match the keyword and the ad.  This will continually reassure the customer that they are following a consistent path.

Your headline, is the first thing your prospect will read and must attract the attention, repeat the offer in the ad, and encourage someone to keep on reading.

Your landing page should again be related to the keyword searched and the ad clicked on. Your USP should be included as well as benefits of your product, service, details etc.

Points that should be considered in a nutshell are:

  • Simple design with not many animations, videos or complicated design
  • Strong headline that can be clearly read
  • Don’t use complex terms be simple and clear and use daily language
  • Help the reader understand what you have to say, by using visual aids like bullet points and pictures.

8. Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking is simply a way of assessing sales produced by your AdWords campaign which lets you know which keywords and ads are delivering sales.

This is crucial to effective management of Google AdWords, and your business!

Conversion Tracking

The AdWords conversion tracking code can be found in the AdWords account under ‘Tools and Analysis > Conversions’.

To create a new conversion, just click on the [+ Conversion] button and follow the steps.

Recommendations for tracking offline sales are:

  • Conversion page in your sales process
  • Specific coupon codes in your ads and landing pages
  • Tracking phone numbers in your ads and landing pages

Tools such as Response Tap and Infinity are effective tools for doing this.

9. Successful AdWords Settings

Important settings for success apart from Keyword Match Types and Negative Keywords, which have already been mentioned are:

  • Search vs. Display: requires different sets of keywords, ads, and landing pages. Always set up different campaigns to aim at every network.
  • Device Bids: 34% of small businesses have mobile optimised website. 66% do not have a mobile-friendly website

Search Network only should be selected for your campaign type, that way Google Search Network and not the Display Network is targeted. Now you can enable the ads and start optimising your campaign.

10. Optimization

Once you’ve enabled your campaign your ads are live, but that’s only the start of the battle. Continual optimisation is required for success.

Three main areas to improve your AdWords campaign performance are:

  • Keyword bids – Once you generate clicks and sales, your bids must be modified accordingly.
  • Ad click-through rate (CTR) – Directly affects your quality score, and this dictates what you pay per click. Test different ads, that way you see which type gets the most clicks.
  • Landing page conversion rate. Many tools can help so as to test different landing page versions like Analytics Experiments. It’s easy and free all you have to do is set up a free account. Experiment by testing two different versions of your landing page and measuring which one generates the most conversions.

The above mentioned point steps will guarantee that your money goes into your bank account, instead of funding Google’s empire.

There is no doubt that Google AdWords works for all those involved.

Optimise Your Landing Pages

It’s possible to spend a lot of money and time on their AdWords campaign.

Unless the page you’re sending people to is optimised for your specific conversions, you’re throwing it away.

Top AdWords Landing Page Optimisation Recommendations:

  • Match AdWords headline to the landing page headline
  • Make sure that the landing page’s CTA stands out from the remaining page so people know how and where to engage
  • Landing page should be simple and to the point
  • Make sure the selling point (also called USP) in your Google AdWords campaign is the same as your landing page

Test Ad Variations

It is of crucial importance to test a range of possible ad variations, to see which elements deliver the best results.

The aim is to find the optimum performance from all your ads, by understanding which resonate with your customers, and deliver the best results.

There are those that find it worthwhile to test more often, but we find six weeks seems to give a defined set of results.

Variables to test:

  • Headline
  • Display URL (short vs long)
  • Call-to-action copy
  • Ad extensions
  • Device targeting
  • Time-of-day budget increases

Talk To Us

Whilst Google AdWords PPC management requires a hands-on approach, the best approach is to talk to the experts.

Advice tailored to your website, and your resources is crucial to achieving the best possible ROI from Google AdWords.

Get in touch with us today for a FREE, no-obligation PPC Audit.

 

Why Paid Advertising is Key to Growing Your Business

In today’s digitally-connected world, we have a wide variety of mediums and methods to reach our customers.

It can be hard to choose the right marketing strategy or medium as the plethora of options available often lead to a state of analysis paralysis where a person is unable to make a decision.

Paid advertising is one of the most effective ways of marketing your business and offers some significant advantages over other marketing methods.

In this article, we will discuss how travel companies can use a range of paid advertising mediums for growing their business.

Benefits of Paid Advertising

Paid advertising has several advantages over other marketing methods.

SEO, social media marketing and blogging are good options for promoting a business, but they require a significant amount of time and effort.

In the case of most of these options, you will have to wait several months to see results.

Paid advertising, on the other hand, can deliver instant results, and you can start seeing the benefits of a paid advertising campaign within a few hours of launching.

The immediate visibility of performance allows you to test and optimise the campaigns to ensure the optimum performance.

Optimising performing is key to ensuring that campaign deliver return on your investment.

Market at the Right Time

The travel industry is quite seasonal as people tend to travel during specific times in a year.

You can decide the optimum time for starting your paid advertising campaign and launch it to coincide with the time when search demand is highest for the tour packages or destinations offered by you.

According to research conducted by Bing Ads, search volume for family holiday ideas peaks in April, whereas search volume for Regional Parks, Gardens, and Theme Parks, peaks in June. Search volume for cruises peaks in January.

These stats show that people tend to search for holiday ideas related to the type of vacation they want during specific months.

Paid advertising tools allow you to market to the demographic of your choice during the months when there is demand for your tour packages.

Better Analytics

Most paid advertising channels such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or Bing allow you to monitor the performance of your ads.

Advertising platforms have very sophisticated inbuilt analytics tool which would enable you to keep a close eye on how your ads are performing.

Paid advertising platforms allow you to measure the ROI of each pound spent on an ad campaign. This is what separates them from other marketing tactics such as blogging or SEO.

With paid advertising channels, you can track each visitor who comes to your site by clicking on an ad and can also calculate how many of these visitors end up buying something from your website.

Paid advertising offers a seamless way to track the conversions of visitors into buyers.

Laser-targeted Ads

Paid advertising platforms such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook Ads offer advanced targeting options allowing you to target people based on demography, geography, IP address, interests, age group etc.

As an example, according to research conducted by Bing, women account for 68% of searches and 69% of clicks related to family holiday planning.

Whilst, it’s clear that people in the age group 35-49 account for 41% of family travel searches, while those in the 50-64 age group account for 31% of searches, and those in 25 to 34 age group account for 16% of searches.

Bing also identifies that women account for 59% of all travel related searches and are also responsible for 62% of clicks.

This makes the women the most important demographic for family holiday ads as they are most often the ones making the decisions related to holiday planning.

You can easily target women specifically with paid advertising tools, and even include demographic and age-specific ads to test performance.

You control the whole process

You can start and stop paid ad campaigns whenever you want and have the option to pause your paid ads if needed.

Other marketing methods don’t offer this luxury as you don’t have much control over SEO or other similar methods.

Types of Paid Advertising Options

There are several paid ad networks available to travel businesses.

You may already familiar with some of the major networks such as Google Ads, or Facebook.

In addition, there are a lot of smaller ad networks which allow you to show your ads to your target consumers.

Google Ads

Google Ads, which was previously known as Google AdWords, is the flagship product of Google responsible for almost 95% of its revenues.

Google dominates the search industry with more than 80%+ market share in the US, UK, Canada, and has more than 90% market share in Germany, France, and Australia.

Google Ads allows you to show your ads whenever a user searches for a keyword which you are targeting. You can also show ads on Google Display Network, which includes millions of sites which have partnered with Google via their AdSense program.

You can also display your ads on other Google properties such as YouTube, Gmail, and Google Finance via Google Ads.

Depending on the type of advertisement, you may be able to include banners, images along with the text, although ads displayed on search network usually only allow text-based ads.

Another advantage of Google Ads is the fact that it can be easily integrated with another popular Google app, i.e. Google Analytics. By combining your Google Ad campaign with your Google Analytics account, you will be able to monitor the success of your ads in real time.

Google Ads offers the most cutting edge advertising tools and has some exciting features such as smart display campaigns which use the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate bidding, targeting, and ad creation. You can also use the re-marketing feature to show ads to users who have previously visited your website.

Bing Ads

Bing is the second most popular search engine after Google. Bing Ads has a long-established partnership with Yahoo allowing users to display ads on Yahoo and Bing using a single Bing Ads campaign.

As Bing is not the leading search engine, many marketers overlook the fact that it has some unique advantages over other ad networks.

Bing and Yahoo combined account for almost 10% of market share in several countries and in some countries such as Japan their share is around 30%. Bing Ads offers better CTR and lower CPC rates as compared to Google Ads. There is also less competition because several marketers don’t run ad campaigns using Bing Ads.

As you can see in the above image, the average CPC for travel is $0.65 for Bing Ads as compared to $0.90 for Google Ads. This means a saving of almost 30% and makes running an ad campaign on Bing Ads more economical as compared to Google Ads.

Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads is another advertising platform which offers some unique advantages over other paid advertising mediums.

Facebook is one of the few advertising platforms out there which has come out with some dedicated options for travel industry specifically.

Facebook allows you to run dynamic Facebook ads which are uniquely suited to travel businesses. You can reach users across Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Audience Network who are likely to make a trip.

Dynamic ads allow you to add location, pricing, and availability of trips or tour packages and then these ads are shown to interested users across multiple devices.

Facebook also offers advanced targeting options allowing you to target users based on their location, age, interests, hobbies, gender and language.

You also have the option of adding images and videos to your ads. Travel companies are primarily selling experiences to people, and visual ads perform better for travel businesses, which makes Facebook the ideal paid advertising platform for any travel business.

It also has a re-targeting option, which is like re-marketing offered by Google Ads, which allows you to show your ads to people who have already visited your website.

Instagram Ads

Instagram has changed travel to the extent that people in the travel industry nowadays talk about ‘Instagram Effect’.

Many users decide to visit a location based on the instagram-ability of the place or by considering how photos of their trip may look on their Instagram feed.

Due to its visual nature, Instagram is the perfect social media network for travel businesses.

Instagram stories have also helped people share their experiences with their followers.

Travel businesses can run ads on Instagram via Facebook Ads and need to have a Facebook Page for their business to show their ads on Instagram.

Instagram offers a wide choice of Stories Ads, Photos Ads, Video Ads, Carousel Ads, and Collection Ads.

You can also promote your Instagram posts from within the app. Instagram allows you to target users based on their location, interests, demographics, behaviours, custom audiences and has an automated targeting feature.

Banner Ads

You can also place your banner ads on individual websites focused on travel as several websites allow placement of ads in return for a fixed monthly fee.

The fee which you pay for such an advertisement may differ from site to site and is mainly dependent on the popularity of the website, the number of monthly visitors and similar factors.

There are dedicated ad exchange networks out there who play the role of matchmaker and help you in finding sites for placing your ads.

Summary

Paid advertising offers several benefits over other marketing channels and is the fastest way to get new visitors and customers.

Most paid advertising platforms also have inbuilt analytical tools allowing you to measure the ROI of the money spent by you.

You must use paid advertising alongside other marketing methods to get the maximum benefit.

A good marketing strategy uses a holistic approach which combines paid advertising with SEO, Social Media, and Email Marketing to get the best results.

10 Frequently Asked Questions About PPC in 2020

PPC or pay per click advertising is one of the best ways to generate targeted traffic in a short amount of time.

As the name itself suggests, it’s a paid form of advertising and has been around for almost two decades now.

Many webmasters and marketers have questions regarding PPC. Due to the complexity involved sometimes, even marketing veterans have difficulty in understanding all the aspects of PPC, and this often leads to confusion and uncertainty about the suitability of PPC.

In this article, we will discuss 10 most common FAQs about PPC and will do our best to answer these questions.

So, continue reading to find answers to some of the most common questions about PPC.

What is PPC Marketing?

PPC marketing or pay per click marketing refers to the practice of using ads to attract traffic to a website or a specific webpage.

In this marketing model, a client usually bids for keywords related to his niche or business within an advertising platform.

The advertising platform tries to match the advertiser with a relevant audience who are searching for information associated with the same keyword.

Once a person searches for the keywords selected by the advertiser, he will be automatically shown the ads written by the advertiser along with the search query results.

The advertiser, in this case, will only be charged if the person clicks on one of the ads and visits his website or webpage.

So, this results in a win-win situation for all the parties involved as the advertiser gets targeted traffic for his website, and the searcher can find the product/service related to his search query easily by clicking on the ad for the specific product/service.

Which sites offer PPC Advertising?

There are primarily two sites which offer PPC advertising, Google AdWords which is now known as Google Ads, and Microsoft Bing Ads.

There are numerous other sites and ad networks which offer PPC advertising, but they account for less than 10% of market share as these two sites are responsible for almost 90% of the PPC advertising market.

Where do my PPC Ads appear?

Google Ads allows you to show your PPC on Google search results and other partner sites which participate in Google ads via their AdSense program for publishers.

Bing Ads, on the other hand, allows advertisers to show their PPC ads next to the search results on Bing search engine, Yahoo and MSN sites and other web properties owned by Yahoo and Microsoft.

Yahoo used to have its ad platform a few years ago but abandoned it in favour of a partnership with Microsoft which allowed Yahoo to cooperate closely with Bing.

Travel websites are able to specifically target travel websites as a whole, or identify the specific websites they wish to appear on.

Who will see my PPC Ads?

This question is often the most asked one by advertisers who are perpetually worried about the audience they will get with PPC ads.

To answer this question, we will need to understand the difference between search and display advertising.

Both search advertising and display advertising are part of PPC marketing and are a bit different from each other in some areas, whereas they also share some fundamental similarities.

Search advertising PPC ads are shown to users who are searching for something using a search engine.

They are the ads which you see above the organic results on search engine results pages or SERPs.

You can see some sample search ads in the image above.

Google shows several ads from dentists when we type a dentist in London.

It’s quite easy to separate search ads from the search results, as the ads usually have a small green button before the display URL which clearly states the word “AD”.

So, if you choose the search ads option while creating your PPC campaign, then your ads will be shown to people who search for the specified keywords.

Display advertising refers to other ads which are shown on countless websites, blogs, and landing pages which participate in Google AdSense or any other ad publishing program such as Taboola, Outbrain etc.

The above image features a display ad which is shown in the middle of a blog post.

You can find other numerous examples of display ads on the sites which you regularly visit as these are some of the most common means of monetising websites which are used by millions of websites in the world.

If you’ve followed closely, then hopefully you’d have got an answer to the question about who will see your PPC ads. In the case of search ads, your ad will only be shown to the people who have searched for the keywords or phrases specified by you.

Search ads are highly targeted as only users with interest in the product/service offered by you will see your ad.

Display ads, on the other hand, are not as focused and may be shown to anyone.

They have their uses as search ads may be best for someone who is looking for new customers, but display ads outperform search ads if you are looking for branding or want to put your brand name in front of an audience.

Essential components of a PPC Ad

A search PPC ad usually consists of the following elements:

  • Headline
  • Description
  • Display URL
  • Destination URL

Google AdWords has predefined character limits in place for each of these components, and you must keep the character limits in mind when creating a PPC ad.

It’s also important to understand the difference between display URL, and destination URL. Display URL is the URL which a searcher will see and is often different from the destination URL.

It’s important to remember this distinction as destination URLs lead to specific landing pages and tend to have more characters than display URLs.

You will also need to keep in mind the character limits for each of these components. Display ads tend to have images along with text and most often are clickable.

There are specific ad format guidelines for all types of ads offered by Google AdWords. Display ads allow you to include animated images or videos along with the text and give you the choice of several ad units with different dimensions.

Due to the inherent complexity, choosing an ad format for display ads is entirely different than a text ad as the requirements will vary and it ultimately depends upon you as you have several options to choose from.

What targeting options I will have for my PPC Ads?

PPC ads allow you to choose the people who will see your ad based on various metrics.

You can target users based on their geographic location, keywords, demographics, affinity, remarketing, and topics.

It’s worthwhile to note here that in terms of targeting there is no better option than PPC ads as they are highly targeted ads allowing you complete control over the audience who will see your ads.

Why must I use PPC Advertising over other Marketing Methods?

PPC ads are among the most effective method of marketing and easily outperform other marketing methods such as SEO, or content marketing.

Other marketing methods take much longer and often there is no way to measure the results.

PPC ads, on the other hand, deliver quick results, and you can measure your success using several key metrics throughout a PPC campaign.

You have access to campaign statistics, which allow you to see how your ads are performing.

How does Google AdWords work?

Google AdWords allows you to show your ads to searchers who are looking for something using specific keywords in Google’s search bar.

If a person, for example, is looking for a dentist in London and types “Dentist in London”, then he will see the following image.

The first few results are the PPC ads which are part of PPC campaigns run by various advertisers who are targeting users who search for the phrase “dentist in London”.

After this section, you can see some organic listing which also shows the location of dentists on a map, and below this, you will find organic listings.

You can also show ads to users who visit sites which are part of Google Display Network through Google AdWords. You need to run a display ad campaign as opposed to a search ad campaign to show your ads on GDN.

These ads are the ones which you come across on various sites and blogs and are most commonly known as banner ads or native ads.

Why is the CTR rate of Facebook ads lower than Google AdWords?

Facebook Ads may appear quite like Google AdWords.

But these are fundamentally quite different advertising platforms. Google AdWords has an average CTR rate of 3.17% for search ads, and 0.46% for display ads.

Facebook, on the other hand, has a much lower CTR rate of around 0.90%. This is because Facebook is primarily a social media platform where people don’t want to be bothered with ads, whereas the same users want to see relevant ads when they are searching for something using a search engine.

Targeting options are also responsible for lower CTR of Facebook ads as despite adding some potent targeting options, Facebook still lags AdWords in terms of targeting and reach.

How much will a PPC Ad Campaign Cost?

There is no specific figure when it comes to the cost of a PPC campaign as you have the freedom to choose your budget and PPC ad platforms also allow you to choose your bid for each keyword, along with a daily budget of an ad group or a PPC campaign.

The cost of a PPC ad campaign depends upon the bid and quality score of an ad.

If you have a high-quality score, then you may be able to get a spot on SERPs with a lower bid, but if you have a low-quality score, then you will need to bid higher, and this will increase the cost of your PPC campaign.

Some industries have high competition, and this leads to very high bids as there are keywords which will cost you $50 or more for a single click. Although, in most cases, you can get a decent amount of traffic for a bid of less than $1 per click.

So, the cost of a PPC ad campaign will pretty much depend on several factors which may vary from one advertiser to another.

What is Quality Score?

To run a successful PPC campaign, you will need a good understanding of quality score as this single metric is highly important for any PPC campaign.

Quality score is used by both the Google AdWords, and Bing Ads for measuring the quality and relevancy of PPC ads.

It’s well known that the primary goal of search engines is to show relevant results on their SERPs, and the search engines always try to deliver the best result for a user’s search query. Few people understand that the search engines apply this metric to PPC ads also.

Search engines assess the quality of ads based on the ad itself, keywords, landing page to see how relevant an ad is to a searcher’s query.

Your quality score depends on several factors such as:

  • Relevance of your ad text to the search query
  • Click-through rate of your ads
  • Relevance of keywords to ad group
  • Landing page quality and relevance
  • Historical performance of your AdWords account and past ad campaigns

As you can see in the above list, relevancy is the deciding factor and plays the most important role in calculation of quality score.

If you have a high quality score, then Google will assign you a higher ad rankings among all the ads displayed on SERP for the specific keyword and this will also lead to lower bidding costs.

Learn more about PPC for Travel Businesses with our ultimate guide

AdWords PPC Re-marketing – What is it? Does it work?

Re-marketing (also known as re-targeting) is perhaps the most powerful feature of Google AdWords which has the power to boost your conversions dramatically.

Although, due to its complexity, not many users know how to use it, although almost all marketers are aware of it or have heard about it.

In this article, we will discuss AdWords re-marketing in detail and explain how it works.

We assume that our readers have the basic understanding of pay per click advertising or PPC and due to this there is no need to dwell on what is Google AdWords or how it works.

If not, have a read of our guide to Google AdWords management for travel companies.

What is AdWords Re-marketing?

Re-marketing allows you to show your ads to users who have already visited your website or landing page in the past.

Perhaps you have noticed that often you visit a product page and leave it without buying the product.

Soon you start to see ads about that product while watching YouTube videos, or browsing an unrelated blog post.

This happens due to re-marketing as the product page which you visited had a remarketing google tag installed on it which remembers your IP address through browser cookies. And once you leave the website, google remarketing ads will follow you whenever you visit a site which is displaying ads from Google.

With AdWords re-marketing you can not only serve your past website visitors but can also reach users who may have interacted with your YouTube Videos or channel, your mobile apps, and can also target your email subscribers.

Re-marketing itself can be divided into following further categories:

  • Standard Re-marketing

This allows you to show your ads to people who have visited your website when they are browsing websites and apps on the Google Display Network.

These ads are effective for brand-awareness, and make the business appear larger than it may be (due to the perception of advertising reach).

  • Dynamic Re-marketing

This is perhaps the most powerful type of re-marketing as it allows you to re-market to your past visitors in several ways.

With dynamic re-marketing you can show your ads to visitors when they are visiting similar sites.

For example, if you sell golf clubs, then with dynamic re-marketing you can show your ads to a visitor when he is visiting a popular golf site.

A salient feature if dynamic re-marketing is the threshold and time frame features which allow you to show your ads to users who have visited products higher than a threshold on your site or have performed an action within a stipulated time frame.

For example, you can decide to show your ads to visitors who browsed products with a value of more than £100 on your site or show the ad to a user who added some items to shopping cart on your site but didn’t proceed to checkout within last 7 days.

  • Re-marketing for Search Ads

With this you can show your ads next to search results to a person who visited your site.

  • Video Re-marketing

Video re-marketing allows you to show ads to users who have interacted with your YouTube channel or videos.

  • Email List Re-marketing

Google AdWords allows you to add emails of people who have subscribed to your mailing list and with email list re-marketing you can show your ads to these users.

They will see the ad if they are logged into their Gmail, Google Search, or YouTube account.

How it Works?

AdWords Re-marketing is based on the simple concept of showing your ads to your past visitors or customers.

It’s easy to convert a visitor into a buyer if he has visited your site in the past or has shown interest in your products or services.

Very few buyers end up purchasing a product or service when they visit a website for the first time. Indeed, first time visitor conversion rates are in the range of 1-2% according to most studies.

Customers tend to pay more attention to a brand when they see it again and again and this has been proved in several studies and experiments.

Most marketers believe a person must see your brand on an average 7 times before they will buy a product from you.

Others dispute this figure and say that a customer needs to see or interact your brand at least 10 or 12 times to buy anything from you.

Regardless, it’s proven beyond doubt that your product must be in front of your customers several times to convince them.

In marketing terminology each unique interaction with your brand is known as a touch point and marketers have been using this concept to their advantage for a long time.

So, each time a past visitor of your site sees your AdWords re-marketing ad, he is essentially interacting with a marketing touch point set up by you which will remind him again of your product and may convince him to revisit your site to buy the product in question.

How to set up a Google AdWords Remarketing Campaign?

Setting up an AdWords re-marketing campaign is not a difficult task and anyone who has experience of using AdWords can easily set up a re-marketing campaign.

Although like anything else in life, re-marketing also has its own learning curve and you must be ready to spend the time required in learning various features of re-marketing if you are serious about it.

Even before starting your re-marketing campaign, you will need to add Google’s re-marketing tag to your website, which is essentially a code snippet much like other snippets used by different analytics software.

This re-marketing tag will allow google to place cookies on your visitor’s browsers and will allow AdWords to track these visitors when they browse other websites.

Here are some simple steps to help you in setting up a re-marketing campaign:

Step 1

The first thing which you need to do for setting up a re-marketing campaign is set up AdWords tag on your website.

Login to your AdWords account and click on the tools option at the top right corner. After this you will need to click on the “Audience Manager” button, which is located under the shared library option as shown in the image below.

Now, click on the “Audience Sources” button on the left-hand menu:

You will be able to see various tag options which you can use as AdWords allow you to use a Google AdWords or Google Analytics tag for running your remarketing campaign.

But for the sake of simplicity we assume that you want to use an AdWords tag. So, click on the “Set Up Tag” button as shown in the image below:

During the tag setup process, you have the option to customize the data collected from visitors based on your industry.

You can also choose the standard data by clicking the first option listed here.

Although, if you are interested in running personalized ads, then you must go for the second option as shown in the image below:

Just click continue and you will be able to see the AdWords tag generated according to the data collection option selected by you.

It will be similar to the tag shown in this image:

Now, all you need to do is to add this code to your site and you are ready to launch your re-marketing campaign.

Step 2

After installing the tag properly on your site, you are ready for setting up your re-marketing campaign.

Before proceeding to this step, you must make sure that the tag is working properly on each page of your site and you can use Google Tag Assistant for verifying your AdWords Tag.

Now go back to your AdWords interface and once again click on the tool button on top-right menu.

You’ll again need to click on the Audience Manager button as shown in the image below:

Now click on the “Audience List” Option and you will see a large blue button as shown in this image:

Click on it and you’ll see various options such as Website Visitors, App Users, YouTube Users, and Customer List like in this image:

Select Website Visitors option and now you will see the following screen:

When you click on the list member section, you will see the following drop-down menu:

As you can see now you can specify the criteria for your re-marketing campaign and can choose your intended audience.

Here you can select visitors of a page, visitors of a page who also visited another page, visitors of a page who did not visit another page, visitors of a page during specific dates, and visitors of a page with specific tags.

You can target visitors who arrived on your site during holiday season by using the “visitors of a page during specific dates” option as shown in the below image:

You will also have to choose the membership duration for your list once you’ve chosen the re-marketing parameters.

Membership duration basically means the number of days for which someone will stay on your re-marketing list after interacting your site.

You can choose any duration up to 540 days. It’s set at 30 days by default, but you must choose a higher figure of around 60 days or 90 days as some of your past visitors may not convert within 30 days.

After creating your re-marketing list, you can create new re-marketing ads and ad campaigns and set up the budgets for them.

Setting up a re-marketing ad campaign is easy as it’s similar to the normal ad campaigns in most aspects.

Just you need to select the type of ad campaign such as search campaign, display network, shopping, video, or app a shown below:

After selecting your campaign type such as Display Network, select the objective from the drop-down menu as shown in this image:

Now you can choose the re-marketing list which we earlier on created under the “Audiences” section and start creating ads for your brand-new re-marketing campaign.

While re-marketing on Google Display Network, you can create display ads incorporating text, images, videos, and other rich media.

You can easily create your own re-marketing campaign by following the above-mentioned steps.

You can also set up re-marketing campaigns for YouTube videos, and Apps in a similar manner, although covering them is not within the scope of this article.

Don’t forget to use the frequency cap option available in AdWords as you need to take care that a customer doesn’t sees your ad hundreds of times in a day as it will kill your CTR.

Ideally, you must set a limit of 3-4 impressions per day for image ads and 8-10 impressions per day for text ads to ensure that your target customers don’t feel that you are stalking them online.

How Effective is AdWords Re-marketing?

AdWords re-marketing requires a significant investment of time, funds and energy as running a re-marketing campaign is not an easy task due to the huge amount of work involved.

Many marketers often have doubts in their mind about the effectiveness of re-marketing and “Does it really Works?” is perhaps the oft-asked question about re-marketing.

So, now it’s time to consider some statistics and decide whether re-marketing is worth the effort or not.

According to data from Wordstream, which is one of the leading providers of PPC software, re-marketing can increase your click through rates or conversions by 2 to 3 times as compared to simple AdWords campaigns without re-marketing.

Re-marketing is also considered one of the best tools in a marketer’s arsenal for building his brand as customers develop affinity for any brand which they see on a regular basis and this will make your brand easily identifiable to your target audience.

Another advantage of re-marketing is quite low cost per clicks as compared to general ad campaigns.

Wordstream prepared the following table from their customers’ data:

As you can see the costs are quite low as some competitive keywords can cost up to $50 per click or more for AdWords Advertising.

So re-marketing CPC of a few cents or 2-3 dollars is quite cheap from the perspective of ROI.

This coupled with the fact that re-marketing will increase your revenues and sales, means that you don’t need a huge budget for your re-marketing campaigns as in most cases advertisers are able to earn much more through sales than what they have invested in their re-marketing campaigns.

With re-marketing, you are targeting leads which have been warmed up by their previous interactions with your brand and there is low chance of these leads going cold as chances are they are still willing to buy from you.

You can give your business a great chance to prosper by taking advantage of re-marketing as it’s a unique feature which if used correctly, can become your best marketing tool.

Success of your re-marketing campaign will also depend on several other important elements such as the quality of your website and landing pages, your sales funnel, nature of your business, your sales cycle, conversion goals such as increasing brand exposure vs generating qualified leads vs increasing sales, your budget and how much resources you are willing to commit to the process of creating detailed re-marketing lists as these lists are essential for any successful re-marketing campaign.

But if you can create and run a successful re-marketing campaign, then chances of your success will multiply manifold as even an average re-marketing campaign can increase your conversion rates dramatically.

Conclusion

AdWords re-marketing is a unique and wonderful method of marketing which is a must have for any modern marketer today.

It offers the best possible way to reach your past visitors who may still be looking to buy that product which you have.

Re-marketing allows you to increase your conversion rates, build a brand, target your ideal audience, and achieve a better ROI on your advertising spend at the same time.

If you are a retail business then, it’s especially beneficial for you as research has shown that people tend to come back to sites to complete the checkout process if they have abandoned their cart earlier on, when they are shown the ads related to the product which they were initially planing to buy.

It also gives you a way to target a whole range of target audiences as you can customize your ads for website visitors, YouTube visitors, mobile apps and emailing lists.

Few other marketing methods offer the depth and power of re-marketing and even few can claim to deliver laser targeted traffic with a high chance of conversion at such affordable rates.

You can easily design your own re-marketing campaign by following the steps in this article or get in touch with us if you need help as we are one of the leading providers of PPC Management services and also provide re-marketing services as part of our package.

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