How Does Google Retargeting Work?

Google Retargeting

Allows online businesses to keep their brand’s ads in front of bounced traffic after visitors exit the website

Google retargeting, or remarketing, is a type of advertising that allows online businesses to keep their brand’s ads in front of bounced traffic after visitors exit the website. For most ecommerce stores, an extremely small percentage of web traffic converts on the first visit. 98%+ of first-time visitors to a web store leave without buying anything – many do not even bookmark.

Have you ever searched for something, and then noticed later on that ads for that product or something very similar keep showing up everywhere you go, including search engines? That’s an example of Google retargeting.

This type of advertising goes beyond trying to bring back visitors to your site by keeping ads in front of them. It allows you to create specific ads to display in front of certain types of bouncers. People may leave a website for any number of reasons: maybe the product wasn’t exactly what they were looking for, perhaps they do not have enough money to buy a specific product, etc. For the first type of bounced visitor, you could create an add displaying other similar products you sell. For the second type, you could create a remarketing ad that offers a promotion or discount.

How the Retargeting Tracking Works

You’ll need to create at least one list in order to participate in Google remarketing. This list simply mentions the type of web visitors with whom you would like to re-interact. Add the remarketing tag (or small code snippet) that is provided to you from the Ad Exchange on every page on your website. You can create a different retargeting list for every page if you need to do so. Whenever customers visit a certain page, their cookie information is stored and added to that page’s remarketing list.

The code is unobtrusive and easy to add. Many webmasters place it in the footer of the layout. It works for visitors who come to your site using any browser on either a PC or mobile device.

If you want to target users of your mobile app, however, a different code is required.

Google Dynamic Remarketing Segmentations

When you set up your remarketing campaign with Google, you have various pre-set segmentations for different types of visitors. You can use and/or modify these segmentations, which are for:

– General visitors – Ordinary visitors who do not view any specific product(s).

– Product viewers – Visitors who do view product pages but do not add any products to the shopping cart

– Visitors who abandon shopping cart – These users do add items to the shopping cart but do not complete the order.

– Past buyers – visitors who have been customers in the past

There are also pre-set segmentations for all visitors to your site.

General VS Specific Lists

You might think that highly-detailed user lists are ideal, but that’s not always the case. Experts recommend having a good balance between broad and specific lists. Specific lists allow you to target your message further, but broader lists deliver more scale and volume. Working with good Google retargeting experts will help you determine the best approach for your business needs.

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