What is Remarketing & How is it Beneficial? | Storm Internet

Remarketing is the process of advertising to previous website visitors. Many people will visit your website, browse through various content and then leave without taking any sort of action. Does that mean those individuals are not interested in your business? In most cases, no. It’s very common that a buyer will visit your website multiple times before making a purchase, particularly for high value items or services. Remarketing simply helps remind that visitor to come back and make a purchase, or to interact in some other way.

Google Remarketing

The most common form of remarketing is through Google. Over 1.17 billion people use Google every month, they are the giants when it comes to search engines, but we’re sure you already knew that! It makes sense then to utilise Google for remarketing purposes. This can be done through the Google Adwords platform.

Google will provide you with a remarketing tag which will place a cookie on your website. When someone visits your website, their cookie ID will be added to a remarketing list in Google Adwords. You can also create different lists for different products, so you can later target your ad campaigns more specifically. Before you can start advertising to each list, Adwords require a minimum of 100 cookie ID’s.

The settings for each cookie are up to you. You can set a specific timeframe, i.e 30 days, to determine how long each cookie ID will remain on your list. A longer cookie will give you a larger list, but visitors from previous months might no longer be interested in your product. It all depends on the nature of your business, but typically anywhere between 30-90 days is the norm.

When you set-up a campaign, your remarketing banners/text links, will show up on websites that allow Google ads. It’s likely that you will have seen these ad types before, there are millions of websites that have activated Google Adsense.

Facebook Remarketing

Facebook also offer a unique way to capture visitors to your website and remarket to them when they’re spending time on Facebook. A remarketing tag is added in a similar way to Google Adwords, you can create one in your Facebook ad manager. This remarketing list is then matched to a Facebook account and collected as a custom audience. Once you have a sizable list, you can create a Facebook ad targeted specifically at this. Remarketing through social media can be an effective method to grow your social community, as well as driving people back to your website to make a purchase.

Remarketing ads need some form of enticement to bring people back to your site. You might want to consider a special offer exclusively for these campaigns. Successful remarketing also relies on good quality website traffic. So, before you set-up any kind of remarketing campaign, check the quality of your previous visitors, by looking at things like the bounce rate and average session time in Google Analytics. If your traffic is poor, your visitors are not the right target audience and therefore remarketing to them would be ineffective.