PPC Remarketing Setup

Tools You’ll Need

The only thing you’ll need for this process is your Google Adwords account. If however you prefer using Adwords Editor the thought process remains basically the same.

Display Remarketing

Name your new campaign, I would recommend something along the lines of Remarketing – Display, or something that has remarketing in it. That way you can tell it apart from the other campaigns in your account. You’ll then need to select the “Remarketing” option for the campaign type. Set a daily budget and  then select the “Save and continue” button. If you have a Google Merchant Center account linked to your Adwords account you’ll need to make sure the “Enable dynamic remarketing” option is unchecked.

Display campaign remarketing settings

On the next screen name your adgroup, enter a default bid, and then select “Interest & Remarketing” for your targeting option. In this menu you’ll be able to select and apply the audiences you’ve created to this adgroup.

Note, if you use Adwords editor to do this it may speed up the process and allow you to create adgroups and assign multiple audiences faster. It will also allow you to get the whole campaign ready and setup before any changes go live.

You’ll then need to create an ad for the adgroup. I would suggest selecting “Skip ad creation” and using Adwords editor to test and upload image ads. Speaking of image ads, I would highly recommend using image ads in addition to text ads as they are much more visible on a webpage and will gain greater user visibility across the web (because there are websites on the content network that only allow image ads). Since you only pay per click in Adwords you might as well improve your branding efforts.

Once you’ve created the adgroups, the ads, get the ads get approved, and the audiences have enough visitor membership you will start getting impressions and hopefully clicks and conversions from your new remarketing campaign. Note, for remarketing in the Google Display network you’ll need ~100 audience members before your ads will run, for search remarketing that number jumps up to around 1,000.

Remarketing Lists for Search Campaigns

With remarketing lists for search campaigns you have a few options. First, you can assign audiences to current search campaigns and set a bid adjustment specifically for the assigned audience. However, I would suggest creating a whole new search campaign for this. That way you can allocate a specific budget for this campaign.

After you’ve created a new search campaign (added keywords, set bids, created ads etc….) you can assign audiences to your various adgroups. To do this navigate to the “Audiences” tab under your new search campaign and select the green “+ Remarketing” button. Select the adgroup that you want to assign an audience to and then select the desired audience. For this I would recommend selecting the “Target and bid” option. This will allow you to only target users in an audience and bid on them specifically. Select “Save” and you are ready to go. Again once ads get approved and the audience membership meets the minimum membership size your ads will start showing.

What’s next?

To wrap it up, remember with remarketing we are trying to segment users into groups and deliver specific messaging and value to each of them. Think about this when creating ads and deciding what keywords to use. We’ll wrap up this series next week.