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Remarketing: What It Is and How to Set It Up

Written by

Paul Lipen

Last Updated: May 7, 2024

Remarketing: What It Is and How to Set It Up

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If people make one purchase from a site and never return, the business needs to attract new visitors from scratch. However, re-ordering is a step towards ensuring that a user becomes a loyal customer. How can you bring users back to your site? That is what remarketing is for. Keep reading to learn what it is and how to set it up!

Remarketing means showing advertisements to users who have previously visited a site. Such ads appear on Google Display Network websites, as well as in Google services and applications, but they are not visible in the search results. Ads can be displayed both as text (with or without illustration) and as banners.

The goal of remarketing is to bring potential clients back to the site. It is often used to invite a user to re-purchase a product to sell more items or to encourage a potential customer to place an order if earlier the user left the website without purchasing anything.

Depending on how users interacted with the site, you can form a specific user group and set up remarketing for it. Here are a few examples:

A visitor wanted to obtain information from a website but left it — Show him/her an ad of your website with the goal of brand recognition.
A user checked out a particular section of the website and was interested in a certain product, for example, a men’s watch, but didn’t purchase anything — Show the user ads on relevant topics with information about specials offers, sales, and bonuses.
A potential customer added goods to the shopping cart but didn’t place an order — Remind the user about the cart an ad and motivate the user to purchase by, for example, saying that the product is selling out, the cart is about to expire, or the product is on sale.
A visitor placed an order — Offer related supplies or products or remind the user about the opportunity to get a discount on the next purchase.

You can launch both traditional and dynamic remarketing in Google. Dynamic remarketing is when the ads are based on users’ interests, including goods viewed on a website. However, if you have just started to learn this tool, then it is better to begin a simple advertising campaign, such as banners and adaptive ads displayed directly on the Google Display Network.

First, you need to set up remarketing conditions and then move forward to launching the advertising campaign. Let’s talk about everything in order.

Setting Up Remarketing Conditions

There are two common ways to set up remarketing conditions:

Through Google Ads’ global tag
Through Google Analytics’ service downloaded onto the website and connected to Google Ads

Let’s learn more about each method.

Global Tags in Google Ads

To set up remarketing, sign in to your Google Ads account, go to Tools > Audience Manager, and click Set up Audience Sources. Then go to the section where the Google Ads tags can be set up.

Then go to the section where the Google Ads tags can be set up.

Choose the type of remarketing you want to set up:

Static (collects standard statistics from a data source)
Dynamic (collects special attributes or characteristics for advertisement
personalisation)

Let’s take a closer look at static remarketing.

The system automatically generates a code for the global remarketing tag. The only thing you need to do is to place on all your web pages right before closing <body> tag.

Return to the Audience Source page, where you’ll see the message, “Tag activation
requests: 24 hours.” Now you just have to wait for the Google Ads system to activate it.

Once it’s activated, the tag will track all users of the site.

Then, it is necessary to select particular user groups from this audience (“Remarketing Lists”) so that the settings are more targeted and accurate. Let’s see how to do this.

Setting Up Remarketing Lists

To set up new remarketing lists, go to the Audience Lists tab in the Audience Manager section.

Based on your plan for how you want to segment users, set up a new list by indicating its name and conditions.

You can also segment visitors to a particular page into a separate list — for example, the “Thank you for your purchase!” page. If users and on that page, it means that they have already purchased something, and they can be offered a discount on their next order. To gather this audience, use the URL contains rule. If the “Thank you for your purchase!” page doesn’t have a unique URL, you’ll need to configure the condition using targets in Google Analytics.

You can separate one audience from the other by creating remarketing lists this way, allowing you to set up advertising campaigns more effectively.

User tracking is available only through page URLs in the Google Ads interface. All other types of tracking are set through the Google Analytics statistics system. If you want to use segments with complicated conditions, then it is better to set up remarketing in Google Analytics. Let’s take a closer look at how to do that.

Remarketing Conditions in Google Analytics

To set up remarketing for people who have taken a particular action, you need to have the Google Analytics counter, which is connected to your Google Ads account.

Follow these steps to set it up:

1. Set goals for website actions in Google Analytics.

2. In the statistics system interface, navigate to the Administrator tab, go to Connection with Google Ads, and check whether the Google Analytics counter is connected to your Google Ads account. If there is no connection, set it up (read more about how to do so in Google Analytics’ Help section).

3. If all settings are correct, a code will appear in the Tracking tab. Add this code to the web pages where you have planned to track the audience’s behaviour.

4. Create a base audience (all users who have visited the site) in the Remarketing tab (Audience section) in Google Analytics. This will allow you to select various categories of users. Don’t forget to click Turn On finish setup. The tracking will come into force only after you click Turn On.

5. Finally, create a new audience based on your goals. The setup tool lets you distinguish between segments of users based on various characteristics, such as what pages were visited and what actions were taken. Read more in Google’s Help section.

If everything is set up correctly, the segment will be displayed in the Audience Manager section of Google Ads.

Once you’ve set up your remarketing conditions, you’ll need to launch an ad campaign in Google Ads.

Launching an Ad Campaign in Google Ads

1. Create a new advertising campaign. In this case, it will be the Display Network type. Select Create a campaign without specifying a goal (so that you can use your own settings and remarketing lists in the future) and Standard Display Campaign in its settings. You’ll set the remaining conditions individually according to an algorithm similar to that of any contextual advertising campaign.

2. In the settings for displaying ads, select Remarketing audiences and similar audiences, which will select remarketing lists of your interest. Then, the system will offer to create ads that can be both adaptive (created using the constructor) or display (created by web designers). The main goal is that they meet the interests of the audience to which they will be shown. After this step, the advertising campaign is considered finished.

Final Thoughts

Try to alternate responsive and display ads, and make sure to keep track of how effective they are in each case to find the best solutions for your website. For example, if a user has compared several products on a site, show him/her banners with images of the products he/she’s interested in. If a visitor has read a description of services and offers, remind him/her about you and what you offer by setting your ads to display vivid examples of finished projects, indicating your competitive advantages. The more precise your remarketing is, the more you’ll get from your advertising campaign.