Google Rolls Out AdWords Dynamic Retargeting For Retailers

In another move to beef up its retargeting offerings–and take on retargeting platforms like Adroll, Retargeter and Mediaforge–Google is rolling out dynamic retargeting to all AdWords retail customers with Google Merchant Feeds. The company is also piloting dynamic retargeting in the travel and education sectors and plans to expand availability to more sectors later this year.

With dynamic retargeting ads are created on the fly with product images pulled from your Google Merchant feed. Google’s product recommendation engine determines which products and messages are shown based on an algorithmic prediction for what is likely to perform best based on visitors’ past actions on your site, including the products they viewed and their purchase history, as well as related products and top performing products.

For example, if a person is shopping for pots and pans, the product recommendation engine may populate the ad with the pot set they last viewed, other top selling pot sets, and kitchen utensils and small appliances.

There are multiple templates that you can customize to reflect the design elements of your brand. Layouts are optimized automatically for each ad impression.

In pilot tests, Google says that Sierra Trading Post, a U.S. retailer of outdoor gear and clothing, saw click through rate double and conversion rate increase by 5x. European “heavy metal online shop,” EMP Merchandising’s conversion rates rose by 230% and the cost of sale fell by 30%.

In the ModCloth template, the ad shows a recently viewed dress with price details along with other related products.

When setting up a dynamic retargeting campaign, in addition to the “All visitors” list, Google automatically creates four lists that reflect four groups of site visitors:

    General visitors - People who visited your website but didn’t view specific product. The dynamic ad will include the most popular products from your site.

    Product viewers - People who viewed specific product pages on your site but did not add them to the shopping cart. The dynamic ad will show the products that your visitors viewed and mix in recommended products.

    Shopping cart abandoners - People who added products to the shopping cart but didn’t complete the purchase. The dynamic ad will prioritize items added into the shopping cart, and will mix in a few other viewed products and recommended products.

    Past buyers - People who purchased products from you in the past. The dynamic ad will show related products by looking at popular items and items commonly purchased together.

To get started, you’ll can edit your existing remarketing tag if you are using one already, or you’ll need to add the dynamic remarketing tag AdWords generates for your site across all your site pages along with several custom parameters.

When people visit your site, the remarketing tag adds them to one of the remarketing list and associates the product ID with the visit. AdWords then uses the product ID to pull the product image, name, and price from your Google Merchant Center account and include in the ad. You can add additional parameters to the tag to for more advanced bidding and optimization control.

4 Google AdWords Updates You Might Have Missed

Google AdWords has launched a series of new changes for advertisers, including updates to AdWords Editor, a new Display Benchmarks Tool, and improvements to enhanced campaigns with flexible bid strategies. Here's a recap of the latest AdWords updates.

1. Google AdWords Keyword Planner

The biggest news from AdWords for many webmasters is the introduction of a brand new keyword tool combined with a traffic estimator, called the Keyword Planner.

The new tool allows you to find new keywords related to a keyword or keyword list, URL, or category, which can be very helpful for those trying to do keyword research or expand their targeting keywords.

You can also use it to get performance and cost estimates, which can be helpful for planning out potential budgets before actually putting it in action.

Lastly, you can import the data and use it in your account without having to manually enter it from other research tools.

2. Advertising on Google Maps

We saw the preview of new advertising on Google Maps when they showed it off at I/O, and now AdWords is updating information for advertisers wanting to target Google Maps locations for advertising. The new ads will show right on the location for those with on-page location extensions, or in a box below the search box.

It is worth noting that advertisers will need to do two things to ensure their ads are showing up on Google Maps. First, you need to run search ads with location extensions and also include search partners in your campaign network settings, since Google Maps is considered a search partner for AdWords campaigns.

3. AdWords Editor Changes

If you use Google’s AdWords Editor, they have made some updates in the new 10.1 version of the editor to include tools for making bulk changes on enhanced campaigns and to include performance stats and metrics.

Some of the new features for advertisers are:

• Set bid adjustments for placements, topics, and audiences.
• Set mobile bid adjustments at the ad group level.
• Upgrade campaigns in bulk using CSV import or the add/update multiple campaigns tool.
• Use the new ValueTrack {ifmobile}, {ifnotmobile} parameters.

4. Flexible Bid Strategies for Enhanced Campaigns

Google AdWords included flexible bidding options for advertisers when they upgrade to enhanced campaigns. This allows advertisers to manage different parts of campaigns or even cross campaigns with specific bid strategies, which is very useful for those wanting to promote certain keywords while leaving other keywords to the current bidding setup.

Flexible bid strategies will be available to advertisers in the next few weeks once those campaigns are upgraded to enhanced campaigns.