AdWords “Remarketing Lists For Search Ads” Coming Out Of Beta

 

On the heels of releasing dynamic retargeting for retailers in AdWords, Google has announced it will be rolling out remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) to all enhanced campaigns advertisers over the next few days. RLSA, which launched in beta last July, allows marketers to modify and tailor their search ads, bids, and keywords based on visitors’ past activity on their sites.

In the beta, a European online tire retailer saw a 161 percent conversion rate increase with RLSA, which led to a 22 percent overall sales increase. The new conversions had a 43 percent lower average CPA than previous campaigns, according to Google.

Using RLSA, you can increase bids for past site visitors who looked at specific high-value pages, added items to their carts or spent a certain amount of time on your site. You can also bid on more generic keywords, or broader match types of keywords for site visitors or past customers that you don’t include in your regular campaigns because they are too broad for general search traffic.

You can then show different ads to specific sets of site visitors. For example, you can write ad copy targeted to shopping cart abandoners.

RLSA bid adjustments combine with other bid adjustments for location, device and time in enhanced campaigns.

To use RLSA, you’ll need to tag your site with the Google Remarketing Tag for the Google Display Network. So if your site is already set with the remarketing tag, you are ready to start running RLSA.

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.