AdWords Remarketing Gets Even Better

At Maple Forest, we’re big fans of the AdWords Remarkeing system. In a nutshell, the system allows you to tag visitors to your website with a cookie, and advertise directly to them via the AdWords Display Network: any site using AdSense.

It’s a powerful tool that means you can have second, or even third and fourth chances to convert visitors who came to your site but didn’t end up buying from you. Harnessing Remarketing is a big part of how we run Conversion Rate Optimisation in paid search.

Simplified Code Installation

To-date, the installation of the code which drives AdWords Remarketing has been, well, clumsy to install. Users needed to have different code installed on different pages in order to define audiences. The most common application has been to install code on the “checkout” page of website, as well as different code on other pages, making it possible to advertise both to people who converted, and people who didn’t as two separate audiences.

It got more complex from there, as you can imagine.

Happily, AdWords has made the whole process a whole lot more simple for all involved.

It is now possible to install just one piece of code across an entire site, and define audiences using URL filters.

No more awkward emails to IT teams to install code on particular pages. The new system means agencies like us only need to make one request of an IT team – we can do the rest of the work ourselves.

Here’s how to get started with the new code

In your AdWords screen, view Shared Libraries on the left hand navigation menu and click on Audiences.

Then click, Set Up Remarketing.

Google will then generate a snippet of code for you to install on every page of your website – usually extremely easy if your site uses any form of Content Management System (CMS).

Once installed, the next time you view your Audiences under Shared Resources, you should see a new audience called “Main List.” This is a list of everyone who has visited any page on your website.

When you click on New Audience > Remarketing List, you can now create custom filters using URL parameters.

This is where the magic happens. Want to create a list of people who viewed, say, your “electronics” section? No problem. If your URL for that section contains the word “electronics” – just add it into the “contains” section and create a new list definition. You’re then free to advertise to that list (or exclude it) by using Custom Lists as usual.

For great ideas an examples of lists to create, Google itself has an excellent tutorial:

https://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2476664&expand=logic#list-definition

This is truly excellent update to the remarketing system. It means agencies and advertisers can get on with advertising, IT teams can get on with site development, and it’s much easier to create highly sophisticated audience lists than ever before.

Good job, Google!