I bet you’ve noticed this growing trend in online advertising, even if you don’t know what to call it or how it works. You do some browsing around, maybe look at some things on Amazon or research some new software. Then, you start seeing ads for what you just looked at… all over the web.
It’s called remarketing, and it’s going to become even more common. Why?
Because it works.
It works, and it’s easy to do using Google Adwords.
When you set up a remarketing campaign, Google gives you a bit of code to paste in your site’s source code. They also have some requirements about your privacy policy to be sure you’re transparent about what you’re up to.
Once that code is on your website, every visitor gets logged by Adwords and added to your remarketing list. Think of it like a mailing list, but for display ads online.
After your list has 100 unique visitors in 30 days, Google will start showing them the ads you set up. The minimum list size is there to ensure that your visitors stay anonymous. There’s no way to show ads to an individual person as they surf, just a group of people.
You may be wondering about an Amazon ad you saw. Often, Amazon will show ads for specific items or types of items that you recently looked at.
Amazon is big enough that they can make a large remarketing list of people who have looked at, say, waffle makers recently. So, when you see an Amazon ad for waffle makers it’s not targeted just at you, but at everyone who has browsed waffle makers recently.
Amazon’s huge, but smaller operations can put remarketing to work fairly easily.
- Get on Adwords
- Set up a remarketing list and campaign
- Add the code to your site
- Make sure your privacy policy meets Google’s requirements
- Make some ads
- Wait for your list to get big enough to trigger ads
Before you know it, your ads will be appearing all over the web to people who have been to your site in the last 30 days. If you’re using Adwords and are able to update your website’s code, it’s pretty easy to get this started in an afternoon. If you need some help getting it started, get in touch.