Would You Like An Audience For that Campaign?

MoreVisibility - August 6, 2010

The Google Remarketing tool announced this past spring can be a powerful tool, if properly configured.  All you need to know to participate is found in AdWords.  Your campaign’s ads and banners will be available to the Google Display Network.  This is a network of websites owned by Google and sites that have joined the network.

When setting up your campaigns that leverage this interest based advertising, you will want to continue to review and tweak the available websites where you wish to have your banners’ displayed.   There are two options, managed placements or automatic placements.  In the managed placement you can review the thousands of sites based on their category and select which ones you think would best fit.  In the automatic placement, you roll the dice.  You will need to tweak these settings in order to find your best return on spend.

A prerequisite before the campaigns can bear fruit is audience definition.  AdWords has a section to define an audience and subsequently generate a tag which must be inserted between the tags on the desired page(s).  There is also a combo-audience one can generate that can be an intersection of audiences.  You can have one audience for browsers that visited a page, and another for browsers that visited that pages’ thank you page, meaning they completed the purchase or action.  By excluding audience members that hit a thank you page from an audience that hit a landing page, we now have a combo-audience of non-converting visitors.  This set up requires two AdWords audience tags, one deployed to the landing page and one to the thank you page.  A caveat to this is the audience must have a population of 500 in order for an AdWords campaign to display on the ad network(s).

The second step is to set up an AdWords campaign.  This should be a display network and not search based campaign since you want your branded visual cues to jog the visitors association of why they were originally drawn to your site.  You then assign an existing audience(s) to the campaign/adgroup.  Once your audience reaches 500 unique visitors, your banners will begin to be displayed on the network.  You may also want to cap the number of times your ad will be displayed to a visitor in a day, so as not to offend them by having your banner appear too frequently during their web browsing activity within a day.  Be sure to apply best practices for measuring these results, since this a relatively new offering and can only get better with age.