By Joshua Clare-Flagg

28th June 2013

Remarketing is a vital aspect for many clients running Adwords campaigns. It offers a cheap way of increasing brand awareness, as the CPC (cost per click) is often massively lower than standard text ads. It is called “remarketing” as it only serves adverts to those who have already visited your site with the code on. The code drops a cookie on the visitors computer (or mobile device) which lasts for 30 days. When they go on to visit another website with Adsense, it tells Google which advert to serve based on their cookies from their browsing history. Therefore, it is important to include a cookie policy on your website.

It is not the simplest thing to set up, so us as Adao* thought it would be handy to post a guide on…

How to set up remarketing in Google Adwords

1. Set up audiences

Click on “Shared Library” on the left hand side, and then on Ads > Audiences.

Click on set up remarketing or dynamic remarketing.

Enter your email address so you get your remarketing HTML tag and instructions on how to install it on your website, and continue through the next two dialogue boxes. you will need to install the tag provided on any page you want to trigger the remarketing.

2. Set up a new display network only campaign.

Now, you can set up the new campaign. Give it a decent name (such as Remarketing).

Under the devices section you can edit what devices, operating systems and carriers to display on:

Then select which locations you want the ads to show to. You can either set the whole earth, countries, cities/towns or a certain amount of miles radius from a specific point.

Set your daily budget, and select an ad extension (recommended).

Google recommend setting a cap on impressions to 7 per day. The thought behind this is that if the ad is served to a person 7 times, and they haven’t clicked on it yet, the chances are they won’t click on it for the rest of the day, and it’ll just annoy them. Also, it’ll result in your CTR going down the drain, as you’ll be wasting impressions on people who may never click through. When you set a cap, at least it’ll move on to another user once their 7 impressions is up.

Set any other settings that you want and click “save and continue”!

3. Add your audience to the new Ad Group

Now you need to add a new ad group (with no keywords – no need as they won’t be used). Call it “remarketing” if you want. Set your default bid, and add the remarketing list we created earlier to it as per the screen shot below.

4. Add your image ads

Upload your image ads into this ad group.

Your adverts can be the following sizes:

Mobile leaderboard: 320 x 50
Banner: 468 x 60
Leaderboard: 728 x 90
Square: 250 x 250
Small square: 200 x 200
Large rectangle: 336 x 280
Inline rectangle: 300 x 250
Skyscraper: 120 x 600
Wide skyscraper: 160 x 600
Half-page: 300 x 600
Large Leaderboard (970×90)

And they must abide by the following rules:

File size limit: 50k (quite hard if you are using a flash animation)
Image formats: .gif, animated .gif, .jpg, .swf, .png.

5. Relax… and get 100 visitors to get started!

All done! Please note will only start working when more than 100 people have been assigned to the remarking list (so 100 people need to visit the page the code is on before it starts working).

If you have any questions or would like us to set up a remarketing list for you, please feel free to contact Adao today! As an official certified Google Adwords Partner, we are trained and qualified to set up Adwords accounts to the best standards.