Google Adwords has been around since the start of the 21st century, October 2000, a year to be remembered by digital marketers as being the first self-serve online advertising platform. If used correctly, Google ads can help you communicate with the correct audience and contribute to helping you build a successful website and online business. If done incorrectly, it can cost you a lot of money for irrelevant traffic that isn’t going to convert.
First, let’s discuss the 3 concepts. Remarketing is targeting people who have already visited your website, they will be targeted with Ads across the Google display network encouraging them to come back to the page or the product they just viewed.
A display campaign is sending advertisements out across Google display networks, you can use display ads to remarket to your audience or target a new audience with the combined use of an audience manager. Video campaigns are utilizing the use of Google’s video network, mainly reaching the audiences on youtube with our video advertisements.
Google Ads How To Setup A Successful Remarketing Campaign
With this being Re-marketing, I assume you already have some traffic going to your website, whether that be from social, email, SEO or another paid advertising platform. To walk you through setting up remarketing, I am going to set up a campaign for Multicore National including some screenshots and a step-by-step guide.
Step 1
First, you need to head over to your Google ads account and click on the tools and settings icon in the top right-hand corner.
Step 2
You then click the arrow next to the shared library and click on the link labeled “Audience Manager”.
Step 3
When loaded you will see a list containing all of your created audiences. There will be 2 tabs at the top, one for remarketing audiences and one for custom audiences, make sure remarketing is selected. You then need to click on the blue circle containing a white plus symbol which is located at the top of the table. When prompted this will bring up a list of options for you to choose, we need to select website visitors so that we can create a list of people who have visited certain areas of our website.
Step 4
When clicked you will be asked to give your audience a name, I am going to call my audience, “plumbers Stoke remarketing” as shown in the screenshot.
Step 5
You can then choose who to include in your audience, you can choose between visitors of a certain page, visitors of a page who also viewed another page, visitors of a page who did not visit another page, visitors of a page between specific dates and visitors of a page with a specific tag. For this, I am going to choose “visitors of a page who did not visit another page”, this is so we can remarket to everyone who visited a specific page but did not continue through to the book now or contact us page.
Step 6
Step 6 allows you to input the URL of the page, remember if you are remarketing a certain product back to your consumers, you put the link to the product page. If you are remarketing a content or services page back to your customers then put the link to that specific page.
You can also select between 2 options “match any ruling group” and “match every ruling group”. I would select match any ruling group as we are only going to have 1 simple rule to build our remarketing audience. You can now input your URL or referer URL into the box and select whether you want to build an audience based on whether it contains the URL, equals the URL, starts with the URL, ends with the URL, does not contain the URL, does not equal the URL, does not start with the URL and does not end with the URL.
We need to choose “contains” as we are building a list of people who visited a page on our website containing the URL inputted. You can add more than one URL per audience if need be.
Step 7
The next 3 sections are pre-fill options, membership duration, and description. The description is simple, add a description for your audience, so this could be something like “a list of people who visited XYZ product or page within the last 7 days”. The membership duration is, how long do you want people to stay in your audience, bear in mind they will see remarketing ads for your product or page during this time.
I usually choose 7 days so we don’t over-advertise to them if they stay on the list for 30 days they may get sick of seeing our remarketing ads. But if your audience is low and doesn’t have many members you may want to keep the duration longer so your audience fills up and Google actually sends your Ads out, if your audience doesn’t have enough members then your ads will not be served.
Prefill options basically, do you want to start building your audience from today or would you like to use cookie settings from the past 30 days and add all of your past audience into the group too. For my campaign, I am going to select the membership duration as 14 days and prefill the option set to include people from the past 30 days.
Step 8
All you do is click on the “create audience” button at the bottom and that’s your audience rules set up and Google will start putting together your remarketing list, that is if you have given them some audience sources to use.
Step 9
Step 9 would be to set up your audience source, how will Google ads collect the data in order to build your remarketing list? At the left-hand side of the audience manager, you will see the option to choose “Audience Sources” click on this so we can set up a source.
Step 10
Choose and set up an audience source, for this tutorial we will use Google tag manager, otherwise known as GTM. So when you are navigated over to audience sources you will need to click on Google tag manager set up and follow the steps to install the tracking code and link GTM to your website. Follow this article for more information on how to link Google tag manager to your website.
Step 11
When your GTM is linked and set up correctly on your website then you would need to navigate back over to audience sources on your Google Adwords account and select Google ads tag. At the bottom of the page, you can select tag setup options and instructions, you will have the choice between adding the tag to the code of your website, emailing the tag to your developers or using Google tag manager, Choose Google tag manager.
Step 12
When clicked you will be given a conversion ID in numerical form, make a note of this conversion ID or keep the page open for later. We then need to head over to Google tag manager to set up a tag containing the following conversion ID. So next open a new tab and load up your GTM account.
Step 13
Next, from the GTM homepage, we can choose to “add a new tag”, click this option and be sure to give the tag a name. I am going to name mine, “plumbers Stoke Remarketing”.
Step 14
After naming your tag you now need to set up the tag configuration. To do this, click on the box labeled “tag configuration” and from the list of choices you need to select “Google Ads Remarketing”. You will then be asked to configure the remarketing tag, and input the conversion ID which we were given in step 12. You can label it if you like, and keep the other options as default. You can also configure advanced settings if need be, however, this walkthrough we are just going to keep basic.
Step 15
Scroll down to the box labeled “triggering” and click on it. You will be prompted to select a trigger from the list, or you can create a new one by clicking on the blue plus symbol in the top right-hand corner.
Step 16
Click the plus symbol and name your trigger. I am going to name my trigger “Plumber Stoke Remarketing”, then click on the box below named “Trigger Configuration”.
Step 17
Once clicked you will have a list of options, from which we are going to select page view and then select the option labeled “Some Page Views”. Choose the option “Page URL”, you can then choose between the options: contains, equals, starts with, ends with, etc. We will choose “equals” and then enter the URL and click “Save” in the top right-hand corner.
We are entering the URL of the product page or the landing in which we want to build our Remarketing audience. You can enter more than one URL if needed however I am just entering the one.
Step 18
Now you will be back on the tag configuration page in which you want to click “Save” again in the top right-hand corner, this will take you back to your GTM dashboard. In the right-hand corner of your dashboard, you have the option to preview. If you click on this it will now take us to preview mode to check the tag is triggering correctly.
Step 19
Now head over to the product page or landing page which you set the remarketing tag up for, as you are in preview mode you will see a box at the bottom of the page in which it will show you if your remarketing tag is firing and working correctly.
Step 20
Now we have set up our remarketing audience and tested our tag and we now know that Google will be building us an audience list that we can then use to serve ads to. Now you need to head back over to your Google ads dashboard.
Step 21
On the left-hand side of the dashboard click on the link labeled “Campaigns”, when loaded click on the blue circle containing a white plus symbol and click on create a new campaign.
Step 22
Select the goal that best suits what you are trying to achieve. For this walkthrough, I am going to set my goal as being leads because I want people to come back to my website and take action which will generate my business lead.
Step 23
Next select the campaign type, you will be given the option to choose search campaign, display campaign, shopping campaign, video campaign, and smart campaign. I will walk you through some of the other campaigns later but for now, we are going to choose a display campaign as from previous experience I have found that a display or video remarketing campaign gives the best results. A display campaign targets users across millions of Google-partnered websites.
Step 24
After clicking display campaign, choose the campaign subtype, you can do a Gmail ad campaign, a smart display campaign, or a standard campaign. Go ahead and choose a standard campaign and then finally enter you business website, for this you can just insert the homepage of your website.
Step 25
Give your campaign a name, mine, for example, will be “Stoke plumber remarketing”, choose the locations you want to target, as this is remarketing to a particular audience you can just have all countries and territories or just choose the countries your business operates in. Choose your language, for me it’s just English.
Step 26
Next on the page is bidding, choose what you want to focus on, I choose conversions as I want to focus on achieving my goal of bringing in leads. Choose whether you want to manually select bids or if want Google to automatically maximise conversions, I tend to stick with automatically remarketing campaigns. Then choose what you pay for, I prefer a PPC method so I pay for clicks. Then choose your daily budget for what you would like to spend on the campaign each day.
Step 27
Creating your adgroup, here we need to give the group a name, again, I will name my adgroup “Plumber Stoke Remarketing”. You then have the option to select your audience, we need to navigate to the browse section and select the label “How they have interacted with your business (remarketing and similar audiences)”, then click on the label “website visitors” and choose the audience you created in step 4. My audience was named “Plumbers Stoke Remarketing”, then click “Done”.
Step 28
Next select the demographics, as we are targeting anyone who visited a specific page we will leave this with everything selected as standard. You can then select “Content Targeting” or “Targeting Expansion”. We will leave these as standard for this remarketing campaign so we can now move ahead to creating our ads.
Step 29
So we will do a responsive display ad with some quality images and text to entice the audience back to our website to make a purchase or contact us or whatever our goal may be. First input the “final URL”, what landing page do you want your audience to see? For my campaign, I want to take my audience that visited the Plumber Stoke page, attract them with a quality advert, and then send them directly back to the book-now page so I will input the URL to the book-now page. You can then select up to 15 images and 5 logos in your adverts, you will be required to have your logo in 2 different sizes in order to be served correctly on different devices. The ideal image dimensions for landscape is 1200px by 628px and for square its 1000px by 1000px. For your logo its best to have it in 400px by 400px and 1280px by 320px. Remember using quality images will attract your customers and catch their attention on the web, you can also add links to your youtube videos if necessary.
Step 30
Now, you can add up to 5 headlines, a long headline, up to 5 descriptions, and your business name. On the right-hand side, you will see a preview of what your ads will look like on different websites and devices. Use all your headlines and descriptions in order to have the best ad strength which you can see above the preview of your ads. To capture your audience and give them a reason to come back you could try to remarket a discount, coupon code, or a free additional service or product included. For example, “book today to earn a complimentary teddy bear” or “Come back to complete your purchase within 24 hours for a huge 50% discount”. Then click on the button labeled “Create Campaign”.
Step 31
You will then see a screen saying “Congratulations! Your Campaign is ready. Click on the button labeled “Continue To Campaign” and that is your remarketing campaign set up. For best results, it is good to set your remarketing campaigns up on the Google display network and Google video network, you should also set up social media remarketing which will allow you to target your audience across social channels like Facebook and Instagram.
Google Ads How To Set Up A Successful Display Marketing Campaign
Assuming you know who your audience is and the demographics, locations, interests, behaviors, and market interests, a display campaign can be excellent to target your marketing communications to your audience across a range of Google-partnered websites. Targeting is key in creating successful display campaigns so making sure you have segmented your audience and know who to target with your different marketing messages is key to creating a high conversion rate for your display campaign. To identify your audience you can use your social analytics, Google analytics and any analytics software you have installed. You can then do focus groups, and surveys and speak to your customers to identify them and figure out what they want and need. To find out more about identifying and segmenting your audience view the following article from the audience agency.
Step 1
Head over to your Google Adwords dashboard, and locate the blue circle with the white plus sign, click it, and select “new campaign” then select your goal. The goal I am using for this campaign will be sales as I am trying to focus on customers purchasing the products on the website.
Step 2
Select the type of Google campaign you would like to run, we will be choosing “Display” because we are setting up a display campaign which will run our ads across millions of Google partnered websites. Next, choose the option labeled “Standard Display Campaign” and enter your business website and click on “Continue”.
Step 3
Now give your campaign a name, mine will be “Generic Rochdale” because I will be setting up a display campaign in Rochdale. Now, location, as mentioned above, you should already know and understand who your audience is so now input the location of the audience you are targeting, you can choose countries, cities, and postcodes and you can do an advanced search in which you can set a radius and add your locations in bulk when you’re done, click the “save” button.
Step 4
Now set your location options, you will be given the choices: people in or who show interest in your targeted locations, people in or regularly in your targeted locations, and people who show interest in your targeted locations. For this type of campaign, I will choose people in or who show interest in my target location. You can also choose who to exclude, you will see the options: people in your excluded locations and people in or who show interest in your excluded locations. You can then choose the language you want your campaign to run in.
Step 5
Next is your bidding, you can choose what you want to focus your campaign on and how you want to do your bidding whether automatically or manually. Optionally you can set a cost per action and choose what you want to pay for. My settings are as follows: focus on conversions and automatically maximize conversions with no target cost per action and I would like to pay per click for my campaign, then we can enter our daily budget.
Step 6
Time to create our ad group, give your ad group a name. Then we select our audience targeting, this is important to make sure we get the right message to the right audience. You can narrow it down very well too, you can use the search section to search through already created audiences and Google also gives you some ideas based on your website and other factors. The browse section allows you to search different factors to locate the perfect audience: “who they are” which has loads of options including parental status, marital status, education, and home-ownership status. You also have the tabs “what their interests and habits are” “what they’re actively researching or planning” and “how they’ve interacted with your business” each tab contains hundreds of different options to choose from to narrow down your audience and target the correct people. You can also create custom audiences through Google audience manager.
Step 7
Now you can choose through the demographics of your audience including age, gender, and household income. If you want to go more in-depth with your targeting you can do “content targeting” and targeting expansion but for now, we will leave them as default.
Step 8
Time to create the ads, remember to use catchy and vibrant images, youtube videos, and create good ad copy to entice your audience. If you do a responsive display ad you can input the final URL, up to 15 images and 5 logos, the same logo and image size as used in step 29. You can add up to 5 headlines, 1 long headline, 5 descriptions, and again your business name. When you’ve finished creating your ad click on “create campaign” and on the next page click “continue to campaign” and that’s your display campaign set up.
Remember a successful remarketing campaign is based on your targeting options and your level of personalization in your adverts, you can use your data to find out what your customers want and start to create a campaign that adds value to your customers.
How To Set Up Successful Video Marketing Campaigns With Google Ads
A successful Google video marketing campaign will capture your audience’s attention on youtube and encourage them to visit your website. We have all seen them ads during youtube video’s and 9 times out of 10 we will choose to skip, but every now and then we see a video that catches our eye and we click to see more information. The more engaging and personalized your video is, the higher the results you will have with your campaign. Consider hiring a professional or using a freelancer on Fiverr to shoot and edit your video if you don’t have the editing skills to make your own.
Step 1
Head over to your Google ads dashboard and select the blue circle with the white plus sign again and select a new campaign. Then choose your campaign goal and select “Continue”. Now choose your campaign type in which we need to select “video” to set up a video campaign and then click the button labeled “continue”.
Step 2
Next, give your campaign a name and choose your bid strategy, I will go with maximizing conversions as my goal from the campaign is to drive sales on my website. If your goal is brand awareness you will be given options to show your audience a sequence of stories on youtube or feature a non-skippable 15-second in-stream video. After your bid strategy chooses your budget and whether you want to give your ad a start and end date.
Step 3
The next step is “networks” where you can choose to appear in youtube search results, whether you want your video on the display network as well or if you just want your ad to appear inside of youtube videos. For this campaign I will select only youtube videos, the next step is your languages and locations. Choose the language and the locations of your audience and remember you can use the advanced search feature if need be.
Step 4
Now you can choose your inventory in which you have the option “standard inventory” which means that Google will show your ad on content that’s appropriate for most brands, “expanded inventory” which is Google showing your ads on some sensitive content, and “limited inventory” which will exclude most sensitive content, I like to choose a standard inventory.
Step 5
You can choose what type of content you would not like your ads to show on underneath the “excluded content” section. You can exclude the following categories:
- Tragedy and conflict
- Sensitive social issues
- Sexually suggestive content
- Sensational and shocking content
- Profanity and rough language
Choose the video types you would like to exclude your ad from showing on, next is “excluded types and labels” where you can narrow down where you want to exclude your ad from being shown.
Step 6
In the next step we can select our demographics and our audience, remember your audience targeting is crucial to getting your message to the right people. Refer to step 6 of “How To Set Up A Successful Display Marketing Campaign” for more information on audience targeting.
Step 7
Now you have the option to choose keywords to target your users based on, you can choose different topics that your audience may be interested in and you can even choose video placements and select which youtube videos you would like to show your ads, which channels you would like to show your ads on in which you can narrow your targeting down great and have your ad appear during the correct youtube videos.
Step 8
Creating your youtube video ad, whichever video you have that you want to use for your youtube ad just upload to your youtube channel and paste the link in the box under “create your video ad”. You can then add your final URL to where you want your audience to be directed to once clicking your ad, you can choose your display URL, call to action, and 1 headline. Next, give your video ad a name and click on the button “create campaign”. You will see the congratulations message, now click on the button “continue to campaign” and that is your youtube ad complete. Remember to use an eye-catching and captivating video to grab your audience’s attention and persuade them not to click “skip ad”.
Google Ads Walkthrough: How To Set Up Successful Re-Marketing, Display, Text and Video Campaigns The Final Conclusion
Now you should know how to successfully set up a remarketing campaign on the display network, a standard display campaign, and a video campaign. Remember understanding who your audience is and what they are looking for online will help you in creating successful ad campaigns. You can also use ads in many ways, you could set up a video campaign and remarket to one of your remarketing audiences across youtube, you could set up a display campaign targeting a certain radius where you know your competition does business. Also, look into social media ads using Facebook business and ad manager where you can create remarketing campaigns and targeted campaigns across social media channels.
Author Bio
Paul Gray is owner of Multicore National and has been consulting SEO and digital marketing since 2010. His current position is digital marketing at a number of entertainment facilities around the UK and internationally.
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