Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 102 - Remarketing
Is running a remarketing campaign in Google Ads still a good idea?
Yes, but the way to retarget users effectively has changed.
In a world where third-party cookies are crumbling, in-platform remarketing is no longer just an option, it's a necessity.
Today, I'm answering your burning questions about Demand Gen, website remarketing, Search targeting, and more.
Let's get into it. I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you.
This is Inside Google Ads: Episode 102, Remarketing.
Our first question comes from Oscar DeKema Chop on YouTube and they say, do you recommend Display campaigns for remarketing only purposes? If not, how do you recommend doing remarketing?
As long time listeners and viewers will know, I do not recommend Display campaigns because the inventory is garbage and usually full of spam. Also, because most Display remarketing relies on cookies, although cookies aren't totally gone, they are not as effective as they used to be.
So here's what I recommend instead if you want to do remarketing in Google Ads.
First, try in-platform remarketing. These are different kinds of your data segments that rely on Google's understanding of your audience. So you don't need to import anything, tag anything. It's data Google already has, about who's interacting with your content and your website. Specifically, I'm talking about YouTube remarketing and the Google engaged audience. YouTube remarketing is where you create a segment of people who have interacted with your content or channel on YouTube.
Because these people are on YouTube, a platform Google owns, Google knows exactly who they are and has a much easier time than reaching them across Google's inventory. Similarly, the Google-engaged audience is an audience of people who click to your website from Google search results, whether that's Google Search, Google Maps, YouTube Search, et cetera. So again, because they are going from a Google-owned property and then going to your website, Google knows exactly who they are before they leave and go to your website. So it's a really robust way to rebuild a remarketing audience on Google's platforms.
I recently wrote an article for Search Engine Journal all about Google-engaged audiences. I'll be sure to link that in the episode description if you want to learn more.
Next, the most powerful kind of remarketing, of course, will be one that's not even just based on Google's data, but based on your own proprietary data, your customer list. This is called Customer Match in Google Ads. And although there are a lot of restrictions in place, even if you can't use your Customer Match list for ad targeting, it is still beneficial to upload this list into your Google Ads account because it will be used to inform all of your smart bidding. It'll be used to inform all of your optimized targeting, including things like PMax or AI Max.
So that customer list just existing in your account makes all your Google Ads smarter. And if you do meet the requirements to use Customer Match, then you can leverage this across Search, Shopping, Demand Gen, Video, PMax audience signals, and Display, and use it as a seed list for lookalikes.
Once you have either your in-platform remarketing with the Google engaged audience or YouTube audience and/or your customer list, it's going to work most effectively if you use it in a campaign type that runs on Google owned properties.
Demand Gen is an excellent starting point. Demand Gen campaigns allow you to serve image and video ads on YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and now Maps too. Because these users are signed into Google, Google knows exactly who they are and therefore has a much easier time matching the records from your remarketing lists to these actual users on their properties.
In Demand Gen, you can do a product-based ad if you're in ecommerce. You can choose a variety of audience segments, and you can use either click-based or conversion-based bid strategies.
Now this in-platform remarketing and your customer list can also be used effectively in Search and Shopping. This is something often called RLSA, Remarketing Lists for Search Ads. And essentially you apply your remarketing list on Targeting mode to your Search or Shopping campaigns, which means your ads are only eligible to show if the user searches for something that matches to your keywords or feed, and they have some kind of relationship to your business already. They're on your YouTube list, they're on your customer list, or they're on your Google Engaged list.
If there are certain products you want to advertise that typically have not met your ROAS goals or certain keywords you want to advertise on that historically have not met your CPA or ROAS goals, then I recommend you try RLSA because if you're only showing ads to people who are already familiar with your business, they should be more likely to convert and therefore more likely to help you reach your CPA or ROAS goals.
To sum up, if you want to use remarketing, I recommend focusing on Google-owned inventory and on remarketing lists that either you or Google own the data to. For the most part, stay away from Display. Most of what you'll be attracting is going to be bots and spam.
If you need a step-by-step tutorial, by the way, on how to set up a Demand Gen campaign or a Shopping campaign for remarketing, or how to analyze performance and optimize these remarketing campaigns while they're running, these are some of the 100 plus tutorials you'll find in my Inside Google Ads course. You can learn more and join today at learn.jyll.ca. That's J-Y-L-L.ca.
Our second question comes from Iaweshraza on Instagram. And they say, if I create a remarketing audience and the audience data is from the last 365 days, how does Google decide whom to target first? Will they target the most recent people added to the list?
The answer is no. Google does not analyze your list in a chronological format, kind of last in first out. Instead, your campaigns will decide who to target first based on your bid strategy and the user's intent.
If you are using a smart bidding strategy, which for the most part you should, you are going to analyze millions of signals at auction time, including their presence on this list, to decide if Google thinks they are likely to convert. So in general, someone who visited your website yesterday is probably more likely to be interested than someone who visited 10 months ago. From that perspective, yeah, you probably are more likely to target the more recent people who've been added to your list.
However, suppose someone visited your website 10 months ago. They are on that 365-day list. If they suddenly start searching for your keywords or browsing competitor sites again, Google may prioritize trying to reach that user. This is true even over someone else who maybe visited a week ago. That recent visitor might no longer be displaying in-market behavior. Perhaps they have already purchased or gotten what they need from someone else.
If you do want to specifically target people who visited your website more recently, then you're going to have to create more segmented audience lists.
For example, having an all users 30 days website remarketing list is usually a good idea. You can set this up via Google Tag or Google Analytics, connect it to Google Ads, and it'll be populated with people who visited your website more recently. Keep in mind, your website needs to have enough traffic to be able to fill this list for the most part, the list will need to have 1,000 active matched records in order to show ads. So if you only have 500 or 600 website visitors a month, then it wouldn't really make sense to have an all users 30 days list.
Conversely, if your website gets 10,000 visitors a day, you might want even more segmented lists, maybe a list of people who visited in the last 48 hours and a list of people who visited in the last seven days.
It really depends on your budget, your goals, your website traffic.
For a deep dive on all the different kinds of remarketing lists you can use in Google Ads and how to create them and use them in your campaigns, you should check out my course, Inside Google Ads. More than 400 Google Ads practitioners like you are improving their skills and getting better results with Inside Google Ads, and you can too. Learn more at learn.jyll.ca. That's J-Y-L-L.ca.
Our final question today actually comes from one of the members of my Inside Google Ads course, because members can ask me questions within the course, and I get back to them within a few days. So their question was, when I look under the Audience Manager, every column indicates too small to serve. What does this mean? Not enough website visitors? Not enough clicks on my ads?
The "too small to serve" error indicates that there are not enough users on the list to target them with ads. And specifically when I say user, the technical answer is Active Matched Records.
For example, I have a personal Gmail account, and I have a Google Workspace account. So those are two different records, even though I'm the same person. That's the distinction there. And then active means that someone who's been active on Google properties recently. So maybe I have some email address from 20 years ago that I haven't used. Although that would be a record, that would not be an active record. So even if I existed somewhere in someone's customer match list, they wouldn't be able to target me because I'm not active. So when we say 1,000 active matched records, it's people with some kind of Google identifier, either a Gmail account, a Workspace account, a YouTube account, an Android account, or some way that Google identifies them. And they've been active recently on Google properties.
Let's say that your GA4 website visitors list is showing as “too small to serve” across Search, Display, YouTube, and Gmail. It could be that you haven't had enough website visitors. It could be that you just haven't had enough who are active these days on Google. Maybe there were a lot of bots or spam or something else going on. Or it could be that it's not configured correctly. Maybe you don't have Consent Mode implemented properly. And so a lot of the people who are visiting your website are not getting captured by GA4. There are a lot of reasons this could be.
Some ways to get around this could be trying different kinds of remarketing implementation. Maybe trying the Google-engaged audience rather than a Google Analytics audience, for example. Or you could set the duration to longer. Try targeting all visitors 90 days instead of just 30 days. When you're creating a remarketing list, certain ones let you pre-fill the segments from the last 30 days. Rather than starting today, creating a remarketing list from zero, certain ones will let you pre-fill.
And then it could be something with the way GA4 or the Google Tag is implemented on your website that may be preventing it from fully populating.
The common thread across all of my answers today about remarketing is that we don't want to be chasing users around the internet with a generic banner ad. It's not 2018. To be successful with remarketing today, you need to leverage Google's owned properties, like Search, YouTube, and Gmail, and give the algorithm enough data to actually do its job via your own first-party data or by creating these in-platform remarketing segments. If you can master both of these things now, you will be miles ahead of your competitors.
Today's Insider Challenge is this. Imagine you're working with a B2B client who has a very long sales cycle, think six to nine months between first ad interaction and becoming a customer. They have a 540 day remarketing list, the longest you're allowed in GA4, and it has about 50,000 people on it. So you're targeting this 50,000 person list in Demand Gen, but the campaign has a very high CPA, and a very low conversion rate. It's just not performing well. What might you look into or try to optimize to improve the performance of this Demand Gen remarketing campaign?
The beauty of the Insider Challenge is there's no right or wrong answer, just an opportunity to stretch your brain on real-life Google Ads problem solving.
The last Insider Challenge in Episode 99 was this.
Let's say you're auditing an account and you notice a lot of overlap between the Shopping and PMax campaigns, overlapping products, overlapping Search terms. What do you do? And how do you determine your recommendation?
I will say this is a very common problem I'm seeing these days with my ecommerce Google Ads coaching clients. So to decide whether to go all in on PMax, revert to Shopping, or do a mix of both, here's a few things to look at.
First is the budget. If you're spending less than $50 a day, I will usually recommend just sticking with standard Shopping because you probably don't have enough budget to do what PMax wants to do, which is place your ads across all of Google's inventory.
Even if you do run PMax on less than $50 a day, it will probably mostly serve on Shopping inventory anyway, in which case you'd be better off with standard Shopping.
Next, how are they performing? If PMax is generally performing better than your standard Shopping campaign, meaning it's hitting your CPA or ROAS goals, then I would shut off Shopping and let PMax take it all. Automation is end game, PMax is end game. So if you can get PMax working well for you, in my opinion, that's preferable than just sticking with standard Shopping.
Third is the more nuanced one, maybe standard Shopping is better for some things and PMax is better for others. So you just want to make sure that you are segmenting by product. Do not target the same product in standard Shopping and in PMax.
Still, I would say most accounts I see my recommendations are usually all in on Shopping or all in on PMax based on budget, performance and goals.
Do you agree?
I'm Jyll Saskin Gales, and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.