As our team gears up for another (bigger! better!) SoundBoard conference, I’d like to share one of our methods for building an audience of potential attendees: Remarketing.
First, a disclaimer: I can’t emphasize enough that effective marketing requires a strategic coordination of content, design, U/X, analytics, advertising, SEO, email marketing, and social, both on and offline. Remarketing is just one tactic, albeit a potentially powerful one.
What is Remarketing?
Remarketing through Google Analytics enables you to create anonymous lists of users based on their behavior on your site. By linking your Google Analytics account to AdWords, you can then “remarket” to these users with specific, tailored ads. That improves ad relevance and resonance, and narrows who can see your ads solely to people who have been on your site. Exciting!
You can build these lists on a particular destination page visited, or even base them off Google Analytics goals. These can include Destination, Duration (time on site), Pages/Screens per Visit, or a specific action, known as Events. If you haven’t set up any goals for your site, we encourage you to get started. It’s pretty easy — here’s how.
From there, things get even more interesting. After you have created your lists in Google Analytics, you can create “combo” lists in AdWords: in this case, you’re targeting people who have landed on one page but not another (confirmation) page. I suppose it’s “advanced” remarketing, but that doesn’t mean it has to be hard.
Easy-to-Implement Advanced Remarketing for Events
I’m imagining a future where Team PPC’s collective hustle results in people landing on our upcoming event’s information page. The natural thought is to remarket to them, right? Like, “Hey, wow, you came to our event page then browsed elsewhere — here’s an awesome ad about the event!”
Trouble is, what if you end up remarketing to someone who has already confirmed interest in attending? That represents a waste of resources at best, and out-of-sync messaging (like spam) at worst.
So how do you remarket specifically to people who haven’t yet expressed interest in attending, and separately remarket with a different message to those that have? You create a new remarketing “combo” list in AdWords out of existing remarketing lists in Analytics.
How we created “Combo” remarketing lists in AdWords, and how you can, too:
First, in Google Analytics, we’re going to need two remarketing lists, or “Audiences.” One for people who landed on the first page, and another list for people who landed on the confirmation page after submitting their interest.
Step 1: Create Your Remarketing Lists in Google Analytics
Admin > Property > Remarketing > Audiences > +New Audience (on following screen)
Then, make sure your account is linked to AdWords, and click edit to set your audience:
For the first list, we want it to include only people who land on the “Page” with a URL that “contains” our SoundBoard landing page:
For the second list, we want it to include only people who land on our event interest confirmation page. We used a previously-created Google Analytics goal, but you could create another destination page list, if you prefer.
Step 2: Create Your Combo Remarketing List in AdWords
Now that we have the two audience lists in Google Analytics, we can set about creating a “combo” list in AdWords. That way we can remarket only to folks who visited our event landing page but not the confirmation page. We can separately remarket to the list of only people who landed on our confirmation page.
This means you can communicate with just the folks who haven’t yet confirmed interest while also having a conversation with people who have.
Shared Library (left column) > Ads > Audiences
Then, select “Custom combination” and arrange to include one audience but not the other:
You are now ready to promote your event with a fancy (advanced) remarketing list!
You are now able to use this combo remarketing list in AdWords as part of a Remarketing — Display Network Campaign. If you don’t have a Remarketing campaign already, here’s how to create one.
In this example, those ads would only be seen by people who visited the SoundBoard page but NOT the confirmation page (i.e. fence sitters). If you haven’t seen our confirmation page, you just might see our remarketing campaign someday, but I assure you the post-confirmation stuff is way cooler, so give it a shot!
Want to learn more about online marketing topics like remarketing? Contact us to let us know how to gear the event to your needs!