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Paid Media

What are Remarketing Ads and Why Should You Use Them?

Actuate Media TeamDecember 2, 20163 min read
Overhead view of a wooden desk with hands at a laptop, clipboard charts and a calculator, beside doodled "REMARKETING" lettering, a target and charts
Remarketing advertising enables businesses to show ads to people who visited their website. The idea is, when people visited your site there was some level of intent and remarketing enables a business to reconnect to that low-level shopper/client/patient. Over the years, I’ve learned to trust three primary platforms for remarketing: Google Ads and Facebook Ads

The Benefits of Remarketing Ads

Remarketing can help drive specific actions and activities ranging from branding and awareness, increase inbound leads, and increasing e-commerce conversions. Simply put, remarketing can drive return on investment (ROI) for just about any advertiser. Google provides a list of benefits including:
  • Access to people when they’re most likely to buy
  • Lists tailored to your advertising goals
  • Large-scale reach
  • Efficient pricing
  • Reach your customers when they’re searching for you
  • And more (link)

Types of Remarketing

There are multiple types of remarketing standard remarketing, dynamic remarketing, social remarketing, remarketing for mobile apps, remarketing lists for search ads, video remarketing, and email-list remarketing. Most remarketing tactics require the use of cookies, Facebook remarketing is the exception which is considered a “walled garden.”

Standard Remarketing

This remarketing solution is simple; you’d use an animated HTML5 ad that targets visitors of your website. The level of targeting is up to you. It can be broad and include all website visitors, or it could be defined and include visitors who visited a specific product page. The key difference from dynamic remarketing is the creator.

Dynamic Remarketing

Allows your business to target visitors who look at a specific product or left their shopping cart full. The creative itself shows the specific products the visitor was looking at or abandoned in their shopping cart. One thing to keep in mind about dynamic remarketing is that we'd need to set up an inventory feed through Google's Merchant Center. Social Remarketing We know billions of people visit sites like Facebook, thus we can create what is called a “walled garden.” Your visitor data is collected via a Facebook pixel and we target the visitors on Facebook. Facebook has several ad formats including carousel ads and video ads, which look great and go beyond traditionally animated ads.

Remarketing Attribution

When it comes to performance and attribution, “ the last click” will be key for remarketing attribution. However, this may mean your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign may move to the assisted conversions column, so don’t cancel it just yet. We always recommend looking at the last interaction, first interaction, and assisted conversion reports in Google Analytics. If you want to incentivize and/or remind visitors to finish an action on your website or shopping cart, then remarketing is the tool for you. Since you are only targeting your previous visitors, it’s also not very expensive; which, is even more of a reason to set it up. If you are looking for a partner, consider us here at Actuate Media.

About Actuate Media

Actuate Media is a digital marketing agency with offices in Seattle and Tampa. Our team has run hundreds of digital advertising campaigns nationwide including SEM, SEO, Display Advertising, Video Advertising, and more. We are proud to have completed the Google Partner’s Specialist Challenge and we are Google Ads & Analytics, certified specialists. Our agency implements a data-driven approach connecting advertising results and analytics, aggregating the data for future analysis allowing our partners to make smart advertising decisions in the future to gain a competitive advantage.
Written by the Actuate Media team · Reviewed by
Brad Holly, MBA · Partner, Actuate Media

20+ years in performance marketing across paid search, paid social, and analytics. LinkedIn

Last reviewed: December 2
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