Google Ads Remarketing – Best Practices

Retargeting—also known as Remarketing by Google—offers advertisers a wide range of options to bring previous website visitors and potential customers back to their store and site if they left without making a purchase or completing a desired conversion/lead.

After all, users often don't convert into buyers right away during their first visit to an online shop. The customer journey can stretch across several touchpoints before the final purchase decision is made. Remarketing, or retargeting with Google Ads, is an effective way to re-engage shoppers along this path. If you are a small business, we also have an article on our blog about maximizing efficiency with low Google Ads costs.

Our Remarketing Best Practices for Google Ads

To help you get the most out of Google's remarketing tool—driving higher conversion rates and boosting revenue—check out our top tips below:

• Use multiple time clusters: People who visited your site just yesterday are likely much closer to making a purchase decision than those whose visit was 30 days ago. For this reason, your campaigns should include multiple remarketing lists with varying cookie durations. This allows you to set tiered bids for different target audiences and engage them with tailored ad copy. We recommend at least three time cohorts: the last visit was up to 30 days ago / up to 90 days ago / up to 180 days ago. However, some advertisers offer products that require an exceptionally long list duration. This is often the case for many B2B providers, where decision-making processes leading to the final purchase are more complex.

• Dynamic Remarketing: Unlike standard remarketing, dynamic remarketing shows visitors tailored offers featuring the latest products they viewed on your site—or related products from the same category. If your product portfolio is already integrated into Google Merchant Center, you're not far from dynamic remarketing. You only need to update the remarketing code on your site and configure a few variables. Since 2019, dynamic remarketing can only be delivered through responsive display ads. This means you will need additional images, your logo, and headlines along with descriptions.

• Avoid delivery on low-value pages and "Below the Fold": Google allows you to exclude various types of website content. Examples include pages with profane or coarse language, as well as sexually suggestive content. While you don't need to be overly restrictive, we recommend excluding parked domains, error pages, and gambling sites, for instance. In our experience, pages in these categories mostly generate useless impressions.

Additionally, you can exclude "Below the Fold" placements—meaning ad space that visitors can only see by scrolling down.

• Google Remarketing for brand building: The value of remarketing for brand building is somewhat debated. If you constantly target your customers with high frequency and show them the exact same product over an extended period, it might actually harm your brand. Over time, users could feel annoyed and frustrated. Nonetheless, you should set up at least one remarketing group with a long cookie duration, between a maximum of 360 and 540 days. To prevent ad fatigue, it's best to reach out to this group at intervals with longer pauses and a low frequency cap—for example, during special promotions like summer sales or the start of the booking season, using tailored offers and messaging. It has also been shown that remarketing can positively impact your direct traffic and time-on-site.

• Past buyers and Similar Audiences: You should always set up a dedicated remarketing group exclusively for customers who have already purchased from your shop. The cookie duration here can easily be a year or even longer. This group should also be re-engaged at longer intervals and for special promotions. Additionally, we recommend testing the "Similar Audiences" feature for this segment. Here, Google finds users for you who share the same characteristics and browsing/search behavior as your existing customers. This feature can prove very useful for customer acquisition.

• Use RLSA campaigns: Remarketing Lists for Search Ads allow you to customize search network campaigns for users who have already visited your website. This lets you re-engage users with tailored text ads, such as via the Google Display Network, and higher bids. It enables you to differentiate between new and returning customers/users through your messaging or special discounts, optimizing promotional content and sales campaigns.

• Run remarketing on the Display Network: Remarketing on the Google Display Network is especially promising. Banner ad messages are perceived much better by returning users during retargeting and are recognized faster than plain text ads. Visual recall serves as an important touchpoint in the customer lifecycle journey and often delivers better conversion rates than targeting new customers.

• Use customer lists: Customer Match is a powerful tool that allows you to use lists of known customers (e.g., newsletter subscribers). You need to implement these directly in your Google Ads account. However, this feature is currently no longer available by default across all accounts. To get it unlocked, you must meet certain criteria, such as having a minimum lifetime spend of €50,000 on your account.

Conclusion

Google Remarketing is a great way to boost conversions and your conversion rate. It gives you the power to retarget existing contacts with fresh offers. Put your products and your brand back on their radar and reignite the buying interest of your prospects and customers.

How we can help

Looking to use Google Ads Remarketing effectively and need a hand setting up or managing your campaigns? Get in touch with internetwarriors GmbH. Our certified Google Ads specialists are always happy to help!