What is Remarketing/Retargeting?

Retargeting works by tagging every visitor to your site and then displaying your ads to those customers on other sites in the Advertising network. These types of ads usually perform better than standard display ads. This is because the potential customer has already been to your site and will recognize your brand.

There are many retargeting companies out there such as Fetchback, AdRoll, Collective etc… This guide is specifically for Google AdWords because the setup is very simple and can be done without opening up new advertising accounts or committing to large ad budgets. This can be done in your existing AdWords account.

How do I set it up?

Step #1 — Set up Audience Profile

Go to the Shared Library section in the left hand menu of your AdWords account.

This will take you to a page where you will want to click “New Audience” and select “Remarketing list”. Fill out the form with a name and enter the number of days you’d like to track people for. If you enter 30, your ads will be displayed to anyone who visited the site in the last 30 days.

After you save the form above, you will need to click on the “Tag” link in the list of audiences. This will show you the code that needs to be installed on your site. There is an option for HTTPS, be sure to select that if your site serves pages through a secure connection (as most eCommerce sites do).

Step #2 — Install Tracking Pixel(s)

After you finished clicking around in Step #1 and you have the final code, you need to get it installed on your site. However, before you install the code you will need to figure out what pages should collect retargeting info. Keep in mind that you can set up multiple audiences in AdWords and show different ads based on the audience profile.

For example, let’s make believe we have an apparel site that we’d like to run a Remarketing campaign on. It would probably be best if we made separate audiences for Men, Women and Children’s apparel. This will allow us to tailor the ads based on the visitors buying preferences. Someone who was shopping for kids t-shirts will see a relevant ad and someone who was looking at a men’s sweatshirt will see what they were looking for. The more granular you get, the better performance your ad will have. Keep in mind that you don’t want to get very granular if you do not have a lot of traffic on your site.

Once you decide how to set up your audience profiles, circle back to step one create them all and copy the code into your website.

Step #3 — Set up Campaign

Set up a new campaign with separate Ad Groups for each audience. You will need to enter the same information as a regular campaign. Make sure that you have the Display Network turned on.

Go to the Audience tab in your Remarketing campaign. If you do not see it, you need to enable it by clicking on the “more” arrow.

Once you get to the Audience tab, click on the “add audiences” button and select your Campaign/Ad Group. A new screen should pop out with the audience profiles that you created in Step #1. Click “add” to add these to this Ad Group. If you have several Remarketing list, you will want to put them in separate ad groups so that you can target the ad creative accordingly.

Step #4 — Design/Upload Banner Ads

This is the part where you want to upload existing banner ads or use the Google AdWords Display Ad Builder.

Image Ads

To upload standard image ads, go to the “Ads” section of your campaign, click “New Ad” and select “Image Ad”. You will then need to upload image ads one at a time.

Display Ad Builder

If you do not have any display ads or if you would like to build ads featuring several different products, you can use the Display Ad Builder. In the “Ads” section click “New Ad” and select “Display Ad Builder”. This will take you to a page with many different options. I like to use the “Product Showcase” which Google describes as follows:

Templates that show a selection of product images with different destination URLs. Promoted products are shown like a catalog in these templates.

You will be given a form where you can enter information for multiple products and it will automatically build a dynamic ad in a variety of sizes.

Once you upload you ads, just make sure all the standard campaign settings are filled out properly (keywords, bids, budgets etc…) — At this point you should be done.

Keep in mind that a Remarketing campaign takes a while to pick up because it needs to collect visitor information so that your “Audience” can be targeted properly. Every time someone visits your site where the code is installed they will be tagged with the audience profile and they will start seeing your ads within the Google Advertising Network.

Good luck. Happy Retargeting!

Google recently started testing a new ad extension called the Communication Ad Extension. This allows merchants to collect customer email signups directly in the ad. As of now, this seems to be a beta program with no information published by Google besides for in the AdWords support forums.

What is this?

The communication ad extension is a new extension that allows AdWords advertisers to collect leads directly from Google search.

There are two types of this ad format:

1. Communication Ads for Daily Deal sites: This type allows Daily Deal sites to collect email addresses and zip codes of new sign-ups to their
offer emails.

2. Communication Ads for Newsletters: This variant allows large businesses to collect email addresses and zip codes of people interested in joining a
newsletter or email list from a given merchant.

How do I get this?

I wanted to test this for a client, so I emailed Google AdWords support requesting additional signup information. I received a reply from Google within a day or so requesting specific information so they can review the account in question.

Once they review the account and see whether you are eligible, the ad extension goes live pretty quickly. When the ad is live, you’ll start receiving email notifications whenever someone fills out the form.

There are no guarantees about which sites Google will accept into the beta, however it seems pretty straightforward and can’t hurt to ask. I would suggest you email AdWords support and see if they will let you in the program.

How does it perform?

I have been testing this for a few weeks already. Currently there are no reports in AdWords for this ad extension. However, it seems to work reasonably well as we have been getting quite a few signups on a regular basis since this went live.

Image Credit: Search Engine Roundtable

It seems that the Google help center has recently been updated to state:

If a user search triggers your ad to run with Sitelinks, our system may include up to six of your additional links on your ad, along with the main landing page link. The higher the quality of your ad, the more likely Sitelinks may be able to run on that ad.

How many sitelinks are you seeing?

Thanks David.

The Google AdWords Product Listing Ads generally perform very well for most eCommerce retailers. You can read our guide on how to set up Product Listing Ads. Here are some extra tips to help you set up and optimize the campaign correctly.

Google Merchant Center

In your Google Merchant Center feed, you can add the following columns to help with Product Listing Ads.

Google AdWords

Once you add these fields to your feed file, you can filter your campaigns by grouping and labels.

You can find more info in the Google Help Center.

Google AdWords/Google Checkout Badge

Hello,

Please be aware that beginning on June 2, 2011, the Google Checkout badge will no longer appear on your ads on Google search results.

We’re making this change to improve the user experience on Google search results pages.

For more information, please visit https://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?answer=1323905

Sincerely,

The Google Checkout Team

Usually, I tend to ignore these type of pop-up notifications… but I’m glad I didn’t miss this one. Click through to get more info on their next great advertising format that arrives this May: Contextually relevant blimp ads.

From their announcement:

Introducing gBlimps

After years of meticulous design, our brand new fleet of blimps is finally ready to take to the skies. Soon you’ll be seeing Google blimps (a.k.a. gBlimps) flying over major cities, displaying AdWords ads to a larger audience than ever before.

Take your ads to new heights

If you already have an AdWords account, using Blimp Ads is easy. Our gBlimps are designed specifically to display your existing text ads in their original format.

Rethink the way you target

With Blimp Ads, you can target your audience in exciting new ways. Specify the height and location of the blimp, as well as the time you want the ad to run. You can even target special events like football games, outdoor concerts, meteor showers, and more!

You can sign up here. Or you can laugh because it’s a pretty funny April Fool’s joke.

Here is what the old interface looked like:

Google AdWords Account Snapshot Old Interface

You will notice a new link on the top left that says “New version”, click on this to activate the new version. Note: When I clicked on this link the page just seemed to hang, I reloaded AdWords and was able to access the new interface.

Google AdWords Account Snapshot - New Version Link

Once you successfully activate the new interface, you should see a sleek modern dashboard that looks like this:

Google AdWords Account Snapshot - New Interface

You have the ability to add new custom modules by setting up saved filters in the standard campaigns tab. Any saved filter will be populated into this box:

Google AdWords - Custom Modules

Enjoy the new dashboard…

If you have many Google AdWords campaigns it can be a pain to copy them all into Microsoft adCenter. To Microsoft’s credit their are several tools to help with this process, some easier than others. I will concentrate on the simplest way possible: Using Google AdWords Editor to export a CSV which can then be imported in Microsoft adCenter Desktop. There is one caveat, this process is Windows only and will not work on a Mac or Linux.

Step 1 – Export your campaigns from Google AdWords Editor by clicking File –> Export Spreadsheet (CSV) –> Export Campaigns. This will prompt you to save a CSV file of your AdWords campaigns.

Step 2 – In the Microsoft adCenter Desktop tool you can click on the “Import” button pictured below. This will open a dialog asking you what kind of file you want to import, select “Import from Google.”

Step 3 – Browse and select the file you exported from Google AdWords Editor.

Step 4 – Review all fields to make sure that are mapped to the correct Microsoft adCenter fields.

Step 5 – Review and approve the results.

Once you have successfully imported the campaigns into adCenter desktop, all you need to do is upload the changes to Microsoft adCenter. You should be set!

As always, if you have any questions, please post them below.

Ever since Microsoft made Bing Shopping free, merchants have been lining up to get their products listed on the new Bing Shopping. The was process was very manual, and every merchant application had to be reviewed by Bing manually. They have recently launched a new tool within Microsoft adCenter for managing your Bing Shopping product listings so that merchants and advertisers can have one interface for both adCenter and Bing Shopping.

Here is a quick “how-to” migrate your existing Bing shopping account or create a new account within adCenter:

Step 1 - Login to Microsoft adCenter and go to the “Tools” tab. Once there, click on the “Bing Shopping Account Management” link pictured below:

Step 2 - For existing accounts, select “Migrate” and enter your Bing Shopping login credentials. For new accounts, select “Create New Account.”

Step 3 - Once you enter your login information or create a new account, you will be taken to the Store Settings screen. You can enter all your store info as well as upload a logo.

Step 4 - Go to the “Catalog Management” tab and choose how you will send the feed. In this new adCenter console, you now have the ability to have Bing automatically import your feed from an HTTP URL. This is a new feature that was not previously available in the Bing Shopping portal. If you choose “Microsoft Download”, you will be prompted to enter the URL where the feed can be downloaded. If you select “Merchant Upload”, you will need to enter the file name and manually upload the file with the FTP credentials specified in the next tab.

You should check back in a few hours to ensure the feed was processed correctly. Additionally, you may want to click the “View Catalog Quality Feedback” link and check for any specific feed errors. At this point you should be done… It’s a fairly simple process. However, if you have any questions, feel free to comment below.