Re-marketing lists for Search ads or RLSA for short are a relatively new feature from Google that came out last year. This allows you to use a re-marketing list to target your search ads to a customer who has already been to your site but is searching on Google again. Previously this was only available for the Google Display Network so this has been a great development in re-marketing and now it is a powerful way for you to provide an even more customized experience for your potential customers.
When using re-marketing you tag the pages of your site with a tracking pixel you can create in Adwords and this will start collecting an audience as soon as it goes in. The default setting to keep the user in the list is 30 days however you can increase this but keep in mind that the longer the user is being re-marketed to the less likely they are going to convert if they haven’t already. This however does depend on the time to conversion of the product or service that you are advertising.
Once you have an audience list set up you can find it under the audience tab. You can then use this to make the campaign target the selected audience.
There are a number of ways that this feature can be of use to you and they are
Using those broad keywords you’d given up on
Depending on the keywords you are using you’ll usually see that broad is the most expensive for getting results which can lead to you reducing your bids or even pausing the keyword as part of your optimisation. The down side would be that you are not getting as much reach for your campaigns anymore by excluding broad however RLSA allows you to target the terms exclusively with your audience and no one else. This will limit the cost and make sure that you are there when they start searching again which can be especially useful when using generic terms on broad.
Optimize Your Bids
Depending on what you want to do with your user list you can set your campaigns to either up weight or down weight your bids for this audience and then use normal CPC’s for everyone else. So for example you have a generics campaign for sports shoes and when the person who has been to your site already searches for sports shoes your ad will be more visible for them, thus increasing your chances that they will return to your site to complete the purchase.
Customized ad copy for your audience
The third benefit of using RLSA is that you can customize your ad for your audience. If you have created a re-marketing pixel for say your basketball shoes page then when some of your users who have visited this page and are now in your audience pool search for shoes you can make sure that you are visible with an ad that is customized to show off the latest deals you have on basketball shoes. This makes your ad even more relevant to your audience and should result in a much higher click through rate than what you have been achieving previously since you are showing an ad that is more appealing to the user than a standard generic ad.
Now that you’ve had an introduction to RLSA you should start experimenting with your audiences and the type of messages that you can use to get them back to the site to convert. The more relevant the ad the better the click through rate you’ll get by being in the right place at the right time.
Cheers for now
Meyrick
1 : An Introduction to Paid Search Traffic and Adwords
2 : Adwords Campaigns and Keywords
3 : Keywords: Which is the right match type for you?
4 : Creative: why this is important?
5 : Quality Score – What is it Good for?
6 : Google’s tools and what they do
7 : How to use Google Analytics
8: Ad Extensions – What are they and what do they do?
