Have you ever visited a company’s website and from then on noticed their ads seemingly follow you around on the internet? Perhaps you were using a booking portal and, for the next few days, saw ads encouraging you to book your flight or accommodation ASAP. This is Google Remarketing at work.
Google Remarketing was developed a number of years ago in response to the growing need to get customers back to websites. We find that while most purchasing decisions begin online — and many companies spend huge amounts of money encouraging potential customers to visit their website — only a small minority of those customers will actually make a transaction on their first visit. Most will leave to continue browsing the internet, be called away from their desks, or simply decide to wait for a couple of days before making a decision. This is where Google Remarketing comes in.
When you’re using Google Remarketing and a potential customer is browsing your website, Google uses cookies to capture their IP address and place it on your list. From then on, everybody in your Google Remarketing list is shown your banner advertisements while they browse the rest of the web.
You may not know this, but Google actually controls most of the banner ads on the internet through its AdSense network. So, while some of the ads you see on the front page of sites like news.com.au and gumtree.com are specially contracted advertising, most of the ads on other pages with lower traffic levels are populated by Google.
So how is this of benefit to you?
When your customers see your ads around the internet, it keeps your brand front of mind. Customers are more likely to come back to the website if they’ve been reminded of your site for the past few days, particularly if they’re shopping around.
Not only does Google Remarketing make for a particularly effective brand awareness campaign and encourage return visits to your site, but we often find it assists with the scalability of your business too. Not everyone knows how Google Remarketing works, so if your ads are seen on news.com.au next to a major company who could have paid thousands of dollars for that space, it helps you seem more important, relevant, and often bigger than you are. Little do they know you’ve paid only a couple of cents to appear there to only that customer.
Google Remarketing can be an incredibly cost-effective exercise, usually taking up only a small percentage of our clients’ overall marketing budgets. For as little as a couple of hundred dollars per month, you could be showing banner advertisements to everyone who visits your website and helping to secure the customers you’ve worked so hard to attract in the first place. For such a small cost, the question often comes down to — why not?