Remarketing: What It Means for Your Website

Remarketing is the practice of showing an ad on a web page to someone who has visited the site previously. For example, if you've read an article on my website and then come to my website to check my latest posts, you'll see an ad for the article you read on my website.

In the ad, you'll see a thumbnail or picture of the article and click "Read More." After reading the article, you'll have the option to buy it (if it's a product you're interested in buying), sign up for a newsletter, sign up for a webinar, subscribe to my RSS feed, and bookmark the page.

You'll get the idea of what remarketing is from the description above, but I'll cover a few additional points in this post. I'll also give a brief description of the types of remarketing ads I use, as well as some of the ad services I use to serve them. It is important for those of you who reside in India and are interested in remarketing to know about the best remarketing services in India with a focus on customer service.

Note that I personally use the word remarketing to refer to advertising to the site visitors I mentioned at the beginning of the post. I prefer using that term because it refers to marketing to those visitors.

I usually do not run remarketing ads on my site, but I do run remarketing ads on some of my other blogs.

Before I begin, I want to note that I've been using remarketing for about two years, so it's something I'm somewhat familiar with, and I've only written a couple of posts about it. However, the posts I've written about it have primarily been technical or marketing posts. I think the more general purpose posts could benefit from a summary of how remarketing works, so that's what you're reading now.

What Remarketing Means For Your Website

Remarketing is one of many different marketing techniques that can help you drive more traffic to your website, increase conversions, and improve the customer experience on your site. It's all part of marketing, which means you can't just ignore it.

However, if you're just starting to learn about online marketing, you don't need to be overwhelmed by all the terminology or complexity. Here's a list of the key concepts that make up remarketing.

Remarketing is usually referred to as remarketing because it involves marketing to site visitors who visited your website in the past.

I'll be talking a lot about "visitor marketing" in this post, but that can refer to remarketing, too. I'll use the term remarketing to mean referring to marketing to the site visitors I mentioned at the beginning of the post.

Here's a basic explanation of the different kinds of remarketing.

Visitor Remarketing

When a visitor comes to your website, you can track them as a visitor and then remarket to them later. If your site collects unique user data, such as user email addresses and their interests, you can target specific content or advertisements to users based on those insights.

If you collect visitor information, such as their IP addresses and website behavior, you can also remarket based on their online behavior.

Remarketing based on unique visitor information can be great. It gives you more data to build a highly personalized relationship with your visitors.

For example, if a visitor has just arrived from a search engine, the visitor's search query will be recorded. You can then use that data to remarket the same ad on that website later.

If your website collects first-party data, such as your user's email address or other information they provided to your website, you can then remarket to them based on that data.

Third-party remarketing (also called remarketing by referral) involves remarketing to visitors who may have visited your website from a website that has been optimized to redirect visitors to your site.

I won't cover referral remarketing in detail here, as I'd recommend reading the Google Ads Optimize remarketing guide.

You can apply an action to a remarketing campaign to determine its purpose. I explain how to set different campaign purposes in the sections below.

Let's start with an overview of the settings that can be changed when you're setting up a remarketing campaign.

Remarketing Settings

Remarketing settings help you optimize a remarketing campaign. You can customize them by looking at the various configuration options.

At a high level, you can configure two things:

If a campaign is triggered based on visitor behavior, you can select when a campaign should be automatically triggered. In other words, what events should trigger a campaign?

You can also select one or more websites on which a campaign should be triggered. That's useful if you want to create remarketing campaigns targeting your visitors who visited only a specific site.

To view and manage remarketing settings, visit the ad formats section of the ad builder.

The two settings that are part of remarketing are the following:

Campaign Settings

The first setting is the Ad Group Targeting. In Google Ads, this is the "where" to be remarketed to. In other words, which website visitors do you want to see the ad with.

For example, you might create a campaign to remarket to your website visitors who are located in the United States. The ad would then show to that visitor only when they visit a website in the United States.

When setting up this campaign, you have to specify the web site’s domain (the part of a website's URL that follows the www) and the geographic location.