Marketers know that customers usually need to see an ad multiple times before they decide to click. Well the good news is that Google just announced it is rolling out a remarketing solution for Adwords.

This effectively means advertisers can have their ads “follow” users around the web when they view sites in Google’s content network.

So How Does Remarketing Work?

So let’s say you are an advertiser and you want to “remarket” your product or service to people who have visited your homepage, or even a specific landing page somewhere else on your website, all you do is put a snippet of code (or a remarketing tag which you get from Google) on your webpage and set up a new Adwords Campaign for it. If someone visits that page they get a cookie which adds them to the remarketing list for that tag (i.e. page).

When you login to your Adwords account you should see a new “audiences” tab and on this tab you can set up a new ad and choose which remarketing list to target.

When users view sites on the Google content network, Google recognises if they are on any remarketing lists and can then show them appropriate ads associated with the cookie.

Brand Visibility

This type of ad campaign is ideal for branding. At the most simply level you just put the tag on all your webpages and then when users browse other sites on the content network, as long as you are bidding enough, you have a better chance that your ad will be displayed, since they are on your remarketing list and you will increase customer mindshare.

A 2004 study by IAB and Nielsen showed sponsored ads had the greatest impact on “unaided” brand awareness. Their study showed that in response to naming a specific brand leader, people were 23% more likely to name a brand displayed on pages containing contextually targeted ads, than the control group that was not exposed to the ads.

A more recent study by Microsoft in 2008 found that display advertising is 7 times more effective when combined with search. If this is the case then the ability to target those display ads to users who have already found you on a search engine but not purchased yet, would be very powerful.

Targeting Your Advertising

There are many other uses for Google remarketing. For example you can set up different remarketing ads for each of your products, each with a different message. Or you can target only users who don’t convert, or who abandon their purchase at the shopping cart. You can also use it to up-sell and cross-sell different products.

Interest-based Categories

Google’s remarketing ads are part of its interest-based advertising solution. Your ads are shown to people who have already shown an interest in your offer because they have already visitied your site. The ads are therefore more likely to be relevant, more likely to get a higher click-through, and more likely to enhance the user experience.

Google is also beta testing interest category marketing which will allow you to display your ads to users who have expressed interest in a particular category, for example sports, travel, or food. With interest category marketing, ads are shown to people who have visited specific types of websites.

More info on Google’s roll out here.