Google Adwords Dynamic Remarketing

About remarketing in Google Ads almost any user of this system is aware. However, not all advertisers are aware that remarketing can be both conventional and dynamic. We will consider all the features of this tool below.

Dynamic remarketing allows you to show ads with goods and services to users who have previously explored this product. The dynamic remarketing model compares favorably with conventional process automation. AdWords creates ads, selects an audience without the participation of an advertiser, based on data about products in an online store.

Setting up dynamic remarketing can bring a lot of benefits to a business because the conversion rate of regular search ad campaigns and dynamic remarketing ads is almost the same. But the cost per click of the latter is lower, which means that the transaction itself is cheaper in the end.

A user is more likely to buy a product or service they have previously viewed if they offer a discount on it or are promised an additional gift when buying. In this way, you can lure customers to re-visit the site and order.

What is dynamic remarketing?

Dynamic remarketing is an effective marketing tool that allows you to show personalized advertising offers to visitors based on their previous activity on your website. Such ads are displayed on the Google Display Network, which includes partner sites, YouTube video hosting, Gmail and many other sites.

Unlike regular remarketing, which uses static banners, in dynamic remarketing advertisements are generated automatically based on data about the products a specific user has viewed or added to their cart.

This allows you to “catch up” with a potential customer who left the site and remind him of the products he was viewing using a personalized advertising message. For example, if a person visited the website of an online store and looked at certain models of smartphones, he would subsequently be shown banners with these particular models.

How is dynamic remarketing different from standard remarketing?

The principle of operation of these two tools is similar – the visitor opens the site, examines the goods or services, and then leaves the resource without placing an order. After that, such a user gets into the remarketing list. The advertiser’s ads are shown to him in order to encourage him to return to the online store and make a conversion.

But there are significant differences in how dynamic and static remarketing work:

1. Personalization. A potential client sees in the ad exactly the product that he studied earlier. This is fundamentally different from the usual remarketing, when a visitor is shown a standard and identical ad every time. This makes dynamic remarketing much more effective.
2. Automation. All that is needed from the advertiser is to create and upload a feed with product information to the system. The system will generate ads automatically using titles, pictures, prices and other data. As a result, dynamic remarketing saves a lot of time.
3. Working with the target audience. If in classic remarketing it is necessary to divide the target audience into groups and form their own creatives and calls to action for each, then in dynamic campaigns, Google’s artificial intelligence itself selects the ad format and creative content based on user data.
4. Application. While classic harassment advertising is universal, dynamic remarketing works best with online stores and sites with an impressive range of services.

The Benefits of Dynamic Remarketing

Google AdWords Dynamic Remarketing is the most converting and effective tool in Google Display Network. It has a lot of advantages:

• You can sell expensive goods. For example, a tool for selling jewelry, expensive household appliances, gadgets, cars works well.
• Reduces the total cost of customer acquisition. The advertiser gets more conversions at a lower cost. So. In the United States and Europe, stalking advertising accounts for 30 to 70% of all eCommerce orders.
• Ability to test creatives. Since the system creates dozens of different ads within one campaign, the advertiser can choose the most effective ones and use them later to increase efficiency.
• You can segment the audience. You can create a separate group for those who added a product to the cart and did not order, or for those who viewed expensive items in the catalog. Furthermore, you can use a separate bidding strategy for all audience groups.

When is Google Ads dynamic remarketing effective?

To determine whether Google Ads dynamic remarketing is effective for you, you need to go to Google Analytics and find a report that will show how much time has passed from the moment a visitor first entered the site to the moment of purchase. It is important to pay attention to what percentage of conversions occurs on the first day after visiting the site. If the indicator is less than 50%, dynamic remarketing will work perfectly. When you can use dynamic remarketing:

• The user visited the store and got acquainted with the characteristics of the product;
• The customer placed an order or sent an item to the cart, but did not make a payment;
• A person was interested in the products that are on your site through a search engine;
• A customer bought a product from you, but you can offer additional accessories for it;
• The user has ordered an item that will soon need an update or additional service.

Setting up Google Dynamic Remarketing

Setting up Google Dynamic Remarketing is as follows:

Audience gathering

To connect a dynamic campaign, you need to collect lists of users to whom such ads will be shown. To do this, add a dynamic remarketing tag to the <head> section of your website. There are three main ways to do this.

Google Tag Manager

Open your Google AdWords account and find the “Audience Manager” menu item. Here you need to open the “Your data sources” section. In the “Remarketing” block, you will need to set the switch to the “Collect data about specific actions …” option, as well as select the appropriate type of company activity:

Specify in the next window that you plan to connect the tag to the site using Google Tag Manager. You need to copy the unique conversion ID that the system will assign in order to specify it later in GTM.

In the Tag Manager, find the Variables section. There, create new JavaScript variables. Information on how to do this can be found in the Google help:

When the variables are created, you need to go to the “Tags” section. There, create a new tag with the type “Google Ads Remarketing”. At this stage, you will have to specify a unique ID from AdWords, as well as activate the launch of the tag in the “All Pages” mode:

Global Site Tag

This tag allows you to track specific events on the site and makes it a little easier to set up remarketing for inexperienced advertisers.

Open your personal account in your AdWords account and create a new target action in the “Conversions” section. As such an action, you can choose to add a product to the cart, checkout, visit a specific page, etc.:

A code will appear in a new window, which you will need to insert on each page of the site before the opening <head> tag.

Google Analytics

Link your Google Ads account to the analytics system. It is important that both services are registered to the same account. Next, in Analytics, you will need to create special parameters that you plan to track (in the same way as it was done for GTM earlier in this guide):

After that, you need to add a remarketing tag to each page of the resource in order to collect data about the target audience. When you’re done, find the “Dynamic Attributes” section in your Analytics account settings and create another one with the desired configuration:

Building remarketing lists

If the collection of audiences was configured earlier, the system will collect lists of people who visited the site on its own. However, you can add your own lists. For example, include those who added an item to their cart and didn’t make a purchase in the past week, or those who visited high-value product pages:

Starting an advertising campaign

To set up dynamic remarketing in AdWords, go to the Campaigns section and create a new display ad campaign:

Don’t forget to tick the “Dynamic Ads” block:

Select the desired target audience from the suggested by the system or created by yourself:

Next, start creating ads. Google Ads will automatically generate ads based on the product feed, but sometimes the system will access store data that is filled in manually. To do this, you need to add a logo, website address and a short description of the company’s activities. When all the settings are made, you can start showing ads.

How to create a product feed for dynamic remarketing?

A feed is an upload of products from a website in .xlsx or .csv format. The product feed is uploaded to Google Ads, and based on this information, the system collects data on those products that interested the visitors of the online store.

As part of the feed, 7 required and 12 optional fields can be uploaded. These include the product page URL, photo link, price, product name, product ID, and more.

To generate a similar product feed, you can use two methods:

CSV file

To create such a file, you need to enter the Google Ads interface, go to the “Settings” tab and then to the “Business data” section:

After that, you will need to click the button with the “+” icon and select the “Dynamic Display Ads Feed” menu item. In the proposed list, select the item that describes your type of activity as closely as possible:

AdWords will prompt you to add a new feed and title it. If this is your first time doing this, it’s best to download the CSV file template from the site first and fill it with your data.

Add information about products in your online store to the table. The data in the CSV file must match the selected business type. Their structure is described in Google help.

The plate with the goods must be uploaded in the Google Ads advertising account. To do this, use the “Commercial data” block. If you made mistakes while compiling the feed, the advertising platform will send a notification after uploading. In the future, errors can be manually corrected in the advertising account or re-upload the product feed.

Important! It usually takes up to 3 days for a data feed to be moderated. If the process drags on for a longer time, it is better to contact the advertising system support service.

Google Merchant Center

You can also create a product feed for Google Ads dynamic remarketing in the Merchant Center. To do this, enter the service interface and go to the “Settings” section. Find the “Linked Accounts” section in the top drop-down menu and link to Google Ads:

After submitting your request, open a Google Ads account. There will be an offer to synchronize accounts:

Here you will need to click “View Details” and click “Approve”:

After that, the link will be established, and the products added to the Merchant Center will automatically be synchronized with AdWords, where a ready-made feed will appear to run ads. This eliminates the need to manually generate CSV files.

What types of ads can be set up in dynamic remarketing?

In dynamic remarketing, all ads are generated automatically by the system. However, Google Ads can use three different formats.

Carousels

This format allows you to demonstrate several products to your target audience within one ad. The carousel consists of 3–10 slides with images and can be used both on mobile devices and on the desktop version of the site. Carousels give the best results for promoting online stores of clothing, shoes, cosmetics and other goods.

Banners

Adaptive banners can also be displayed on both smartphones and PCs. The ad size automatically adjusts to the user’s screen. You can place from 1 to 4 products in them, and also add buttons to go to the site.

Multi-format ads

This type of advertising automatically adapts the format to the characteristics of the platform for display – be it social networks, mobile or desktop resources. For this adaptation, AdWords uses artificial intelligence. This allows you to make the most of your advertising budget across different platforms.

What is the difficulty of setting up a dynamic campaign?

Dynamic remarketing is proving to be a very effective tool and is often the most effective among other display tools. However, it also has one major drawback. Setting up AdWords dynamic remarketing is a rather complicated process that requires considerable experience and knowledge from a specialist. So, while working with this tool, the following difficulties arise:

1. To set up data transfer to a special feed, the help of an experienced programmer is required (because if the settings are not made correctly at this stage, then money will be spent on advertising, and there will be no sales);
2. It is important to constantly conduct analytics and, based on the data received, implement changes to the settings (for example, ads are shown on various sites in the Google media network, their effectiveness will be different and some of them may work out in the negative, so regular cleaning of sites is required);
3. The tool requires meticulous support in order to obtain a favorable cost per conversion for a specific group of products (it is one thing to sell a fireplace insert for $1000, and quite another to sell a chimney to a fireplace for $20, the cost per sale should be different in each case and such product groups should be accompanied in different ways).

How to optimize your AdWords dynamic remarketing campaign?

To increase the effectiveness of your advertising campaign using Google dynamic remarketing, use the following tips:

1. Analyze the time from the first click on an advertisement to the completion of a target action (for example, a purchase). You may need to adjust the timing of your ads to avoid wasting your budget on uninterested users.
2. Conduct an audit and disable advertising for irrelevant products. Often, dynamic remarketing is not effective for cheap products – the decision to purchase them is made quite spontaneously and the user does not need to be reminded again about the offer. It is better to focus on expensive goods, the purchase decision of which is not made immediately.
3. Test different target audiences. Try to divide the entire site audience into segments depending on the actions they performed (those who added an item to the cart but did not place an order, viewed the item but did not add it to the cart, etc.). Next, for each segment, you need to set up a separate advertising campaign with unique targeting and creative. This will allow you to identify the most promising audiences and adjust your approach to increase conversion.
4. Conduct split testing in creatives. When designing ads, experiment with different options for headlines, descriptions, images, and colors in banners – this way you can determine the most effective ones.
5. Check the quality of the automatically generated feed. Product URLs may be transmitted incorrectly, images may be missing, and prices and specifications may not be displayed correctly. All this negatively affects the click-through rate of ads.

What if dynamic remarketing doesn’t work?

If your dynamic remarketing campaign is not delivering the expected results, try implementing the following recommendations:

• Check that your targeting settings are correct. Perhaps the advertisement is being shown to a non-core audience. It is imperative to take into account the date and time of the user’s last visit to the site (it is usually recommended to count no more than a month from this date when setting up remarketing), products viewed or added to the cart, the amount of the potential order, as well as the geolocation of the potential client.
• Analyze the assortment. During the audit, it is worth highlighting product items that received a lot of clicks from advertising, but low conversion. Perhaps these are illiquid goods or their prices are significantly higher than those of competitors. Understand pricing or turn off advertising for these items.
• Add special offers. You can set up a rule in which the user will be shown an advertisement with a discount on the product he viewed. An additional incentive may be a gift with purchase or free shipping.
• Expand your audience reach. To do this, you can show ads to an audience similar to yours (Look Alike), and also enable impressions on sites outside the Google Display Network.
• Analyze your competitors’ advertising campaigns. It is important to understand what products the main players in your niche promote in remarketing, on what platforms they buy advertising, and what formats are most often used. This will help you identify working approaches in the desired industry and use them, taking into account the specifics of your offer. For analysis, you can use specialized services such as Ahrefs, SERanking or Serpstat.

In our projects, with scrupulous support, Google dynamic remarketing brings from 7% to 18% of site sales. At the same time, the cost of an application is 35% lower than with a search advertising campaign. So for the theme of selling musical equipment, the conversion rate of visitors who returned to specific products: for the sale of toys and puzzles, the indicator was as follows: It should be taken into account that we are conducting these projects relatively recently and these statistics are only for 1 month.

Returning a website user with dynamic Google ad remarketing is cheaper than looking for a new user.

It is easier and cheaper to return a specific product with a price, description and product image than “general remarketing”.

Total business benefit: 7% to 18% increase in project sales.