Create powerful Remarketing campaigns with Alavi.ai

Remarketing, also known as retargeting, is a way to connect with users who have previously carried out a task on your website. Remember the last time you visited a website and added an item to the cart but did not make a purchase, then saw an ad for that product while browsing the internet right after? That was thanks to Remarketing!

While it sounds simple enough, Remarketing actually has a ton of advantages and if used correctly, can be an extremely valuable tool to increase returns on your digital ad spends.

Remarketing allows you to strategically position your ads in front of these audiences as they browse Google or its partner websites, which helps you increase brand awareness and remind those audiences already familiar with you to make a purchase.

Why Remarket?

1. Good Timing – Reach out to potential customers just after they’ve been on your website and are interested in your offering
2. Very Focused – Target users based what they looked at or did on your website/app
3. Encourages Action – Customize messaging according to what a user was interested so your ads are more persuasive and gets the user make a purchase

Common Remarketing Strategies

1. Target Cart Dropouts – Reach out to users who added items to their cart but did not complete the purchase
2. Target All Site Visitors – Reach out to users who visited your website

Potential to do More

However, while these strategies may yield short term results, they do not make full use of remarketing’s potential and are therefore not best for the long run.

• Cart dropouts and site visitor remarketing segments are too broad
• Your user base consists of a wide variety of attributes and you need further segmentation of these audiences to create laser-focused remarketing campaigns

Examples of Remarketing Segment Variables:

• Location – Country, region, city etc.
• Device – Device category, operating systems/versions, browser etc.
• Engagement – Number of sessions, session duration, page views etc.

Greater Focus for Greater Returns

Using the variables mentioned above effectively could deliver hundreds of profitable customer segments to target via remarketing.

But doing this manually is often a daunting task. This is why we recommend an online application like Alavi.ai which uses proprietary machine learning algorithms to do this for you.

Here’s an example of how it works:

You can then create this segment in Google Ads via Google Analytics.

1.  Login to your Google Analytics account, and click “Admin” button on the bottom left corner

2. Under “Property” > Audience Definitions, select “Audiences”

3. Select “+New Audience” to open the creation wizard

4. Let’s name this audience as “Users: Pakistan + >500sec Duration + 2-5 Page views” to easily understand what it is (feel free to use your own if that’s easier). Select “Create New” to proceed.

5. Select age and gender brackets (remember to fill in the details of your default target group unless specified otherwise by Alavi.ai)

6. Choose “Location” type as “Country” and look for “Pakistan”

7. To select the next set of conditions – you can use either the “Behaviour” tab or the “Conditions” tab (the latter will give you more control over the selection criteria) – then select the options as shown below followed by “Apply”

8. In the next window, which shows an estimated user count (for the last 7 days) that matches the entered criteria, select the membership duration based on your understanding of the time-to-conversion

9. Select your Google Ads account and press “Publish”

10. Now, let’s head back to Google Ads and use the audience we just created by selecting the “Tools” button and then, “Audience Manager” as shown below

11. You can now select the audience that was created on Google Analytics within Google Ads by pressing “Add to” > “Campaigns” and then select the campaign you’d like to use this audience with

That’s all there is to it!

Additional Tips

Some pointers on getting the best out of your targeted remarketing campaigns:

1. Use ads with messaging that resonates with the audience you’re targeting.
2. Avoid creating extremely small audiences (Alavi’s “Segment’s current reach” metric helps you understand the size of an audience).
3. Keep in mind that audiences with smaller volumes may take time to show significant performance.
4. Use longer membership durations (above 30) wisely. These could contain users who are no longer interested in your products, thus driving the campaign performance down. If you’re not sure what to use, create multiple campaigns/ad groups to target 30, 60 and 90 day membership groups separately.
5. Exclude users who have already made a purchase depending on the business case – if you’re not promoting a repeat purchase, upsell or a cross sell, excluding converted audiences is usually a good idea.

Let us know what you think. Also, feel free to share any questions in the comments section below.

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