Transform Your Search Remarketing with Google Analytics

The inherent nature of search – users explicitly declaring to be in market for a given product or information – is a marketers dream. We know the value of bidding on branded terms (serving customized messaging, and fending off prickly competitors), but how do we re-evoke ourselves to the consideration set if a user isn’t searching for your brand?

Remarketing Lists for Search (for those unfamiliar, this involves only serving search ads to users who have visited your site, or specific pages on that site) have long been available within AdWords; this is nothing new. Our friends at Google, however, have quietly opened up a whole new world of audience segmentation with Google Analytics integration, allowing us to slice & dice remarketing lists for search like never before. With budgets tight and goals even tighter, efficiently re-engaging those users most likely to convert is, and should be, of the highest priority.

Rather than just targeting based on whether a user has visited a given page or set of pages, we can now target & adjust bids for search ads based on demographic information, location, technology used to visit the site, session recency & frequency, session duration, number of pages visited, as well as target users who perform a specific sequence of actions on your site. This is AWESOME.

With this offering, we can create a virtually infinite combination of customized lists based on exhibited behavior and focus media spend only on those users likely to convert. For example, excluding users who bounced within 2 page views, or spent less than 10 seconds on the site, allows you to leverage information you already know about your consumer, such as the number of times the average user returns to the site before completing a purchase.

In addition to far more granular targeting, creating these custom lists allows for great copy customization opportunities. For example, re-introducing a product name in the copy if it was abandoned before purchase, pushing complimentary products, etc.

These benefits are huge for search marketers, but even better for display advertisers who run on the Google Display Network. With holiday wrapped up, and yearly business reviews largely behind us, what better time to start using these lists and turn your remarketing for search into the lean, mean, fighting machine it’s meant to be!

For more information on joining AdWords & Google Analytics remarketing lists, follow this link.