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Dynamic Remarketing is a very powerful strategy to laser-focus on past site visitors. Previous visitors are served tailored-fit ads on products that they have previously viewed on your site and other closely related items.
It is a great approach to employ if you are an advertiser that offers hundreds of products, models, sizes, destinations, and other similar variations. You can bet a pretty penny that the majority of big-name e-commerce sites are currently taking full advantage of this to hedge their marketing budgets in a smarter fashion.
The essence of its attractiveness ties back to the fact that it goes much further than the usual All Visitors audience and ad group level ad copies that we’re all accustomed to with standard remarketing. It’s dynamic in the sense that past user behavior determines the type of banner image and text content that will be shown.
From Humble Beginnings to an Advertiser’s Buzzword
Google started rolling out this new campaign type around the end of last year. Its beta phase only included verticals like hotels, flights, classifieds, finance, real estate, jobs, auto, and education.
This soft launch eventually generated excited murmurs and curiosity within the advertising community as its very nature and application pointed to widespread adoption by all other e-commerce websites.
With its sustained success and positive impact on returns on ad spend, it’s now available for all industries. Fast forward to 2015 – online retailers, both run-of-the-mill and niche enterprises, have become one of the biggest cliques in the playground.
A few e-commerce case studies touted by Google in terms of profitability include Build Direct, Netshoes, and Bebe stores. For other spaces, successful pioneers include Campmor, Hotel Urbano, Sierra Trading Post, and IndiaMART.
Some Bottom Line Bullet Points
Early adopters across varied verticals report up to a 2x increase in conversions and a 60% reduction in cost per acquisition (CPA) on average when they complemented their existing remarketing campaign.
High seasons like Christmas and Thanksgiving also seem to get an extra kick (some 30-40%) in overall revenues when Dynamic remarketing is utilized due to more frequent and impulsive online shopping activities.
Mobile targeting is positively affected as well as the dynamic template ads are mobile-optimized to allow for seamless viewing for any screen type be they tablets or smartphones. Conversion volume has also been seen to tick up by 15% on average.
Key Reasons to Use Dynamic Remarketing
1) Urging people who have previously looked around your site to complete a transaction tends to be more effective when they see familiar images, price points, specifications, and other closely-related inventory or promotional offers.
2) The bandwidth needed for creatives is lessened by a huge degree or eliminated as AdWords also provides an intuitive suite of templates. You can design a professional-looking banner while still having control of the theme, style, fonts, and other preferences within minutes. This placeholder ad will change its contents on the fly accordingly.
3) Though it requires some back-end work and feed management, it is still easy and accessible enough even for smaller merchants. This evens the playing field to some degree with big franchises with tons of resources.
4) You can also elect to use real-time bid optimization options like Conversion Optimizer and Enhanced CPC to prompt Google to calculate the optimal bid for every occasion.
I’m Sold – What Do I Need to Get Started?
Product or Service Feed
Include attributes like unique ID, price, image, etc. This goes in the Business Data section of the Shared Library in AdWords. For retailers, this is managed through a linked Merchant Center account.
Tag with Custom Parameters
This needs to be added to every page of your website. The different remarketing lists associate the visitors to the unique IDs of the items they saw and the exact pages they were in. The tag can be found in the Audiences tab.
Dynamic Ads
These can easily be created and customized to reflect your business’ style font and themes through the AdWords ad gallery.
Mind the Installation of the Tag
Contact your developer if you are not familiar with making changes to the back-end of your site or with updating custom variables properly. The slightest oversight can cause the tag to misfire and not work.
Within the tag, the following needs to be identified:
1) Product page
2) Shopping Cart page
3) Purchase page
4) General site visit
The entire code snippet should be placed just before the </body> tag. It’s best to use the JavaScript Object Notation format (JSON) and the parameters must be separated by commas. If JSON is not your cup of tea, there are workarounds available to use others but they may be trickier to implement.
You can simply make changes to your existing remarketing tag to accommodate this. When in doubt, use the Google Tag Manager to verify if your setup is correct.
Different Customer Parameters for Different Industries
Only the pre-defined parameters defined by Google will be accepted. Look up the Google Developers site for instructions.
At The End of the Day
Don’t be afraid to thread into this type of campaign relatively unknown for SMBs. It would have stayed in the Beta stage if there were major drawbacks to making it available for everyone. From my experience, Google has also gone out of their way to make this fresh campaign type more accessible to all levels of advertisers.
Read up well on literature from those that have used the strategy before and be ready for some hiccups before you can dial this in properly. There’s plenty out there that you can turn to, but here are my suggestions:
- Google’s step-by-step guide
- How to Use Precision Based Remarketing Lists
- 10 Top Retargeting Tips for AdWords Users
I make it a point to peek at the source codes of others using dynamic remarketing to give me a good picture of where to begin as well. The good results that many have boasted off from intelligently coaxing past site traffic to convert at lower costs are worth the initial frustration.
