Building a Remarketing Strategy From Scratch
A hands-on setup guide to remarketing in 2013: tagging your site, segmenting audiences, capping frequency and getting your first campaign live.
By 2013 remarketing had moved well past its early Google AdWords roots into something most advertisers could set up in an afternoon. Facebook had opened Custom Audiences to a wider set of advertisers earlier that year, AdRoll and Criteo were running full remarketing programs across the display network, and Google had just extended dynamic remarketing to show shoppers the exact products they’d viewed. If you were starting from nothing, here’s the order that worked.
Step one: get the tag on every page
Nothing else works until your remarketing pixel is firing correctly on every page of your site, including checkout and confirmation pages. Skipping this step, or tagging only the homepage, was the single most common reason a new remarketing program produced nothing useful in its first month. Test the tag with the browser’s own debugging tools before you spend a dollar on media.
Step two: build audiences that mean something
A single “everyone who visited the site” list wastes the format. Split visitors into groups that behave differently: people who viewed a product but didn’t buy, people who added to cart and left, people who already purchased. Google’s dynamic remarketing, new in 2013, let you show the literal item someone looked at rather than a generic ad, which lifted response meaningfully over static creative.
Step three: exclude the people who already converted
This sounds obvious and gets skipped constantly. Anyone who already bought should come off the remarketing list for that product immediately, both to stop wasting spend and because showing someone an ad for something they just purchased is exactly the kind of thing that gets remarketing a bad name.
Step four: cap frequency before it becomes a complaint
Remarketing ads following someone around the web after a single site visit was already earning the nickname “stalker ads” in the press by 2013. Set a frequency cap, typically somewhere in the range of a handful of impressions per day per user, and set a list duration so people age out after a reasonable window instead of being chased for months.
Step five: match the offer to where someone dropped off
A cart abandoner needs a different message than someone who only viewed a category page. Build creative variants for each segment rather than running one ad across every list. This is where remarketing stops being a blunt retargeting net and starts acting like a real sales follow-up.
Putting it together
A retailer starting from scratch would typically launch with three lists (product viewers, cart abandoners, past purchasers excluded from future promotion), a frequency cap, and dynamic creative pulling in the actual product image. That’s a modest setup, and it’s enough to see meaningful recovered revenue within the first month, well before anyone needs to think about more advanced segmentation.
What to watch heading into 2014
Facebook’s Custom Audiences and Google’s dynamic remarketing both signaled where the format was going: less generic banner-chasing, more precise, product-level targeting built on first-party data. Businesses that got their tagging and segmentation right in 2013 were positioned to take advantage of that shift without having to rebuild their setup from the ground up.
The mechanics matter less than the discipline behind them. Tag everything, segment by behavior, exclude converters, cap frequency. Get those four things right and remarketing earns its place in the budget instead of becoming the campaign everyone quietly resents.
More from Paid Advertising, the full 2013 archive or the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
