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Rediscover Lost Customers – Use Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

5 minute read

Happy Columbus Day! Today is the annual celebration of the 15th century explorer Christopher Columbus’s misguided attempt to reach Asia. Instead, he found what Europe considered to be lost continents – North and South America. While many people will spend the holiday staying home from work and taking advantage of seasonal retail sales, we can think of no better way to celebrate than to help businesses become explorers themselves and rediscover customers lost throughout the buying process. Remarketing is a form of digital advertising that targets users that have previously visited a company’s website, but failed to convert. There are several tools that advertisers can use to target these users, but one of the newest is a component of Google Adwords: Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA).

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)

Rolled out to the public in July 2013, RLSA allows marketers to reach users on their search results page with a text ad based upon search keyword bids and a cookie the user received for previously visiting the marketer’s webpage. RLSA uses the same remarketing lists and management tools as the Google Display Network, and allows advertisers to create more targeted ads that have a higher chance of converting based upon the pages that the user being targeted previously visited.

In order to make the most of RLSAs, make sure you pay attention to the following:

  • Enable Remarketing through either Google Analytics or a Remarketing code snippet;
  • Decide whether you want to just use the remarketing list to target users, or if you want to combine them with keyword searches
    • To just use the remarketing list, choose “target and bid”
    • To use both keyword searches and remarketing lists, choose “bids only”;
  • Customize your text ads for each list – each list describes a certain user action, so different types of information will be relevant to each list;
  • Use bid adjustments for remarketing lists in adgroups; different users will be worth different CPCs;
  • You can use more general keywords to target RLSA lists; every user has already visited your site, so you can use less expensive keywords to target them.

RLSAs are new tools to help your business discover potential customers who have already showed a certain level of interest in your brand – making them members of a critical audience. Rediscovering these “lost” visitors can help you conquer the digital market, making you the Columbus of your team! Remember, even Columbus had royalty backing him; if you need support in your explorations, contact inSegment; our Lead Generation team is completely Adwords-certified, and can use RLSAs to your maximum benefit.