SEO
How To Launch Your First Google Ads Remarketing Campaign
Remarketing is an essential part of any Google Ads strategy.
It’s no longer a question of if you should run remarketing campaigns; it’s how you should run remarketing campaigns.
With more devices in households than ever, remarketing is imperative to recapture and engage your audience for a second (or third or fourth) chance at their attention.
To launch an effective Google Ads remarketing campaign, it’s crucial you master the setup.
This guide will help you cover not only the basics of setting up a remarketing campaign but also advanced tips and tricks to get the most out of your marketing dollars.
1. Ensure Proper Tagging Is In Place
For remarketing to serve impressions, it is vital that the proper tracking is on a website.
Most websites will use either Google Analytics or Google Ads tracking, I recommend having both sources as options.
Google Ads Tag
If your Google Ads account starts from scratch, a Google Tag must be implemented.
To find this specific to your account, navigate to Tools & Settings > Setup > Google tag.
If you’re used to the “Global Site Tag” name, it is now named the Google tag.
Google now offers installation configuration with any of these website builders:
- Drupal.
- Duda.
- MonsterInsights.
- Typo3.
- Wix.
If you are manually installing the tag, it must be placed immediately after the <head> tag of every page of your website.
Lastly, if you have Google Tag Manager, you can install the necessary code in your website container.
Google Analytics Tag
Google Analytics tracking is required before being able to create any remarketing list within the platform.
To find the tracking code, navigate to Admin > Property View > Tracking Info > Tracking Code.
Checking For Tag Implementation
The easiest way to check if tags have been implemented properly is to download the “Tag Assistant for Conversions” beta extension in a Chrome browser.
Navigate to your website and run the Tag Assistant. If implemented correctly, the results should look similar to this.
The green check mark means that there are no issues identified with the tag setup.
2. Create Intentional Remarketing Lists
Once you have ensured tracking is in place, it’s time to create intentional remarketing lists.
The intention is extremely important when crafting remarketing audiences.
If you simply targeted “All Visitors” to your website, you’re missing out on so many opportunities.
Google Analytics and Google Ads provide many options to segment your site viewers as granularly as you want.
Keep in mind that a list that is too narrow will have difficulty serving.
The key is to find a balance between audience size and their intent.
Google Analytics Lists
I prefer to create remarketing ads in Google Analytics (or GA4 if you’re already using it).
Because there is onsite behavior data to layer onto lists, it gives more options to qualify that audience.
To create an audience in Google Analytics 4, navigate to Configure > Audience Definitions.
Note: This is assuming that a user has already linked the proper Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts for data sharing.
Now, it’s time to get creative.
The key is to create multiple remarketing lists based on the categorization of your website.
A few starter ideas to consider when creating a remarketing list portfolio:
- Category page viewers.
- Purchasers/Leads (to exclude in campaigns).
- All Qualified site traffic (determined by time on site, whatever amount is considered above average for your business).
- Quality Blog Viewers (determined by time on site, whatever amount is considered above average for your business).
- Cart Viewers.
In this example, I want to create a remarketing list of anyone who visited a specific landing page and watched at least 50% of the video on that page.
The two key pieces of information to input would be “page” AND “video percent” (not “OR”).
Once completed, don’t forget to choose your audience destinations.
Always be sure to choose the Google Ads account for the list to import.
By doing so, the list can be used for Remarketing campaign purposes.
Google Ads Lists
To create lists in Google Ads, navigate to Tools & Settings > Audience Manager > Segments.
There are five different types of remarketing lists available to create:
- Website Visitors.
- App users.
- YouTube users.
- Customer list.
- Custom combinations.
This article gives a more in-depth breakdown of how to create effective YouTube remarketing lists.
Depending on the goal, create your necessary remarketing lists and choose a list duration. The maximum duration a user can stay in a list is 540 days.
The benefit of Google Ads remarketing lists is that they give the option of pre-populating the list with users in the past 30 days. Google Analytics does not offer retroactive audience filling.
3. Determine Proper Assets
The most popular remarketing campaign type is within the Google Display Network (GDN). However, there are Remarketing Search campaigns as well.
Before creating the proper assets, ask these questions first:
- What is the user being asked to do?
- What should the message consist of?
- Does the landing page experience match the ad messaging?
There are key components to consider when creating remarketing assets. Below are some of them:
- Static image formats
- Responsive image formats
- Headlines and descriptions (if using responsive format)
- Landing page experience
The full list of uploaded display ad specifications for Google Ads can be found here.
It is important to note that if using the Responsive Ad format, images must be ratio based and are not the same as static image requirements.
4. Create A Remarketing Campaign
Remarketing campaigns can be built in either the Google Ads interface or Google Ads Editor.
Start with the campaign name, budget, and settings. If you’re creating multiple remarketing campaigns, keep track by putting the audience name in the campaign.
The campaign settings can make or break performance. When they are not properly managed or maintained, expect some volatility in performance. These include:
- “Observation vs. Target” setting.
- Bid Strategy setting.
- Targeting Expansion setting.
- Location setting.
- Frequency Cap setting.
When adding audiences to a remarketing campaign, choose the “Targeting” setting instead of “Observation.”
By keeping it in “Observation” mode, audience targeting is not narrowed at all.
When selecting a bid strategy, be sure to select one based on your goals.
For example, if you are to use “Target CPA” and set the bid too low, Google will throttle impressions, and the campaign will be at risk to serve.
Lastly, be competitive with bids because the targeted audiences have already been introduced to your brand.
The next setting, “Optimized targeting,” is one that Google has conveniently hidden within the Ad Group settings.
Always keep this off in a remarketing campaign.
If you went through the trouble of creating a targeted list, why on earth would Google want us to expand to lookalike users in the same campaign?
The default setting is “People in, or who show interest, in your targeted locations.”
While this is the recommended setting according to Google, I recommend changing it to “in or regularly in targeted location.”
By changing it to the middle selection below, it allows for narrower targeting.
Lastly, frequency cap settings are still important because seeing the same ad multiple times daily creates a bad user experience.
Be sure to set frequency caps at a moderate level per user.
5. Analyze, Refine & Optimize
You’ve officially launched your first remarketing campaign!
That’s all there is, right?
Wrong.
It is important to keep a pulse on campaign performance early on. Some of the key items to watch for in the early days include:
- Ensure audience size is large enough to show impressions.
- Placements (where ads are showing).
After a few weeks of data (give or take, depending on the audience size), there should be enough information to start making optimizations based on performance.
The goal is to continually refine.
Remarketing campaigns are not a “set and forget” strategy.
Pulling It All Together
A remarketing strategy involves more than just targeting a group of users. It intertwines technology, audiences, messaging, and more.
Without even one of these areas, a remarketing campaign may not truly live up to its potential.
Follow the tips above to ensure your next Google Ads remarketing campaign is set up for success (and don’t forget to monitor performance!)
More Resources:
Featured Image: Chinnapong/Shutterstock
SEO
Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It
Content pruning sounds pretty appealing: delete a ton of content and see your organic traffic improve. But pruning has risks (like deleting useful pages and useful backlinks), and benefits are not guaranteed: So how does pruning actually work? And when…
SEO
8 Free SEO Reporting Tools
There’s no shortage of SEO reporting tools to choose from—but what are the core tools you need to put together an SEO report?
In this article, I’ll share eight of my favorite SEO reporting tools to help you create a comprehensive SEO report for free.
Price: Free
Google Search Console, often called GSC, is one of the most widely used tools to track important SEO metrics from Google Search.
Most common reporting use case
GSC has a ton of data to dive into, but the main performance indicator SEOs look at first in GSC is Clicks on the main Overview dashboard.
As the data is from Google, SEOs consider it to be a good barometer for tracking organic search performance. As well as clicks data, you can also track the following from the Performance report:
- Total Impressions
- Average CTR
- Average Position
Tip
But for most SEO reporting, GSC clicks data is exported into a spreadsheet and turned into a chart to visualize year-over-year performance.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Indexing report. It’s useful for SEO reporting because you can share the indexed to non-indexed pages ratio in your SEO report.
If the website has a lot of non-indexed pages, then it’s worth reviewing the pages to understand why they haven’t been indexed.
Price: Free
Google Looker Studio (GLS), previously known as Google Data Studio (GDS), is a free tool that helps visualize data in shareable dashboards.
Most common reporting use case
Dashboards are an important part of SEO reporting, and GLS allows you to get a total view of search performance from multiple sources through its integrations.
Out of the box, GLS allows you to connect to many different data sources.
Such as:
- Marketing products – Google Ads, Google Analytics, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360
- Consumer products – Google Sheets, YouTube, and Google Search Console
- Databases – BigQuery, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
- Social media platforms – Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter
- Files – CSV file upload and Google Cloud Storage
Sidenote.
If you don’t have the time to create your own report manually, Ahrefs has three Google Looker Studio connectors that can help you create automated SEO reporting for any website in a few clicks
Here’s what a dashboard in GLS looks like:
With this type of dashboard, you share reports that are easy to understand with clients or other stakeholders.
Favorite feature
The ability to blend and filter data from different sources, like GA and GSC, means you can get a customized overview of your total search performance, tailored to your website.
Price: Free for 500 URLs
Screaming Frog is a website crawler that helps you audit your website.
Screaming Frog’s free version of its crawler is perfect if you want to run a quick audit on a bunch of URLs. The free version is limited to 500 URLs—making it ideal for crawling smaller websites.
Most common reporting use case
When it comes to reporting, the Reports menu in Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a wealth of information you can look over that covers all the technical aspects of your website, such as analyzing, redirects, canonicals, pagination, hreflang, structured data, and more.
Once you’ve crawled your site, it’s just a matter of downloading the reports you need and working out the main issues to summarize in your SEO report.
Favorite feature
Screaming Frog can pull in data from other tools, including Ahrefs, using APIs.
If you already had access to a few SEO tools’ APIs, you could pull data from all of them directly into Screaming Frog. This is useful if you want to combine crawl data with performance data or other 3rd party tools.
Even if you’ve never configured an API, connecting other tools to Screaming Frog is straightforward.
Price: Free
Ahrefs has a large selection of free SEO tools to help you at every stage of your SEO campaign, and many of these can be used to provide insights for your SEO reporting.
For example, you could use our:
Most common reporting use case
One of our most popular free SEO tools is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which you can use for your SEO reporting.
With AWT, you can:
- Monitor your SEO health over time by setting up scheduled SEO audits
- See the performance of your website
- Check all known backlinks for your website
Favorite feature
Of all the Ahrefs free tools, my favorite is AWT. Within it, site auditing is my favorite feature—once you’ve set it up, it’s a completely hands-free way to keep track of your website’s technical performance and monitor its health.
If you already have access to Google Search Console, it’s a no-brainer to set up a free AWT account and schedule a technical crawl of your website(s).
Price: Free
Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar is a free Chrome and Firefox extension useful for diagnosing on-page technical issues and performing quick spot checks on your website’s pages.
Most common reporting use case
For SEO reporting, it’s useful to run an on-page check on your website’s top pages to ensure there aren’t any serious on-page issues.
With the free version, you get the following features:
- On-page SEO report
- Redirect tracer with HTTP Headers
- Outgoing links report with link highlighter and broken link checker
- SERP positions
- Country changer for SERP
The SEO toolbar is excellent for spot-checking issues with pages on your website. If you are not confident with inspecting the code, it can also give you valuable pointers on what elements you need to include on your pages to make them search-friendly.
If anything is wrong with the page, the toolbar highlights it, with red indicating a critical issue.
Favorite feature
The section I use the most frequently in the SEO toolbar is the Indexability tab. In this section, you can see whether the page can be crawled and indexed by Google.
Although you can do this by inspecting the code manually, using the toolbar is much faster.
Price: Free
Like GSC, Google Analytics is another tool you can use to track the performance of your website, tracking sessions and conversions and much more on your website.
Most common reporting use case
GA gives you a total view of website traffic from several different sources, such as direct, social, organic, paid traffic, and more.
Favorite feature
You can create and track up to 300 events and 30 conversions with GA4. Previously, with universal analytics, you could only track 20 conversions. This makes conversion and event tracking easier within GA4.
Price: Free
Google Slides is Google’s version of Microsoft PowerPoint. If you don’t have a dashboard set up to report on your SEO performance, the next best thing is to assemble a slide deck.
Many SEO agencies present their report through dashboard insights and PowerPoint presentations. However, if you don’t have access to PowerPoint, then Google Slides is an excellent (free) alternative.
Most common reporting use cases
The most common use of Google Slides is to create a monthly SEO report. If you don’t know what to include in a monthly report, use our SEO report template.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite features is the ability to share your presentation on a video chat directly from Google Slides. You can do this by clicking the camera icon in the top right.
This is useful if you are working with remote clients and makes sharing your reports easy.
Price: Free
Google Trends allows you to view a keyword’s popularity over time in any country. The data shown is the relative popularity ratio scaled from 0-100, not the direct volume of search queries.
Most common reporting use cases
Google Trends is useful for showing how the popularity of certain searches can increase or decrease over time. If you work with a website that often has trending products, services, or news, it can be useful to illustrate this visually in your SEO report.
Google Trends makes it easy to spot seasonal trends for product categories. For example, people want to buy BBQs when the weather is sunny.
Using Google Trends, we can see that peak demand for BBQs usually happens in June-July every year.
Using this data across the last five years, we could be fairly sure when the BBQ season would start and end.
Favorite feature
Comparing two or more search terms against each other over time is one of my favorite uses of Google Trends, as it can be used to tell its own story.
Embellishing your report with trends data allows you to gain further insights into market trends.
You can even dig into trends at a regional level if you need to.
Final thoughts
These free tools will help you put together the foundations for a well-rounded SEO report.
The tools you use for SEO reporting don’t always have to be expensive—even large companies use many of the free tools mentioned to create insights for their client’s SEO reports.
Got more questions? Ping me on X 🙂
SEO
Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO
A new study by Authoritas suggests that Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), currently being tested with a limited group of users, could adversely impact brand visibility and organic search traffic.
These findings include:
- When an SGE box is expanded, the top organic result drops by over 1,200 pixels on average, significantly reducing visibility.
- 62% of SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results.
- Ecommerce, electronics, and fashion-related searches saw the greatest disruption, though all verticals were somewhat impacted.
Adapting to generative search may require a shift in SEO strategies, focusing more on long-form content, expert insights, and multimedia formats.
As Google continues to invest in AI-powered search, the Authoritas study provides an early look at the potential challenges and opportunities ahead.
High Penetration Rate & Industry-Wide Effects
The study analyzed 2,900 brand and product-related keywords across 15 industry verticals and found that Google displays SGE results for 91.4% of all search queries.
The prevalence of SGE results indicates they impact a majority of websites across various industries.
The research analyzed the typical composition of SGE results. On average, each SGE element contained between 10-11 links sourced from an average of four different domains.
This indicates brands may need to earn multiple links and listings within these AI-curated results to maintain visibility and traffic.
The research also suggests that larger, well-established websites like Quora and Reddit will likely perform better in SGE results than smaller websites and lesser-known brands.
Shifting Dynamics In Organic Search Results
With SGE results occupying the entire first page, websites that currently hold the top positions may experience a significant decrease in traffic and click-through rates.
When a user clicks to expand the SGE element, the study found that, on average, the #1 ranked organic result drops a sizeable 1,255 pixels down the page.
Even if a website ranks number one in organic search, it may effectively be pushed down to the second page due to the prominence of SGE results.
New Competition From Unexpected Sources
The study revealed that SGE frequently surfaces links and content from websites that didn’t appear in the top organic rankings.
On average, only 20.1% of SGE links exactly matched a URL from the first page of Google search results.
An additional 17.9% of SGE links were from the same domains as page one results but linked to different pages. The remaining 62% of SGE links came from sources outside the top organic results.
Challenges For Brand Term Optimization & Local Search
The study reveals that SGE results for branded terms may include competitors’ websites alongside the brand’s own site, potentially leading to increased competition for brand visibility.
Laurence O’Toole, CEO and founder of Authoritas, states:
“Brands are not immune. These new types of generative results introduce more opportunities for third-party sites and even competitors to rank for your brand terms and related brand and product terms that you care about.”
Additionally, local businesses may face similar challenges, as SGE results could feature competing local brands even when users search for a specific brand in a regional context.
Methodology & Limitations
To arrive at these insights, Authoritas analyzed a robust dataset of 2,900 search keywords across a spectrum of query types, including specific brand names, brand + generic terms, brand + product names, generic terms, and specific product names. The keywords were distributed across 15 industry verticals.
The study utilized a consistent desktop browser viewport to quantify pixel-based changes in the search results. Authoritas also developed proprietary “alignment scores” to measure the degree of overlap between traditional organic search results and the new SGE links.
While acknowledging some limitations, such as the keyword set needing to be fully representative of each vertical and the still-evolving nature of SGE, Authoritas maintains that the insights hold value in preparing brands for the new realities of an AI-powered search ecosystem.
Why We Care
The findings of the Authoritas study have implications for businesses, marketers, and SEO professionals. As Google’s SGE becomes more prevalent, it could disrupt traditional organic search rankings and traffic patterns.
Brands that have invested heavily in SEO and have achieved top rankings for key terms may find their visibility and click-through rates diminished by the prominence of SGE results.
SGE introduces new competition from unexpected sources, as most SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results. This means businesses may need to compete not only with their traditional rivals but also with a broader range of websites that gain visibility through SGE.
As Google is a primary source of traffic and leads for many businesses, any changes to its search results can impact visibility, brand awareness, and revenue.
How This Could Help You
While the rise of SGE presents challenges, it also offers opportunities.
Taking into account what we’ve learned from the Authoritas study, here are some actionable takeaways:
- As SGE favors in-depth, informative content, businesses may benefit from investing in comprehensive, well-researched articles and guides that provide value to users.
- Incorporating expert quotes, interviews, and authoritative sources within your content could increase the likelihood of being featured in SGE results.
- Enriching your content with images, videos, and other multimedia elements may help capture the attention of both users and the SGE algorithm.
- Building a strong brand presence across multiple channels, including social media, industry forums, and relevant websites, can increase your chances of appearing in SGE.
- Creating a trustworthy brand and managing your online reputation will be crucial, as SGE may feature competitors alongside your website.
Looking Ahead
While the long-term impact of SGE will depend on user adoption and the perceived usefulness of results, this study’s findings serve as a valuable starting point for businesses and SEO professionals.
By proactively addressing the challenges and opportunities SGE presents, you can increase your chances of success in the new search environment.
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
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