Retargeting

I love display retargeting. I’ve only come across a handful of clients that I thought didn’t need more retargeting in their accounts. The main ingredients in retargeting success are retargeting audiences. 

My philosophy is to make those audiences early and often. If I’m speaking with a new client, I’ll typically recommend that they make retargeting audiences IMMEDIATELY so we can retarget vigorously that much sooner. Every single day those lists are accumulating cookies is a victory. All users is definitely less than ideal, but it’s way better than nothing at all. Perfect is the enemy of the good here.

I recommend poring over the website to create a list of the audiences you would want to have. If you’re not sure whether or not you’ll use an audience in the future, make it anyway. They don’t take long to make, and you’d much rather have them and not need them than need them and not have them. 

Consider making duplicates of your most important audiences with different date ranges. For example, a ‘transactions > 0’ list might be valuable at 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, 180 days, 365 days and 540 days. Perhaps you’ll want to retarget someone after they’ve purchased something at a certain interval after that purchase. Maybe a few weeks after their purchase is too soon, but a few months after the purchase is a good time to suggest a subsequent purchase. It’s difficult to accomplish this with only one ‘transactions > 0’ audience, as each audience has a date range attached to it, and I definitely avoid changing that list duration after the list has been made.

Having the same audience with multiple list durations also gives you more options when it comes to exclusions. I frequently exclude my ‘converters’ audiences from campaigns, and having those at different date ranges is very useful if you want to exclude someone that bought within the past 3 months, but not exclude them if it’s been more than 3 months.  

Note that while Google Ads will eagerly suggest ‘similar to’ (AKA lookalike) audiences for your retargeting efforts (or “targeting expansion”), this is not retargeting. Retargeting is people that have been to the website before, not people similar to people that have been to the website before. I love display prospecting, but it has to be kept separate from display retargeting for structural reasons.