Remarketing in Google Ads: What we do before launching the first campaign

Remarketing is the easiest campaign to start and the easiest to do badly. Easy to start because the interface lets you do it in a few minutes. Badly, because you can show the same ad to the same person for a month, without realising it.

Before we press start, we check four things. Their order matters less than the fact that none of them are missing.

Cookie consent must actually work, not just be for show. If the banner is just placed for the sake of it, lists will fill incorrectly, and you'll have a legal problem anyway.

Tags must send events that we can check manually, not just "page visited". We're interested in who reached the product page, who added to cart, who opened the form and didn't submit it.

Lists need enough people to start; with low traffic, the "added to cart" list can sit for days without activating. In this case, we start with a broader list and narrow it down later.

And there must be a reason for them to return. If the person left because they didn't like the price or the product wasn't what they were looking for, an ad repeating the same message won't change anything.

The Audiences We Usually Use

For online shops: abandoned cart separate from product visitor, and buyers excluded from both. Seems obvious. We've taken over accounts where existing customers were seeing ads for the product they'd bought the day before.

For service companies, where there's no cart, we divide by intent: those who stayed on the price or contact page go into one list, the rest of the traffic into another. The message differs. For the former, a concrete offer works. For the latter, more likely something to read.

We link the list duration to the decision cycle, not to a standard figure. Someone looking for tyres decides in a few days. Someone looking for a house builder, in months. Here we don't have a formula; we look at the data for the interval between the first visit and the enquiry, and start from there.

Why the Feeling of Harassment Occurs

For two reasons, almost always: you don't limit how many times the ad is shown, or you don't remove the person from the list after they've done what you wanted.

We set a cap on daily impressions per person. We set exclusions for those who have converted. And we stop the audience when performance declines – not at a fixed number, but when we see the cost per conversion consistently increasing for a few weeks in a row, a sign that the list has been exhausted.

What Doesn't Work for Us, Although It Should

We've tried video remarketing ads for small service businesses a few times. The result was poor every time – probably because we didn't have good creative, not because the format is wrong. We prefer to say this than to sell it as an option.

For very small budgets, under a few hundred euros a month, remarketing eats money that would do a better job in search. We postpone it. Other agencies start it anyway; we can't promise results from it on small budgets.

If you want to see if your tags are sending what they should, we'll look at your account together on a short call and tell you what's missing.

The Audiences We Build, and What We Tell Them

Remarketing breaks easily, because it's simple to show the same banner to everyone. We look at what the person did on the site and start from there.

The last row is one that many treat the same as the first. Someone who has read an article isn't necessarily a buyer, and if you bombard them, you lose them.

How Long We Track Them For

It depends on how long the decision takes in the niche. For a service bought out of necessity, a short window makes sense. For something that's planned, we keep them longer. What we do in all cases: limit the frequency, so it doesn't become annoying.

We had a remarketing campaign that we kept too broad, with all visitors in a single audience. The cost per enquiry was higher than for the search campaign. We cut it and redid it in segments.

What We Exclude, Always

People who have already submitted an enquiry or ordered, if we don't have a new message for them. There's no point paying to show an ad to someone who's already waiting for our reply, and it annoys the customer when they see it.

The Limits We State Upfront

For sites with low traffic, remarketing audiences don't fill enough to warrant separate campaigns. In those cases, we recommend not investing money here yet and working on the part that brings new visitors. It's not the answer that gives us more work.

If you have traffic and you're not doing anything with people who didn't write to you straight away, let's look together at what audiences you already have available.