Best Practices for Dynamic Remarketing Campaigns

Digital marketing is all about targeting specific audiences and building relationships. Most businesses already use remarketing ads to show relevant products or promotions to people who visited the website or made a purchase. You can check what is remarketing here. However, If you’re determined to build and maintain a competitive edge, you should include dynamic remarketing in your digital marketing toolbox.

Taking Remarketing to the Next Level

Dynamic remarketing personalizes promotional experiences more than remarketing — it allows your ads to show the specific products or services visitors showed interest in or to promote accessories that go well with prior purchases. Your ads can appear across websites, social networks, mobile apps, and video content.

The most popular remarketing networks are Google and Facebook. The Google Display Network reaches a whopping 90% of people on the Internet, while Facebook has 2.4 billion monthly active users. With dynamic remarketing, it’s possible to reach these large audiences without dealing with the creation of endless ad variations for huge numbers of separately targeted ad groups.

Should I Be Using Dynamic Remarketing?

If you’re only selling a few products, dynamic remarketing probably isn’t for you. Let’s say you’re selling three different gift baskets of chocolate-covered strawberries. You can easily set up a traditional remarketing campaign and run a few ads with an emphasis on your most popular offering.

It’s a different story if you’re running a clothing e-commerce site that offers hundreds of products to different types of audiences. If a customer loved a pair of fabulous heels on your site and left without purchasing, a remarketing ad promoting your brand might not offer the relevance necessary to drive a purchase. Dynamic remarketing that shows an image of the specific product makes the ad engaging enough to bring the customer back to the specific pair of heels. Google, Facebook, and other remarketing networks can track the merchandise that your customers viewed and repeatedly show them those exact products or suggest similar products.

How to Set Up Dynamic Remarketing Ads in Google

While there are a plethora of detailed tutorials out there, in a nutshell, here’s what you do:

1. Link your AdWords account with your Google Merchant Account. This is necessary to provide a product feed. 
2. Create a display campaign and connect your feed to the campaign. After you take this step, you won’t have to upload images. 
3. Place a tracking code on your website generated in AdWords or Google Analytics. 
4. Select a layout and create your dynamic remarketing ads or use responsive ads.
5. Connect your audience groups to the products you want them to see.

Dynamic Display Ads Best Practices

For the purpose of discussing best practices, let’s reference Google dynamic display ads. Note that many of these guidelines also apply to other ad networks with some modifications for their parameters.

• Link your Google Analytics account to your Google Ads account. It’s important to set up Google Analytics and then link it to your Google Ads account. This enables you to leverage all the rich data you gather from Google Analytics in your dynamic remarketing ads. Google Analytics can provide you with information such as visit duration, general location, and pages viewed that’ll help you choose your dynamic remarketing audiences.

• Test your layouts. Initially, you may want to use responsive ads and let Google choose your layout according to placement rather than selecting a specific layout. Google automatically adjusts responsive ads by size, appearance, and format to fit available ad space. When you do choose specific layouts, test out different ones to see which performs the best by setting up A/B testing. Tests should run for about one to three months, but the fewer ads you’re running, the longer it’ll take.

• Carefully select your audience groups and bid strategically. Place higher bids on repeat visitors to your site and those who’ve visited key pages. In some cases, you may want to set up an ad group for those who abandoned their shopping carts rather than all site visitors. Consider filtering out people who spend little time on your site. Market to customers who’ve already purchased, and populate your remarketing lists with people who’re most likely to buy using demographics and interest reports from Google Analytics.

• Select the optimal frequency cap. A frequency cap limits the number of times your ads appear to the same person. You can select the optimal frequency cap to lessen the chances that people will see your ads so much that they become annoyed. 

• Spruce up your product images. Dynamic remarketing ads use product images from your product feed. Make sure your images are up to par to create attractive ads. 

• Use seasonal dynamic remarketing ads. You can do more than just show products that customers have viewed or products similar to them. Use dynamic remarketing ads to promote sales, Christmas specials, or any other event.

Don’t Stop There! Consider Dynamic Prospecting

You don’t have to stop with dynamic remarketing — Google enables dynamic prospecting, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to show products to people who’re likely to be responsive even if they’ve never visited your site. You can even add dynamic prospecting to a dynamic remarketing campaign.

Want your ads to hit that 100% viewability mark? Read more here.

Last updated on February 16th, 2023.