3 Google Remarketing Strategies for driving more sales with Google Ads

Your contact database contains invaluable insights about your prospects and customers that can help you convert leads and up-sell or reconvert existing customers. Google Customer Match gives you the tools to feed relevant information about your contacts to your Google campaigns for faster and better results.

Google Customer Match helps you reach specific segments of your existing customers or prospects with a targeted message. By simply uploading your contacts' email addresses you can segment and target contact lists across devices on Google Search, Google Shopping, YouTube and Gmail. Segmentation allows you to align your media spend and maximise exposure to your most valuable customer segments.

You can use Google to cross-sell or upsell, maintain a connection with your highest-value customers, retain existing customers or attract new potential customers using insights about your existing customers.   

In this blog, we give you a few ideas on how to use Google remarketing to improve your sales figures and your return on ad spend.

1. Re-engage lapsed contacts

If you work in an industry with a long sales cycle you are no stranger to having prospects show interest in your products or services only to go cold for a long period after. This could be due to a number of reasons such as timing, budget and need but the fact that those prospects displayed interest in your company makes them more valuable to you and more cost-effective to convert than someone who has never heard of you.

It’s a good strategy to pay attention to lapsed contacts and bring them back to your business with thoughtful targeting and tailored messaging before they are drawn to a competitor. You can start by creating a remarketing list of website visitors who haven’t been to your website in the last 90 days. Consider the pages that the visit and the information you already have about them. Do you know what product pages they viewed? Did you collect some relevant information about their needs in an online form? Use that information to provide a targeted offer in your ad aimed at bringing them back to your website or collecting more relevant information about their needs.

Target your lapsed website visitors who are still actively searching for the solutions and products you offer with highly targeted and personalised Google search ads to stand out from competitors. You can use dynamic ads to show them the exact product they showed interest in or offer them a time limited discount.

2. Reach customers who converted off of your website

As a digital marketer, you probably spend a lot of your time attracting and converting new customers through a mix of digital channels. However, in many industries such as the automotive industry, the majority of transactions happen offline. The ability to feed the information you gather about customers offline into your digital campaigns is marketing gold.

You can upload your customer lists from offline sources such as retail store purchases, call center conversations or app downloads to Google and target those contacts with Google Ads. This is a great opportunity to cross-sell or up-sell to existing customers and make a real difference to your bottom line.

Use Google Display Ads to reach existing customers with a personalised or regionalised offers and messaging. Make sure that you use a refined list of website placements to ensure your brand is associated only relevant websites and your ads drive good quality traffic. Segment your audiences based on what you already know about their previous activity and make sure the ad creative and message is relevant to the products and services they’ve shown an interest in.

3. Expand the reach of your lead generation campaigns

Apart from being a great way to reach existing leads and customers Google Customer Match can help you expand your reach with Similar Audiences.  Google’s Customer Match Similar Audiences can help you find new customers similar to your existing contact lists. Google uses Machine Learning to analyse the characteristics and web browsing behaviour of people on your customer lists and find people with similar characteristics and behaviours. For example, Google will be able to find people who visited the same web pages as your existing contacts, who searched for the same terms, watched the same videos or are similar in age or location.  

A quick and easy tactic is to use a list of all of your best-performing audiences or your existing customers to create a Similar Audiences list. Go through your highest -converting campaigns and create audiences similar to the leads you generated with those campaigns. Alternatively, if you haven’t run any highly successful campaigns you can use your existing customer list or a segment of your high-value customers and create a Similar Audience based on those.

If your Customer Match Audience meets certain criteria it is possible that Google has already automatically created Similar Audiences ready for you to use in your next campaign.

Top Tips

Keep your database clean

Research shows that up to 38% of the leads that enter your database could be invalid or fake. Lead validation and cleansing is not only good practice, but it’s also an essential aspect of improving the performance of your marketing campaigns. You can either periodically remove invalid leads manually or use a tool like Driftrock that will do that for you automatically.

Create Exclusion lists

Make sure you are not spending your advertising budget on the wrong people. For example, if you are running a campaign aimed at people who didn’t convert on a specific landing page make sure you exclude those who did convert from your audience.

Keep your segments up to date

Keeping your audience lists up to date is essential for most Google remarketing strategies. In order to make sure that your campaigns are relevant you need to have a way of automatically updating your audience lists such as Driftrock’s Google Customer Match Audience Sync.

Automatically manage your bids

Automatically syncing your audiences allows you to increase or decrease advertising bids for certain segments of your database.