This week Google has announced a few new twists for marketers who use its AdWords advertising program.
One allows marketers an opportunity to re-engage visitors who clicked-through to their site but left with out converting. The other helps marketers understand how visitors interact with the ads they have placed on Google.com prior to committing a conversion. AdWords Remarketing and Search Funnels in brief:
AdWords Remarketing
- analogous to what other providers call retargeting
- allows an opportunity to re-engage with visitors who clicked on an ad, did not convert, and then visited another site on the Google Content Network
- multiple Remarketing campaigns can run simultaneously
Of the two announcements, this is the one that I’m the most excited to. Just to paint the picture simply, I’ll leverage the example from the AdWords blog:
Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page of your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network. In addition to your own site, you can also remarket to users who visited your YouTube brand channel or clicked your YouTube homepage ad.
You can also run a number of remarketing campaigns at the same time. For example, you could offer discount game tickets to users who’ve previously visited your tickets page, advertise VIP hospitality packages to users who clicked on your “How to get to the arena” page, and advertise a sale on team merchandise to users who previously visited your YouTube brand channel.
There’s a lot of opportunity here, and I can’t wait to do some real-world tests.
AdWords Retargeting is alive and kicking, patiently waiting for you to tinker with it in the AdWords Dashboard.
AdWords Search Funnels
- shows user interaction with AdWords advertisers ads over time
- creates relationships between views, clicks and conversions
- provides the following new reports in the AdWords dashboard: Top Conversions, Search Funnels, Assisted Conversions, First and Last Click Analysis, Time Lag, and Path Length
So, in short, Search Funnels provides a much broader view of how users are exposed to and interact with AdWords Ads overtime leading up to conversions.
Search Funnels sounded relatively tame to me until I watched the explanatory video in the post on the AdWords blog.
A lot of the data sounds good. Maybe the person who does the Google product geek-to-human translation was on sabbatical when the video was pulled together. Learn more about AdWords Funnels on the AdWords Blog. Search Funnels are available in the AdWords Dashboard.
Which of these will have more impact on your future AdWords marketing activities?
Follow me on Twitter
Get the RSS Feed
Subscribe via Email
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Great recap, Scott. I think Google’s remarketing will serve as a nice complement to some of the other retargeting and behavioral ad networks out there like Burst, AudienceScience and Fetchback here locally. I can’t really understand why some people are so overly concerned with privacy – at least Google lets them opt out. I personally would rather be served relevant ads.
The search funnels update will be nice and really allow us to get a better handle on conversion latency. Hopefully it will help search marketers understand which keywords are truly important throughout the buying lifecycle and which terms are just a waste.
Thanks for the insightful post. Good stuff as always.
Sensational post! You summed it up beautifully. As this announcement trickles across the web, it has the potential to really catch on. What most people don’t realize is that retargeting has been around for awhile. Now as SMB’s learn more, they may really start to look into the benefits it could have. For years, there have been tactics to attract visitors (which naturally will always be essential), but now the focus sways towards getting them back ust after they have left. Retargeting can be a solid approach.
I think the remarketing feature will have a huge impact on the entire web as it allows more advertising budgets to be assigned to content websites in the upper-end of the funnel.
See my post about the subject:
http://www.yanivnizan.com/2010/03/google-adwords-retargeting-feature-will-change-the-face-of-the-web.html
Great points – increased awareness of Remarketing is a big one. Google’s got their hands full to keep Ad revenue on their networks. As sites like Facebook continue to evolve their viewshare of the web at large, Google is smart to leverage their broad distributed network of sites and increase the value of advertising with AdWords. Remarketing is definitely a smart move by Google…
Yes I’m sure Google will be the big winner here. It seems like they have consistently failed in every attempt they made to develop a decent social website so they are taking the “if you can’t bit them join them”. This move allows them to get a cut of the brand advertising revenues in the upper-end of the funnel.
Thanks for the update. I’m particularly excited about the new retargeting feature as well, but I think it’s important to note that this type of marketing technique isn’t at all new, just new to Adwords. The fact that Google is now employing it just validates that it works. Marketers should also note that Google’s content network for display ads is only the 6th largest so it’s important for advertisers to run across multiple networks. (See recent case study on this: http://bit.ly/aAhAFm) Bottom line – I think this is truly a win-win, for both marketers and consumers alike.
{ 2 trackbacks }