Part 5: Google Ad Innovations-Display Innovations: All about Traveling

In my last post, we discussed a bit about the new Google Above the Fold Display ad innovation.  Today, I’d like to share some info on another innovation but first, I thought it best to make sure everybody knows what we’re referring to when we talk about Display Ads.

Display ads are what are previously known as banner ads. They generally are graphic and image-based, and are displayed on websites. Display ads will often encourage a user to interact through a video or rollover display, complete a form, or to click through to a website for more information.

Google Ad Innovations has enhanced their Display Ad offerings by giving advertisers new options that utilize existing technologies in more effective advertising strategies as well as taking a fresh approach to the YouTube video advertising platform.

Remarketing (Status: Fully Released)

You might have heard of the concept of remarketing before, I’ll admit it is something that I find really interesting and effective.

Remarketing is a cookie- based system that lets you show your ads to people who have visited your site in the past. These ads can appear on any site that the user visits, provided it is within the Google content network.

As I said, Remarketing is not a new  concept and has been in use for a long time in the media buy industry. The past year Google has tested remarketing with over 500 companies, and has finally released it to the public.

Any AdWords advertiser can use remarketing to reach users as they’re browsing the web on sites within the Google Content Network. It is a great way to connect with users who, based on their past browsing histories, have visited your website.

Okay, let’s see it in action…let’s say I’m doing a big product launch and I have a ton of web traffic arriving at my site. A cookie will be placed on these users, and if they don’t buy then I can use remarketing to essentially stalk errr I mean follow them around the Internet.

A few of the Key Benefits:

• You can target people based on the pages of your website that they visited
• you can target all people who visited your site with the same ads
• you can target people who left your site without buying anything,
• you can target those who did not buy something they put in a shopping cart
• you can target people who bought from your site

This really takes precision marketing to a new level. The best part of AdWords remarketing is that you can set up a different remarketing campaign for each page on your website. This is awesome, because it means that I can message my ads differently, which is so IMPORTANT. A user who abandons their shopping cart has different interests and needs form the person who didn’t try to buy the product at all.

For example, maybe a high shopping cart abandonment rate suggests that your shopping cart process needs some rejuvenation or that the shopping cart text does not reflect the text on the sales page. Now you can message those users that abandoned the shopping cart with a message like “Did we do something wrong?” Brittanylynch.com has recently revamped its shopping experience we now have improved checkout times and ease of use..or something along those lines. Really powerful!

A study published by the NetWork Advertising Initiative showed that behavioral-targeted online ads are more than twice as valuable and effective as non-targeted online ads….Interesting. And this doesn’t even touch the tip of the feature/benefit list of remarketing.

This is something I have had an interest in long before Google adopted the concept, but I’ll be sure to test the AdWords version and let you know my results.