1. Search Remarketing within your Current Search Campaigns

At this point in time, almost anyone in the digital advertising world is familiar with remarketing advertising — most commonly, remarketing display ads. But have you tested out Search Remarketing campaigns? 

Search Remarketing campaigns can be just as effective as Display Remarketing campaigns. You are still targeting users who have previously visited your website or landing page but that are also searching for or related to your keywords. In a sense, you’re doubling down on users that are most likely extremely interested in what you have to offer so it’s a great time to use a bid adjustment to bid more aggressively on these users.

Setting up a Search Remarketing within your current search campaign is super easy. Just follow these steps:

1. Select an Ad Group within your campaign
2. Select the Audiences tab
3. Click on the Remarketing red button
4. Under Targeting, click Add targeting and then select Remarketing
5. Select your desired remarketing list(s)
6. Select Bid only (VERY IMPORTANT)
7. Click Save
8. Implement a Bid adjustment (optional)
9. And you’re ready to go!

2. Performance Data via Geography

Ever wonder what geographical areas your leads are coming from? Sure, if you dig into Google Analytics enough, you could figure this out but wouldn’t it be nice to see at a quick glance? And wouldn’t it be even cooler if you could then adjust your bidding based on how the different geographical areas perform?

For example, say you’re currently targeting a 50-mile radius around campus— are you curious if you are actually obtaining leads via AdWords for those search 50 miles away? Try adding another radius that targets 25 miles around your campus and maybe even another one that targets 10-mile radius.

After running the campaign this way for a few weeks, go back and see which area is performing best by going to the Settings tab and viewing the Locations tab within that. You should now be able to see the campaign’s performance by location, which allows you to make adjustments accordingly. Try this with multiple cities, states, DMAs, etc.

3. Similar Audiences Lists

If you’ve had a chance to run any remarketing campaigns within Google AdWords, you are most likely extremely pleased with the results much like myself. Did you know that AdWords collects data on your current remarketing list and builds a list of similar users based on their browsing habits, interests and other contextual data?

Your remarketing audience allows you to reach users who have already view your landing page or website but targeting Similar Audiences allows you to reach more users that have similar characteristics as users in your current remarketing lists.

This feature is only available on the Display Network so if you want to add this audience to your current remarketing campaign or add it to another display campaign, you’ll want to take the following steps:

1. Select an Ad Group and then select the Display Network tab
2. Click the Targeting red button
3. Click the Add targeting option and select Interests & remarketing
4. Under Remarketing Lists, select a desired Similar to XYZ list(s)
5. Click save and you’re good to go!

Overlap the audience lists with additional geographical and demographic targeting to ensure this audience is the best fit to receive your ads.

4. Targeting by Location Groups

If you’re still looking for other ways to effectively find your target market, I highly recommend exploring Location Groups within Locations targeting. You can now target your ads to specific income tiers and places of interest.

Curious on how you take advantage of this targeting feature?

Are you trying to reach students at specific community colleges or other transfer students? With the Places of Interests option, you can select specific schools to target. Do you have an exclusive, high-cost Executive MBA program? Use the Locations by demographics target users by average income levels.

To get started, select a campaign and take the following steps:

1. Scroll down to Locations and select Edit
2. Select Advance search
3. On the top right, click on Location groups
4. Under Choose location group type, select one of the options and explore what they have to offer!

5. Conversion Tracking

Well, this may be something that most of you are already doing, but if you aren’t, get moving— it’s really the best way to effectively optimize your campaigns based on real-time data.

Receiving a lot of mobile traffic but unsure if you’re landing pages are as effective on mobile devices? By implementing conversion tracking, you can view data by devices to better understand how the different devices perform.

By adding conversion tracking coding to any ‘Thank You’ and any other goal completion pages, you’ll better be able to tell what keywords, ads, geographical targeting, devices, etc. have higher conversion rates or a lower cost per lead. Based on this data, you can bid more aggressively on keywords that have higher conversion rates, decrease bids on geographical areas with higher cost per leads and so on.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more AdWords strategy tips— like I said, I’m discovering new tactics every week! If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to comment or contact me directly at hayley@convergeconsulting.org.