Remarketing: What Is It and How Your Association Can Market Smarter

Have you been looking for the perfect way to connect with those that have slipped through your association's metaphorical fingers in the past? Say hello to the power of Google Ads’ new term ‘remarketing’.

‍With Google Ads already being a wonderful tool to have in any association’s marketing and advertising toolbelt, they’ve recently rolled out a new way to get audiences to convert in the long run even if they’ve visited your website in the past and not had that deep urge to come on board as a member. So, what’s the deal? And how can your association get started?

If you’re looking to get on a smarter path to association marketing and advertising, Google Ads might have the answer for you. Let’s take a closer look at what remarketing is, how it works alongside Google Ads’ extremely user-friendly platform, and how you can get started with better marketing tactics.

Google Ads and Remarketing

We’ve done a lot of clambering on about the term ‘remarketing’, but what does it actually mean? Why should your association even care? According to Google’s new claim over the word, “Remarketing is a way to connect with people who previously interacted with your website or mobile app.”

Essentially, Google Ads uses an easy to navigate platform that allows marketers to strategize the way they place ads in front of audiences. With these strategically placed ads, audiences that are being retargeted will be confronted with your association’s valuable offers, both increasing your brand awareness and reminding your audience that you’re still around. Many people who visited your website may forget about the value you bring to the table. Remarketing allows you to pop back into their lives, hopefully reminding them that becoming a member is what would work best for them.

‍Audience retargeting is a feature that many online ad platforms use, like Facebook Advertising, but also one that Google has down to a science. However, remarketing is Google’s platform for making audience retargeting easy and effective. So, what this all comes together to say is that remarketing is a way to market twice to those audience members that just didn’t convert the first time around. It’s as easy as that, and it’s easy for your association to do in order to boost membership rates too.

Google Remarketing: How it Works

Your association is probably looking for the best way to get started on the remarketing journey. Let’s talk about how you can make the first steps needed to get you on track.

‍To start, you’re of course going to need both a Google Ads account and a website to direct your online ad traffic towards once things get going. Of course, you probably would not be using online advertising if you did not already have a website set up, but we’d like to be very clear for those that do not consider themselves to be tech savvy. You should also look into setting up a place where you can track and analyze your web traffic in order to make sure that remarketing is working for you. Thankfully, Google has a great traffic tracking platform- Google Analytics- that allows you to do all of your web analytics in an easy to use tool.

‍Once you have everything you need in terms of tools and platforms, you can then start making a list of website visitors you’d like to retarget with your Google ad. According to Google, a remarketing list is “a collection of website visitors...gathered by snippets of code added to your site or app.” With this list, you’re then able to set rules on your list on when web visitors get advertised to, as well as how long they stay on your remarketing campaign.

Remarketing Tips

If you’re new to running ad campaigns on Google’s platform, we’d like to share a few tips and tricks to make things easy for your association. When creating ad campaigns, you always want to set a budget that works for your association’s marketing cost limit. Setting a lower budget when you first start creating ads will help you get a feel of what you’re doing without paying high costs for experiments.

‍Think about it this way: Google Ads is a test run that can actually get you results if done correctly, so start small and build your budget from there. You’ll also want to study up on how to size your marketing materials in order for them to best show up for the audience you’re trying to retarget. With so many different ad sizes available to your association, you may be overwhelmed trying to get the right size for your graphic or video ad. However, if you stick to the most common banner ad sizes, you’ll be sure to hit the mark and make your ads appear for members.

‍And finally, you’ll want to monitor your ad campaigns as they progress in age. See which ones are working well at converting your remarketing list and consider adding more to your ad budget for these campaigns. Similarly, check up on ads that aren’t performing as well and see if they can be fixed to perform better, or if they should be scrapped so you can focus on those ads that work well. Remarketing is the smarter way to bring back audiences to your association’s website and convert them into brand new members.