6 Key Remarketing Audience Types for the 2017 Holiday Season

Maximize Google AdWords’ remarketing capabilities in your search campaigns by diving into multi-targeted / remarketing audience types. 


Remarketing is the art of “saving a click,” targeting ads to users who have prior experience with your site, which in turn increases conversion rates, ROI, and retention among existing customers. In the product research boom of the holiday season, you need to utilize strategies to stay connected with your target audience, even after they leave your site.
Luckily, AdWords’ remarketing tools have advanced in recent years to allow more flexibility and control for account holders. In 2015, Google Analytics audiences became available within Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, which meant that advertisers could use over 200 Google Analytics dimensions and metrics to create audiences for RLSAs. And just last year, a new subtab for demographics became available to display age, gender, and parental status data in that ad group.
But if you’re mainlining off of a single All Users audience, you’re likely coming up short on growth and profit development for your business. Here are six remarketing audience types to help kick off your strategy.
Engaged Audiences
Engaged audiences are categorized by behavioral metrics available through AdWords. Session duration, pages per session, and bounce rate help refine a high-quality target audience who is likely to re-engage with your site.

 
Demographic-Based Audiences
Demographic-based audiences are categorized by age, gender, parental status or location. Chances are that you or someone on your team already has an idea of what your customer demographics look like. Still, a study by Google has shown that some of our preconceived ideas about which demographics purchase which items may result in us missing out on a significant proportion of buyers. So before running search campaigns that exclude all but 18 to 35-year-old males, use performance data to target most effectively.

AWOL Audiences
Your AWOL Audience has abandoned your conversion funnel and is categorized by the steps a user takes within a particular ad. For example, you can set up a sequence filter to segment visitors that have completed specific sequential behaviors on your site. Running ads that promote a seasonal holiday discount for a product may be customized to surface only to users who complete a series of sequential actions: clicking the product’s landing page, adding it to their cart, and finally proceeding to checkout before bouncing from the site.

 
Past Purchasing Audiences
Your past purchasing audience is categorized by the purchasing history of existing customers. When you sell a product with minimal involvement in the purchasing decision, remarketing to previous customers can be highly effective to drive sales. Creating a custom strategy is integral to address the differences between remarketing to what you might consider a loyal visitor (i.e. someone who has purchased multiple times within the year) and a user who purchased something a year ago.

 
Lookalike Audiences
Automatically created by AdWords, look-alike audiences are based on the remarketing lists you create. Within the context of your search campaigns, advertisers provide a source of audience data to an ad network which then matches it to other users on their network. Remarkably, these new networks allow you to be conspicuous to prospective qualified audiences without screwing up your search budget on all potential search impressions.
Unqualified Audiences
Cold and unqualified audiences fail to meet the criteria necessary to make them worth a piece of your search budget, which is why AdWords allows you to exclude sets of users from seeing a specified set of ads. These audiences can be added to your campaigns or ad groups as an exclusion, just as you would add a target audience. Filtering out audiences who don’t qualify for your campaign goals eliminates the need for custom combinations or isolated audiences with a repeated exclusion incorporated into its definition.
Is your business remarketing to a full usership? Are you utilizing AdWords’ tools to remarket to multi-targeted audience types? If you see opportunities to make better data-driven choices in how you market this holiday season, contact our AdWords and PPC experts at RLC Media here./http://www.rlcmedia.com