AdWords “Remarketing Lists For Search Ads” Coming Out Of Beta

On the heels of releasing dynamic retargeting for retailers in AdWords, Google has announced it will be rolling out remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) to all enhanced campaigns advertisers over the next few days. RLSA, which launched in beta last July, allows marketers to modify and tailor their search ads, bids, and keywords based on visitors’ past activity on their sites.

In the beta, a European online tire retailer saw a 161 percent conversion rate increase with RLSA, which led to a 22 percent overall sales increase. The new conversions had a 43 percent lower average CPA than previous campaigns, according to Google.

Using RLSA, you can increase bids for past site visitors who looked at specific high-value pages, added items to their carts or spent a certain amount of time on your site. You can also bid on more generic keywords, or broader match types of keywords for site visitors or past customers that you don’t include in your regular campaigns because they are too broad for general search traffic.

You can then show different ads to specific sets of site visitors. For example, you can write ad copy targeted to shopping cart abandoners.

RLSA bid adjustments combine with other bid adjustments for location, device and time in enhanced campaigns.

To use RLSA, you’ll need to tag your site with the Google Remarketing Tag for the Google Display Network. So if your site is already set with the remarketing tag, you are ready to start running RLSA.

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About The Author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin was Third Door Media’s former Editor-in-Chief (October 2018 to December 2020), running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin wrote about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.