Google Rolls Out AdWords Dynamic Retargeting For Retailers

In another move to beef up its retargeting offerings–and take on retargeting platforms like Adroll, Retargeter and Mediaforge–Google is rolling out dynamic retargeting to all AdWords retail customers with Google Merchant Feeds. The company is also piloting dynamic retargeting in the travel and education sectors and plans to expand availability to more sectors later this year. […]

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In another move to beef up its retargeting offerings–and take on retargeting platforms like Adroll, Retargeter and Mediaforge–Google is rolling out dynamic retargeting to all AdWords retail customers with Google Merchant Feeds. The company is also piloting dynamic retargeting in the travel and education sectors and plans to expand availability to more sectors later this year.

Google AdWords Dynamic Retargeting Ads

With dynamic retargeting ads are created on the fly with product images pulled from your Google Merchant feed. Google’s product recommendation engine determines which products and messages are shown based on an algorithmic prediction for what is likely to perform best based on visitors’ past actions on your site, including the products they viewed and their purchase history, as well as related products and top performing products.

For example, if a person is shopping for pots and pans, the product recommendation engine may populate the ad with the pot set they last viewed, other top selling pot sets, and kitchen utensils and small appliances.

There are multiple templates that you can customize to reflect the design elements of your brand. Layouts are optimized automatically for each ad impression.

In pilot tests, Google says that Sierra Trading Post, a U.S. retailer of outdoor gear and clothing, saw click through rate double and conversion rate increase by 5x. European “heavy metal online shop,” EMP Merchandising’s conversion rates rose by 230% and the cost of sale fell by 30%.

AdWords Dynamic Retargeting Template ModCloth

In the ModCloth template, the ad shows a recently viewed dress with price details along with other related products.

When setting up a dynamic retargeting campaign, in addition to the “All visitors” list, Google automatically creates four lists that reflect four groups of site visitors:

General visitors – People who visited your website but didn’t view specific product. The dynamic ad will include the most popular products from your site.

Product viewers – People who viewed specific product pages on your site but did not add them to the shopping cart. The dynamic ad will show the products that your visitors viewed and mix in recommended products.

Shopping cart abandoners – People who added products to the shopping cart but didn’t complete the purchase. The dynamic ad will prioritize items added into the shopping cart, and will mix in a few other viewed products and recommended products.

Past buyers – People who purchased products from you in the past. The dynamic ad will show related products by looking at popular items and items commonly purchased together.

To get started, you can edit your existing remarketing tag if you are using one already, or you’ll need to add the dynamic remarketing tag AdWords generates for your site across all your site pages along with several custom parameters.

When people visit your site, the remarketing tag adds them to one of the remarketing list and associates the product ID with the visit. AdWords then uses the product ID to pull the product image, name, and price from your Google Merchant Center account and include in the ad. You can add additional parameters to the tag to for more advanced bidding and optimization control.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Ginny Marvin
Contributor
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, MarTech 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.

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