Remarketing has been popular for a while among the PPC advertising crowd, and with Google’s recent introduction of “dynamic remarketing”, online retailers (the feature is only available to the retail sector at the moment) get a new advertising tool to play around with. Dynamic marketing allows marketers to target shoppers with personalized advertising. It works by tracking people who view online retail sites (either those that fail to purchase items, or people who have previously bought from the website). The potential customer will then see automatically created ads of the products they have browsed on subsequent sites (with Google ads) they visit.

How it Works

Dynamic remarketing uses cookies to generate advertisements that are very specific and customized, allowing retailers to place adverts that are based on what a potential customer has already viewed, or offers similar items that they might also be interested in. Because the adverts reflect what the reader has already browsed and is obviously interested in, this kind of advertising offers high conversion rates.

Why use Dynamic Remarketing

• It’s effective: The main reason you would choose this kind of advertising is because it is very effective. It stands to reason that if someone is viewing a particular item, even if they haven’t got to the check-out stage, that they will still be interested even if they didn’t originally purchase anything. Case studies already indicate that dynamic remarketing campaigns are much more successful than traditional remarketing campaigns, with for example Sierra Trading Post achieving click-through rates up to twice as high and conversion rates even five times higher. Therefore, the potential for converting sales is obvious and unmissable.
• It’s easy to implement:  Google offers a guide through the set-up process and then will help you get your campaign up and running by suggesting initial remarketing lists. There is a dynamic remarketing tag that allows you to collect data from your audience, such as which pages they visited, which items they viewed and whether they placed any items in their shopping cart (and if they did, how far they got through the payment process). There is also a tag validation tool to make sure that your tag has been set up correctly.
• It’s easy to use:  after the initial set-up, the ads are added with very little effort. You can choose from different templates and styles, which means that you have a customized ad in only a few minutes. You can also customize who you want to target with dynamic remarketing, such as people who have already purchased or viewers who live in a certain geographical area. You can also adjust who you target, for example, it might prove more valuable to put more effort into attracting viewers who actually placed items in their shopping cart over those that didn’t view any products.

In summary, dynamic marketing seems like the perfect tool if you want to try to capture sales that would have normally slipped through the net. You can engage a captive audience, one that you already know has shown interest in the products you are showing them. There are many reasons why visitors abandon shopping carts and dynamic marketing allows you that second chance to  convert the sale by using technology that is appealing, easy to use and above all, effective.

Zane Schwarzlose is an SEO at Fahrenheit Marketing, an Austin Web design company. Zane thinks remarketing is kind of creepy.