We’ve all spent time window shopping and canvassing for the best price or service quality available before buying online. Whether for a small ticket item, or a once-in-a-blue-moon high-end purchase. 

This natural tendency to delay our purchase decision means it is highly important for marketers and business owners to tailor marketing strategies to ensure that potential customers and leads are carefully nurtured.

The practice of remarketing has become increasingly common over the last couple of years, and a number of leading display marketing companies have developed some pretty advanced, highly tailored solutions for their customers.  

These are already helping many businesses achieve prolonged engagement with users who have shown intent on a given site.

But over the past few weeks Google has released some extremely useful new tools which help get closer to the competition’s offering, and open up sophisticated features to advertisers – no matter what the budget size.

Today I want to introduce two Google products, talk a little about the opportunities provided, and give a straight-forward outline of how to get started.

So, first up we have a brand new acronym, RLSA. Or to give it it’s Sunday name:

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

The RLSA feature helps you use previous site interactions to improve the relevancy, and ROI, of your search ads.  

To give an example – say a number of users arrive at your site and view category pages containing blue suede shoes – add them to the basket, but leave the site without making a purchase.  This information can be used to customise your RLSA strategy for targeting those users through the purchase funnel.

Your RLSA campaign could identify them in a number of different ways on future searches – perhaps by using more generic keywords that prove profitable in your ‘standard’ campaign, or bidding more on the keywords you already advertise with.  

The main theory here is that the user has shown intent to purchase, and although further advertising investment is required to keep them engaged, the fact that they are further through the purchase cycle and have brand awareness and engagement, increases the chance of converting the sale.

Implementation outline

1. Add the remarketing tag to your site

Navigate to the ‘Shared Library > Audiences’ section of your AdWords account, in the not-always-obvious left-hand navigation:

Audience location in AdWords

If this is your first remarketing campaign you will need to generate the Remarketing tag – on the audiences page, select the ‘Set-up remarketing’ option for now. The other option is covered later in this post (if I can entice you to continue onwards!).

You’ll be invited to email the set-up details to the relevant person. These details include a tag to be placed before the closing