Remarketing is a very sexy thing these days in Internet advertising, especially on Google AdWords.  There’s remarketing and there’s retargeting. The former refers to reaching back out to a potential customer who lands on your website, and “re” marketing to him or her by “re” showing them an ad. The latter is similar, but usually refers to going to a broker who “buys” lists (cookies) of people who have searched for a key term, or shown interest in a key product or service, and then you “re” target that person to your own advertisement. In both cases, remarketing / retargeting means following someone around the Internet and REshowing him or her your ad.

This list identifies some of the top articles on remarketing for your online marketing learning and enjoyment. Let’s get started!

It’s confusing! Here are two of the best articles on remarketing, starting with Google.

• Remarketing – Ad Innovations. This article and video by Google explains what remarketing is. It’s a little snazzy and over-the-top but a good introduction nonetheless. Click here to get started.
• Remarketing – How it Works. This is a Google AdWords “support” article explaining how remarketing works in AdWords.  Click here to get started.

Beyond Google: Other Articles on Remarketing

ClickZ has a nice article on remarketing, here.  What I like about this is it is not only a two-part series but it is very step-by-step. In addition, it explains how to leverage your already existing Google Analytics code to make it (relatively) easy to set up your remarketing list. The official Google Analytics YouTube channel has produced a nice explanatory video, here.

Another good article on remarketing explains a more basic, or traditional way to add the code, here.

Why and When Remarketing Might Work

When does remarketing work? That’s a conceptual question, and most of these articles talk about remarketing “as if” you already understand why you want to use it. Remarketing works best if the following criteria are met:

1. You have a high value product. The Google AdWords bids can be pretty expensive for remarketing, because you are competing against many, many advertisers to “reshow” your ads. So if your product is inexpensive or the profit margin is thin, it’s not really a good strategy.
2. Your product or service has a relatively long time horizon. The whole point of remarketing is to reshow your ad to someone. So this implies that they did NOT convert on the first access of your website.  Common remarketing situations are things like wedding services (it takes many months to plan a wedding), orthopedic surgery (people hem and haw)… these are situations when it can be a good idea to reshow them your ad as they move along the decision curve.

Remarketing doesn’t work when these criteria aren’t met, and/or when your own website doesn’t generate enough traffic for Google to build a large remarketing list. That’s when you might turn to retargeting, which usually involves a broker. But, again, that really only works if you have a) a high value product, and b) a long time horizon in the purchase. Remarketing and retargeting are not for everyone… but they can be useful for some situations.