The RIGHT Way to Set Up Google Ads Display Remarketing Campaigns | Step-by-Step Tutorial

Hey, this is Austin from Grow My Ads. And in today's video, I am going to show you how to set up a display remarketing campaign in Google Ads the right way. I'm also going to show you a tip that you must implement so you don't end up burning a bunch of cash that will never result into any conversions for your display remarketing campaign. A lot of people forget about this, but I put this tip in this video. I show you step by step how to implement so you don't end up burning cash and end up making lots of money with your display remarketing campaign. So let's go ahead and dive right in. First, before you can build a remarketing campaign, you have to have audiences that you can actually remarket to. So you're going to want to make sure you have data sources for audiences already connected to your account. You can take a look at that if you go to Tools and then if you go up to Shared Library and then Audience Manager and then if you go head over to your data sources, this will show you what you have connected. So this account, we have a GA4 account connected to it and we have the Google Ads tag. If you're, if you have a YouTube channel, you can connect that so you could remarket to YouTube viewers. You could also upload lists, customer lists. And then you know, if you're using like Zapier or something, you, you could also be using some sources there as well. And in this case for this account we're just going to be using the Google Ads tag that is my favorite today to be building audiences around. I used to use Universal analytics a lot years ago, but since the transition over to GA4, I tend to just like using the Google Ads tag. I. I'm just not a huge fan of GA4. To build your actual audiences, you're going to go to your data segments. So this is where you can actually come in and create your audiences based off of the data sources you have connected to your account. So you can do website visitors, app users, YouTube users, customer list analytics, and then even these custom combinations. For today I'm going to just be doing for this campaign which will be for an E commerce company, I'm just going to do website visitors and here you can start segmenting so you can do by tags or web pages. So I'm going to do visitor visitors of web pages and then we're going to do web page visits in the past 30 days and, and then really this page URL just contains like that slash just means anyone who's essentially visited our website. Or if you wanted to, you could refine this to anyone who goes to the sectional product page. Or if you wanted to build like a checkout page visit audience, you could do the checkout. So whatever your URLs are for those pages, you can just include that. So page URL contains. You can also do equals or does not equal. So there's like a million variations of audiences that you could build with all of these different rules. But I usually keep it very simple, especially with the way smart bidding behaves today. A lot of times on a newer account, let's say there's no remarketing audiences yet built. I like to build usually like a seven day audience. If it's a huge website with tons of traffic, I'll even build a one day audience. But normally like a seven day audience, 30 day, 6090. I will go all the way to. I think you can go all the way up to 540 days maximum. I always like building the largest website that's anyone who visits our website in the last 540 days. The reason being that is going to be a massive list. I normally am not remarketing to that list. However I can use that list for other scenarios or strategies with campaigns and I love utilizing it when it comes time for the holidays because then I can just blast anyone who's been to our website in 540 days. Especially when I'm like being the most aggressive with sales and then with our budgets dependent on the client. So you can do a lot there. Again here we would just be building a 30 day list and normally I like to name it in a naming convention that makes sense. So here we would just have webpage visitors and then here I want to make sure I know it's a 30 day audience. Okay, now it's time to build the actual campaign. So I am inside of an actual account. I'm just going to go to this blue create a campaign icon at the account level of looking at all your campaigns. I'm going to hit new campaign. So it wants you to choose an objective. I've talked a lot about this in my other videos. With campaign setups you don't have to do this. This has no impact on your performance. So in this case I am going to hit create a campaign without goals guidance and that what that ends up doing it gives you all of the campaign setting options. Then I am going to choose display since that's what we're going to go after today and Then what sort of conversion goals? I actually don't want to be tracking phone calls on this. I just want purchases. So we're going to go after purchases only and then I'm gonna hit continue and we're gonna name this D for display. And then usually I do for this case I'm labeled it remarketing and then we're going to do converters excluded. So this allows me to know it's a remarketing campaign so I know what the targeting is. And then I also know I'm gonna have anyone who's converted excluded. So this just naming convention for my own management sake. So now I hit continue. All right, now we're in the campaign settings. So I only want to be targeting United States. You only want people in or regularly in your locations. You do not want presence or interest. This could fire for people outside of the United States based off of this how that setting behaves. So make sure you just have this presence on English is what we want. Ad rotation is going to be optimized. Prefer best performing ads which is what I want in this case especially since I'll be utilizing smart bidding. And then I personally do not like tablets and so I start with no tablets. If this remarketing campaign starts to do well then I'll open tablets back up. But tablets normally is my least amount of traffic and my least converting for volume wise and usually it converts at the lowest conversion rate. So I just like to remove it on brand new campaigns especially for display remarketing. And I'm just going to roll with desktop and mobile for now. And then we've got more settings so you could do ad schedule which I don't care, we're just going to fire 24. 7. There's some URL options if you wanted to add any URL parameters for like third party analytics tools. You might be using your own internal CRM system or something. We don't need anything there right now. And then here's this dynamic ads. Okay, so this is a E commerce business. So I actually am going to be setting up dynamic product ads along with the ad that I'm building today for the remarketing purposes. And what that will do is actually show products that people have visited on your website. How you do that is exactly this. You're going to be connecting your data feed. So I have merchant center connected with this Google Ads account because it is E commerce. If you are not an E commerce business, you do not need to worry about any of this. If you are an E commerce business, then this is highly important and normally if you're an E commerce business utilizing Google Ads, you already have your merchant center account connected to Google Ads because that is your product feed that is being used for shopping campaigns or your performance max campaigns. So here I have now connected my merchant center account or at least this data feed to this campaign. So we're all good there. Everything else looks really good. For now you can do these content exclusions. I don't worry too much. Google's kind of taking a lot of the control away from here now so. But this allows you to opt out of showing your ads on content that doesn't fit your brand. They're pretty good at not showing your ads on like any sort of iffy websites that you wouldn't want to be on. So normally I actually don't worry about this too much today. Five years ago I was a little more in the weeds about it, but I don't worry too much anymore. All right, now we're going to hit next now budget and bidding. So when I am building a brand new display remarketing campaign, usually I already have some conversion data through my other campaigns, whether it's my shopping, my pmax or my regular search. So normally what I'm doing is I'm looking at the historical data of the account and I'm looking at what's like the average cost per acquisition and I'm, I'm kind of setting it towards a minimum of what the average CPA is. So let's say for the account the average CPA is $200. I forget in this account it's like 2 or 300. I would then minimum want to be spending about that per day. You can set this to whatever you want. But I actually do want this to have some breathing room to work. And basically what I'm doing is saying hey, I'm willing to spend to at least get one conversion per day based off of my average cpa. Now will it start generating one conversion per day as soon as I launch this? Absolutely not. But I'm giving Google enough breathing room, I'm giving the smart bidding enough breathing room to make some things happen. So if I like set this to $20 per day and my average CPA within my other campaigns that are already probably optimized is 200. Well I, I'm giving this campaign not enough breathing room to actually work. And so you're going to suffocate the smart bidding to do its job on trying to actually find you conversion. So in this case I'm going to go for $200. Now, if you already have very successful campaigns that are working, you could go immediately to a target CPA bid strategy or you could do conversion value. So you could set a T roas if you're e commerce like in this case. But I tend to just straight up go for Maximize conversions or Maximize conversion value. In this case, I'm actually going to do conversions and it's brand new. I want this thing to just start generating some conversions for me. So I'm going to be more aggressive with that. However, if you have an account that you already are getting historical conversion data through your other campaigns, whether that's shopping or search or pmax, and you're just now getting a display remarketing campaign going, you could go straight into a tcp, TCPA bid strategy or TROAS bid strategy dependent on what you want to go after and what industry your account is or your business is in. I just prefer to go aggressive usually in the beginning, and then I'll flick over to TCPA or TROAS after I get some conversion volume fired within the remarketing campaign. So here I'm at Maximize conversions. By the way, I have a full bidding masterclass on YouTube. I will have that video in the description below. It's not specific to remarketing campaigns, however, it gives you everything you really need to know about bid strategies. And you can kind of apply that same thought process in regards to how I like to manage my bids and when I start implementing TCP art and then how I actually configure what TROAS or what CPA caps I'll put on those. All of that's in that master class. Again, that video is in the description below. So go check that out if you want to learn more about bidding. If you're kind of confused on this. So now we're on maximize conversions. I'm going to hit next. Okay, this is the most important part or one of the most important parts in regards to a remarketing campaign. So we've got our targeting. Now I'm going to want to be targeting an audience, hence it's remarketing, right? So one of my remarketing audiences that we have built, that I showed you earlier in the video, this is just a display campaign right now, so you could go after cold audiences, and that's why it's giving you all of this different target targeting options. We don't care about any of this right now. All we care about is adding an audience segment. So here I'm going to go to Audience segments. And then I'm going to hit browse and then this is going to show me your data segments. I'm going to click that. I'm going to click my website visitors and then I am going to have my all visitors 30 days added here. And that is the audience I want to target for this specific campaign. Then this is very important. Optimize targeting setting. This is at default turned on. You want to turn this off if you're going to be doing a remarketing campaign, why optimize targeting is basically Google saying we're going to go find people beyond your target targeting signals. My targeting signals would be my all visitors 30 days list. And we are going to show your ads to those people who we think look like your audience signal or your all visitors 30 days. That no longer means it's remarketing. Now you're showing your ads to a cold audience. That's not what we want for a remarketing campaign. I can't tell you how many audits I do and they have optimized targeting on and I might go, I go and show them. I'm like 90% of your budget is not even showing to the audience you're trying to remarket to. It's going to a cold audience. So no wonder your performance has been horrendous. So just turn this off for a remarketing campaign. Then again, there's all these other targeting options. We don't care about any of that right now. I just have my all visitors 30 days. I want to go after. Okay, now we are in the ad creation process. So this is where you're actually giving it the creative that would be shown to the audiences that you're targeting. Targeting. So here we have final URL, your business name. So final URL obviously being where someone would go to on your website after they click the ad. Images. You can add up to 15 images. Logos. You can add logos here and you actually have to give it a logo. Then there's videos. I do not recommend adding a video to this. That would be. That's a whole separate thing. So normally for display remarketing campaigns, I want it to just be display ads. I do not want video baked in there. This is optional. So just ignore the video piece. Then you can add up to five headlines, a long headline, and then up to five descriptions. By the way, I also, I have a full YouTube video on how to build out responsive display ads. I give you all the image sizes that are needed for the actual image creative and I even show you how to do some optimizations within that. That video will be in the description below. I am going to go ahead and build the ad and I'm going to show you what it looks like when it's done. Okay. So I have all of my assets built out here. So I have the final URL. And again this is if someone clicks the ad, this is where they would go. Now I am running a product feed to this campaign because I want to run the product ads, right? So if you go and look at a sectional our website, you are going to see one of our sectional sofas, right? Especially hopefully the one that you are interested in. If they clicked on one of these actual products that are being shown in the dynamic product ad layout then it would send them to the product page because that's based off of your feed. If they see an ad though, that has nothing to do with the products so the products aren't being shown. It's more of like a native looking display ad like this. Then if they click on the ad it would then now send them to this final URL. So just want to give you a heads up on that. But everything's in here. I've got the images, logos, headlines, long headline, etc. There's a few things though. You want to be cautious about additional format options. So use asset enhancements. I'm okay with for this. This lets Google just kind of enhance your assets and optimize your ad layouts. I'm usually fine with that. However I'm not fine with use auto generated video. This is saying Google can just create a video based off of the assets that you just gave it. I do not want that. I don't want any video involved in this. I just want and yeah, the ad strength goes down to good. Ignore that. I just want display. I don't want any of this video nonsense. So that would be its own purpose and usually a YouTube campaign or if you're running performance max. So use native formats. I don't mind this. So I will have this included as well. Then you can add tracking if you need to. In most cases you don't need to do any of that. Then you can go a little crazier, right? So you could add in custom colors if you wanted to. Again, Google does a pretty good job of matching like in and creating the ads like from the assets you give it. So here it's using a button color that matches our logo and I'm usually okay with a lot of that so I don't normally go there. However you're Able to do that if you want. And then there's also some call to action text. Right now it's on automated. But if we wanted this to just say shop now we could do that. If it's on automated, Google will test different call to actions. But if I wanted to only say shop now then I can, I can force it by just saying in that setting, only use shop now. So now you see it says shop now there. Okay. I actually don't want any call to action or custom colors here. For this particular one. I'm going to let it roll. So. Okay. Before I'm actually done creating this ad, even though I have everything ready to go, I am going to this preview section here. This, even though I've already been playing around with it, this will show you previews of different ad formats that your responsive display ad could show in. So, you know, here it's showing the products with the titles. Here it's showing products with no titles. Here it's showing no products at all. It's just like a native display ad with the ad creative I gave it. Here it's showing one specific product. So this gives you an idea of what your ad could look like out there in the wild. Here's just all text based. So this is nice to be able to use and actually have a feel for what your ads would look like out in the wild. Okay. That campaign is now published. I am inside of it. I can see the ad group that I had built. This is very important. This is a campaign setting. Essentially this is a part of your audience targeting. But when your ads start firing right now they could be shown to. And this is brand new, so there's going to be no data here. But if you go into your insights and reports and go to when and where ad showed, you're going to be able to start seeing where ads showed. Once you actually have historical data that starts running within this campaign, this will show you the placements your ads are being shown on. Whether it's YouTube or certain websites. What you want to avoid doing is showing your ad on mobile apps. Mobile apps will suck money away from you. The only time mobile apps work to advertise on is if you're advertising another mobile app. However, if you're not advertising a mobile app, then it is an absolute waste of money. I've done over a thousand account audits. I've personally managed over $50 million in ad spend. I've been in this game for 10 years. I've. I've never seen anyone who's making Money on mobile apps with advertising, a non mobile app. So I always make sure to exclude it. However, Google does a very good job of making that difficult for you. I am going to show you an easy way of going about it. So normally inside the campaign you can come down to the content section. So that would be under your assets and audience keywords and content area of the campaign settings. So we're going to go to content here. Okay. This then has the exclusions area. This is where we're able to say we want to exclude certain content. Now you could go in here, I'm at the campaign level and I'm going to go to placement exclusions and then you can start seeing apps. Right? So you could do individual apps or you could do app categories. Well, now you have to go do 94 different clicks or whatever the number comes out to. It's pretty high. And so 141. Sorry. So there's 141 boxes. You have to sit there and click to exclude all these different app categories. I hate that. It's annoying. So I'm going to show you how to exclude all apps with one click inside of Google Ads Editor. Okay, I'm inside of Google Ads Editor and I'm going to the new campaign that we just built, the remarketing campaign here. Then we're going to go to keywords and targeting. And then what we're going to do is go to mobile app category negative. Okay? And this is where you would be able to add these as negatives inside of Google Ads Editor. However, you don't have to sit there and do 100 different clicks. What you can actually do is we're going to do campaign level negative mobile app category. And this is all you do. You just come up here and it kind of gives you the dropdown like inside the interface does, where it wants you to go through and click all these categories. All you actually do is go right where it says all apps. You click that you hit, okay, boom, all apps are now excluded. And now I just hit post changes right up there and boom, hit post. I just saved myself carpal tunnel in my right hand where I don't have to do all that crazy clicking and I can just do it in Editor in one click there. Okay, I'm back inside of the account, just confirming. Here you go. All content, all apps, they have been excluded. And that was all from the Ad Word or Google Ads Editor change that I made there. Now this is a remarketing campaign to visitors of our website. However, I do not want to remarket to someone who just bought a sectional sofa, right? So how do I exclude those people from viewing this ad? What I'm going to do inside of this campaign I have to now go into the actual audience targeting. So back to audiences here. This is where I'm, you know, all visitors is what I'm going after and targeting. But now I'm going to go down to exclusions and inside of the exclusions I'm going to hit edit. And then this is campaign level. And now I want all converters excluded. So I'm going to hit save. Boom. So now I'm only targeting people who have visited our website in the last 30 days. But if you actually made a purchase on our website, you will not be remarketed to too. There's no need for me to try to force sectional sofas back in your face if you just purchase one. So I'm going to save my money and only show it to people who have not purchased yet. There you go. You now know how to set up a display remarketing campaign in Google Ads the right way. A heads up if you run performance max campaigns and then you set up a display remarketing campaign, just know performance max is going to take most of the of the good converting remarketing revenue generally. So you might find the campaign struggles a bit with volume. That is not unusual. We're seeing that in a lot of different accounts now. If you don't run performance max campaigns and you want to set up a display remarketing campaign, you're going to get normal usual volume or expected volume from it. But pmax does a really good job of wanting to take credit for everything. So it will compete essentially or take away from a standalone display remarketing campaign that you build doesn't mean it still can't work. We have campaigns that still does wonderfully or sorry, accounts that it still does wonderfully for. But just a heads up there if you are running performance max campaigns. Also, before I end this whole thing on our website, grow my ads.com if you go to Resources Ultimate Guides. If you go over to Google Display Guide, we have a bunch of this in guide format as well. So how to set up display campaigns, how to build remarketing audiences how to create Google Display remarketing campaigns. I'll have the video baked into this article as well. Targeting options, optimizations, ad tips. This is like an entire, you know, ebook guide on our website for display remarketing campaigns. So go check that out if you want more information. Information. I hope you got great value from this video. If you have questions, put them in the comment section below. I will do my best to answer your comments or questions if I know the answer to it, and I will see y' all on the next video.