Welcome Michael Hayes

Avinash Kaushik will share a collection of strategies to help you ensure that the focus of your analytics effort is on taking action and not data regurgitation in a session titled: ?Driving an Obsession with Actionable Analytics.?

Note that you won?t be able to check tags by viewing the HTML source of the page, because Google Tag Manager loads everything asynchronously. You should use the AdWords Remarketing Validation tool Chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adwords-remarketing-tag-v/iokkmdmobnhjmhbapieilipodaaeohol?hl=en-US) to verify that the parameters are passed properly and that the product ids match your merchant center Feed

Google Tag Manager fires tags asynchronously, in parallel to the page loading. So, if you are planning on using macros (see below) extracted from a Javascript variable or a DOM element defined after the container snippet , it?s possible that your tags will fire before the data is ready. Therefore, you should add a condition to wait until the page (DOM) has completely loaded, using the built-in event ?gtm.dom?. For example:

Rule: url contains //www.googlestore.com/shoppingcart.aspx Using ?url contains? instead of ?url starts with? makes it possible to support both http and https protocols.

It?s a bit tricky to do placement exclusions for remarketing. If you?re not familiar with what we mean, placement exclusions happen when you download a placement report and decide which sites your ads are performing poorly on that you should block from showing your ads. This is a very easy task when you?re dealing with topics or contextual marketing on the Display network. Then, you can look at performance and relevancy at face value. However, with audience targeting, such as remarketing or interest category marketing, then you?re targeting the person who happens to be on that website. Content relevancy of the page itself may not be as important in a remarketing campaign as it will be in other display campaigns. Remember that you?re targeting the user and not the content.

This is especially true if you plan on testing special offers for remarketing visitors. They may not notice a discount or sale if they don?t notice that it?s for a site they?re familiar with. Our best advice is to start with ads that match your website and your brand as a control set of ads and test from there.

While your results may vary, we?ve found the most success with remarketing ads when they are very brand focused.

Landing page testing. The user that you?re bringing back to your site already has a certain level of familiarity. You should experiment landing them on the same page and somewhere completely new. Is your messaging catered to someone who?s been there before? Are you asking questions on the landing page that a previous site visitor would already know the answer to? Test to find out which type of content connects most strongly to previous visitors.

Bid testing Impression share is something worth monitoring in a remarketing campaign. You?re following users and not sites, so if you get to 100% IS you may be annoying some of those users. Monitor your bids both for cost effectiveness and return on investment, but also for impression share.

Frequency cap testing You don?t want to be too annoying, but you also want to maximize the number of interested visitors to your site. Monitor your audience size in combination with the number of impressions your remarketing ad groups get. Maybe your cap is too high and you aren?t limiting anything at all. Maybe you?re setting it way too low and you?re severely limiting your ads? exposure.

Custom combination testing We mentioned earlier that you may find different results when combining interest categories with previous site visitors. Keep testing and find what works best for your account. Experiment with different combinations of cookie lengths. Messaging for visitors that visited between 7 and 30 days ago may very well end up not working for users who visited between 30 and 60 days ago.

Ad testing Strong branding may work well in your ads. Start there as a control, but experiment with other messages. Treat remarketing ads similarly to how you would treat other ads, just keep your audience in mind. These users are already familiar with your brand, so you may need to go a bit farther to win them back to your site. Experiment with different offers, calls to action, images and everything else you can think of.

How to optimize remarketing campaigns

You know your sales cycle better than anyone, so think of creative ways you can make the most of the high level of targeting that remarketing affords you. Users think of your brand 30, 90 or even 180 days after being introduced to it initially. Adjust your messaging accordingly.

One strategy that can work really well for some advertisers is what?s called delayed targeting. We?ll start with an example. This is a client that is a subscription-based service. Some members select to pay on a month-to-month basis. So, we decided to make an audience that targets people who have converted with member duration of 30 days. We made another identical audience, but made it for 90 days. We then made a custom combination by making the 90-day member duration our target, and excluded the audience for 30 days. This means we?re targeting people who have converted, 30-90 days after converting. This targets those users who are due to convert again.

Perhaps you?d like to create an internet category marketing campaign that will be focused purely on trying to get your brand out to as many people who have never heard of your website as possible. You could create a custom combination audience targeting whichever interest category you?re interested in targeting and using a remarketing tag for your home page URL, ?all site visitors? perhaps, as a negative audience. This custom combination would target your interest category without impressing ads to anyone who has been to your website within the amount of time your set your membership duration to.

if you don?t have Analytics for some strange reason, don?t have admin access to it and/or don?t want to agree to the terms of service, you can still create and manage remarketing lists directly in AdWords.