Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

The Advantages of Remarketing

The biggest advantage of remarketing is that it addresses the vast majority of your website visitors: those who don't opt in or buy. If the average e-commerce site converts 1 percent of its visitors into customers, remarketing goes after the 99 percent who leave without buying. Until remarketing, all you could do was kiss that traffic goodbye and hope they remembered your URL or searched for you again. With remarketing, you can now follow them around the Web with your best ads for up to 180 days.

A second advantage of remarketing pertains to your prospects' perception of your business. When your ads show up everywhere, your prospects can't help but think that you're a bigger player than you actually may be. Joel's brother Jason runs a tiny one-man tutoring agency in Portland, Maine and uses remarketing. He often receives calls from prospects who assume he's bigger than Kaplan and Princeton Review because they see his ads everywhere. And Howie, who should know better, was himself duped into complaining that his web host was neglecting his support tickets because they were growing too fast. His evidence? He kept seeing its ads and assumed they were blitzing the planet with them. The truth? Only he and others who had visited their site were seeing them at all.

Third, remarketing can be used to advance a relationship with existing customers by validating their initial decision to buy from you in the first place. You can offer upsells and generate word ...