What Are Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)?

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Have you ever visited a website, looked at a product, left the site, but then seen an ad for that exact same product you were looking for on Google? I come across ads like this multiple times per week.

The reason we see these ads is because we’re placed on remarketing lists — we’ve shown interest in a product and a business wants to remind us that it’s still available for purchase if we’re interested.

As a business, using remarketing lists helps you make contact with pre-qualified prospects in an attempt to drive a conversion. In this post, we’ll explain how, as a business, you can leverage remarketing lists for search ads to draw in interested site visitors for conversion, and best-practices for using these lists.

RLSA Audiences

RLSA audiences are created by adding a snippet of code (called a tag) to your website that automatically adds your audiences to specific lists based on the action taken on your site. Once the tags are placed, you can bid on these segments and add them to your marketing campaigns. Here’s a guide from Google on how to set these up.

Creating specific RLSA audiences helps marketers leverage the already interested highly-valuable audience members, as it may not be as difficult for them to convert. As a result, you’ll increase conversions, revenue, and profits. You’ll also make the most of your budgets because these users are more qualified, so you’ll spend less on brand awareness.

If you’re feeling a bit confused, consider this example: you sell fiberglass pools and a user on your site has started a work order for pool maintenance, but then they bounce. Since they came so close to conversion, you can add them to a remarketing list and serve them ads for your business every time they query “fiberglass pools,” or related keywords.

Let’s go over some best practices for using RLSA campaigns in your marketing.

RLSA Campaign Best Practices

1. Know your audience before beginning.

As with any marketing process, it’s critical to understand your audience before creating your RLSA lists and running your ads. Consider creating buyer personas and customer journey maps to learn what customers are thinking about in different stages of your journey for better targeted ads.

An additional step could be to modify your bids based on audience demographics. If your users are signed in to Google when making their searches, you’ll be able to further segment and adjust your bids and lists based on available information, like age and gender.

2. Change bids by user stage.

If you’ve created accurate journey maps, you likely know which customer actions are most critical to driving conversions for your audience — this is where you should use RLSA. Use your website codes to track where your users are in their journey, and bid higher for those closer to conversion, a.k.a the closer they are to completing a purchase.