Module 3 - Remarketing lists

What is remarketing on YouTube and why does it matter?

Remarketing is going to be one of the most beneficial things you ever do with YouTube ads. If you've got a website already doing well with a decent amount of traffic, you can retarget that traffic simply by attaching Google Analytics, creating a remarketing list, and letting Google put your YouTube ads in front of the right people at the right time. How long that audience window should be always depends on your product's purchase cycle: it might be seven days, it might be fourteen, thirty, 180, or even 365 or 540 days.

One of the most interesting uses I've seen is a series of remarketing videos that aren't really designed to sell at all: how good your customer service is, your opening hours, meeting a member of the team, client testimonials, work you're doing in the community. These continually show your brand to your existing customer base. If you've got a large enough customer base, they see you on a daily basis through in-stream ads. Most people will still skip these videos, but they've seen your brand regardless, and that's you staying in touch with your existing customers, almost for free. If you take one thing away from this, it's that: putting new content in front of your existing customer base every week, so they keep seeing different ads and learning a bit more about your business, is probably the best piece of marketing you'll ever do.

How do you build a remarketing audience?

In practice, you go into your tools, then audience manager, then remarketing, with Google Analytics already attached. You give the audience a name, for example "web visitors, last 30 days," and choose your account and tag. You can build very specific audiences around people who've visited a particular page or product, which takes more setup work but becomes a set-and-forget system once it's done: for example, a video for each of your ten most popular products or services, so that once someone has been on that page, they see a follow-up video and learn more.

Videos you serve to a remarketing audience can afford to be longer, since you're speaking to someone already engaged, who may have seen a short ad before, browsed your site, added something to a basket, or thought about enquiring without taking action, since most traffic doesn't convert from a cold audience or on the first click. You can also build rules around specific offers, particular pages people did or didn't visit, specific date ranges, or specific tags, which gets quite in-depth quite quickly, though it isn't especially hard to set up. You do need a reasonable amount of traffic to a page before an audience will actually trigger, generally a few hundred visitors rather than three or four.

How long should a remarketing audience run for?

The maximum length of time someone can stay in one of these audiences is 540 days, or a year and a half. I tend to build separate audiences at seven, 14, 30, 60, 90, 180 and 365 days, and rarely bother with the full 540. Creating six or seven audiences at different windows lets you test and compare: do people need to think about your product for only a week, or are you seeing them convert three or four weeks later?

Very few people actually take the time to set this up as a proper strategy, partly because they don't know about it and partly because making the video content is time-consuming and knowing what to make is a challenge in itself. Anyone who does follow this kind of approach has a genuine advantage over the vast majority of YouTube ads agencies or users, because hardly anybody is doing it. The summary is simple: create the audiences across different time frames, and then use them properly within your campaigns.