Today is the 2nd anniversary of the Daily Golden Nuggets. As I begin the 3rd year of writing about jewelry website SEO and online marketing tips I want to remind everyone that you can submit a questions or comment for a future Nugget. Just reply to a daily email or submit a question through the contact form on the jwag.biz website.
Last Monday I attended a special training session for Google AdWords to learn the latest stuff about Remarketing. AdWords Remarketing is a special form of AdWords that only shows ads to people who are part of an interest group, or those who have already been to you website.
Even though Google announced Remarketing in March 2010 very few people have heard of it or use it. Any AdWords advertiser can use this feature to reconnect with users who previously expressed an interested in your store, and those who may be interested.
With a regular AdWords account, you create a series of text and banner ads that appear throughout the web based on keyword targeting. If you target "princess cut diamond" then your ads have the potential to appear when someone searches for that phrase.
Advertising also appears throughout millions of websites that are part of the Google Content Network. Large and small websites can sign up to show Google's ads on their pages. Most of the time the ads appear based on the topics of each individual web page. For example, ads for Aflac Insurance might show up on a web page talks about insurance. Some of those websites will be competing insurance companies.
With remarketing you don't target keywords, but people. Google uses high level tracking to monitor what websites people visit online and displays ads based on their actions. Instead of targeting the keyword insurance, Aflac could target people who visit several websites that use the word "health insurance." Once someone shows and interest in health insurance they become a candidate to see the Aflac Insurance ad.
What I've just explained is how you can use AdWords Remarketing to target people who have shown an interest. These interest groups are called "audiences" inside AdWords. You will need to ask your AdWords firm to help set up your audience remarketing because this gets into a pretty tricky setup called "custom combinations." Drop me an email if your AdWords firm doesn't know how this works.
Google's categorization of interest groups for the jewelry industry is quite limiting with only these 3 category targeting options:
1. Shopping > Apparel > Clothing Accessories > Gems & Jewelry
2. Shopping > Apparel > Clothing Accessories > Gems & Jewelry > Rings
3. Shopping > Apparel > Clothing Accessories > Watches
Your interest group audience will include people who've visited your competitor's website and websites of your largest online competitors like BlueNile, JamesAllan, and Tiffany.
Remarketing gives you the ability to show your banner ad to someone who was just browsing engagement rings on BlueNile 5 minutes ago. It's important to note that Google only shows banner ads to these targeted people and you will need to create 9 different size ads for your campaign.
If you plan on using all 3 targeting categories then you should create 3 different sets of banner ads with specific intent on each set. Someone in the Watches group will not click on an ad for rings and vice versa.
This was just a brief overview for jewelers who feel they are wasting a lot of money on Google AdWords and want an alternative. Google Remarketing is the remedy for jewelers spending $3000 or more per month on AdWords.
I've left a lot out of this Nugget, like landing page targeting, banner ad design, geo targeting, and time targeting. I consider this entire topic to be high level website magic, so don't attempt it on your own.
