It seems like it’s been a crazy few weeks at the Googleplex with the amount of new features that have been added into AdWords. We’re going to take a quick look into 6 of the different features available that you might not have heard of and want to get set up in your account.
RLSA – Remarketing Lists for Search Ads
What is it?
RLSA stands for Remarketing Lists for Search Ads. It has been available in beta form for a while now and was just recently pushed live across all accounts. RLSA allows you to add your existing remarketing lists into Search-only campaign. For example John clicks on your ad then lands on your site and gets a remarketing cookie. Using an RLSA linked campaign you can choose to bid for when John and other previous site visitors are searching for any specified keywords on AdWords.
This gives you a couple of extra options for targeting:
- You can use an RLSA list to bid on very broad keywords knowing that you are only showing to those users who have already been on your site. Let’s say you own a bookshop and John visited your ‘Moby Dick’ page – you could choose to show an ad for that particular book to John when he later typed in a much broader ‘books’ search to Google and know that your ad is still probably relevant and likely to convert.
- Alternatively, you could also create an RLSA campaign with just really strong, previously converting keywords in it and bid them up to a higher position (this is my preferred strategy). This means for any of your power keywords you can try and dominate top positions in the rankings that you know will drive conversions. You can afford to do so because you know you are only bidding on heavily qualified traffic that converts really well.
How do you implement it?
If you already have remarketing tags on your site, go into your shared library and then audiences. You should see that you now have a column labelled ‘List size (Google Search)’ – this is the amount of users you can use RLSA for.
Once I know I have users in my remarketing lists, I set up a new Search Network Only campaign named ‘Campaign X – RLSA’ to which I add my desired keywords and then hit the Audiences tab. From here you can ‘Add remarketing’ to your search campaign just like you do on the display network.
What are the results like so far?
During the beta stages we saw a fairly mixed bag of results from RLSA, but had about 30% of accounts where it was a significant boost to Conversions and CPA.
Affinity Groups
What is it?
Affinity groups are new ways to bid on Interest Categories in the Display Network, which originated out of Google’s attempts to create video-friendly groups of people. Affinity groups are a little broader than ICMs, which tend to be narrowed down quite a lot. A high end hotel, for example might use the Affinity group ‘Luxury Travelers’ to target the types of people Google thinks live the Jet Set lifestyle.
How do you implement it?
Exactly the same way as you would do with ICM. Go into your list of Interest Categories when changing Display Network settings and you should now see the following:
From here it’s as simple as opening up your category list and finding things that relate to your audience.
What are the results like so far?
So far my Affinity Group campaigns have performed slightly better than my ICM and Topic campaigns, but worse than Contextual and Managed Placements, according to Google Analytics stats.
Similar Audiences
What is it?
Similar Audiences are an attempt on Google’s part to help you reach a similar group of people to those that you have in your remarketing lists. Google looks down the information it has about those people and says ‘hey, these other people are pretty similar, you would do well to advertise to them’.
How do you implement it?
Similar Audiences can be added from your Remarketing lists section in a Display Campaign’s Display Settings. Make sure you tick the ‘Show Similar Audiences’ button to make them visible and you should see those lists appear.
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