You must already have used Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) campaigns. But, do you know that you can dramatically improve your search ads' performance over a period by adding remarketing audiences to your regular search network campaigns even without making it an RLSA campaign?
Yes, you can. Adding Audiences to your existing search ads' targeting allows you to customise your Search Network campaigns by prioritising ads for the people who are important to you.
How is it different from an RLSA campaign?
An RLSA campaign limits your targeting to the set of audiences you add to it. To be more precise, your ads are not shown to the people outside your audience lists. They can be viewed only by the people who are on your targeted audience lists.
However, here I am talking about adding audiences to your existing search network campaigns to see how audiences from different lists are actually performing even without making it a remarketing campaign. It's different than RLSA.
How to add audiences to your search network campaigns?
Make sure you are setting it to 'Observation'. Doing this will not make it an RLSA campaign and still give you insights on the audiences lists. It's the same as 'Bid Only' and 'Target & Bid' settings for display network campaigns in the old AdWords interface.
Now when you run your ads for a few days, you will see that a reasonable percentage of people from your audience lists are overlapping with your existing keywords targeting in search campaigns, it means that a certain percentage of people who came to your site and did not convert are still on their paths to the purchases.
It means they are still looking for the product or services you are offering. This is where you have an additional chance to convert them.
You can bid more aggressively on them by setting a positive bid modifier of a certain percentage, usually 25 to 40%. It will allow you to prioritize your ads for the people who already visited your site.
If your campaigns are on bidding automation, you can still use audiences. By adding audience, you will give more food to the system for thoughts. And then, with machine learning as key part of AdWords system now, the auto-optimization will get better and better over time. As a result, you will see an improved performance eventually.
Become as granule as you can be in creating new audience lists. For instance, if you are an e-commerce store, have separate audiences lists for different categories. If you such lists, you can add relevant lists to the campaigns. The more relevant you are, the better your performance will be.
If you see that certain lists, for instance – All Converters, are not actually doing well, do not hesitate to exclude them by adding a negative bid modifier. This will save you a few dollars additionally.