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Google Search Ads are one of the most dynamic ways to grab the consumer’s attention. Not only do they help in catching eyeballs, the conversion rate also levels up. Another winner strategy, remarketing, that targets the audience who has visited your website before, is becoming digital marketer’s favorite due to its incredible results. 

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) is a next step to applying remarketing to your ad campaigns. It basically connects you to people who have visited your website at some point and continue to search on Google and other search engines for the things they initially visited your website for. 

This means that you can get to know your visitors, their preferences in terms of keywords, and information about the time they have spent on your website. 

Before going into the intricacies of making the most out of the Google RLSA, let us help you understand it a little better.

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How does RLSA work?

If you are familiar with remarketing already, RLSA should not be a tough nut to crack. When the visitors browse through your website, their actions get recorded. Whether they leave the site after a few seconds or make it to the cart, every action gets recorded through the cookies. 

When the same audience go back to the search engine and keeps on looking for things on other websites that could even be your competitors, their search words for other websites get stored. These search words play a pivotal role in getting the users interested in your products back to your website. 

RLSA helps you revisit your strategy for gaining attention of the website visitors. There are two ways to go about once you get the information on your visitors. 

You can change the bids you have placed on the keywords in your remarketing lists that you are using. This means you can either increase or decrease the bid for the website visitors depending on the efficacy of the said keywords. 

For instance, if a visitor used ‘sulphur-free shampoo’ that took him to your website and then used the same keyword to search on Google again, you would want to increase the bid on the keyword so that the chances of them visiting your website increase. 

However, if the same user used a different keyword this time to search for the same thing on Google you would want to decrease the bid on the existing keyword. 

Another way of using Google RLSA is by bidding on newer keywords for your website. These are the keywords that you have not placed a bid on before. These keywords include the one this old user of yours used to search instead of the ‘sulphur-free shampoo.’ 

You can only bid on these keywords for people who have visited your website. This means that you will be making sure that your bucks do not go to waste by not taking much of the risk of including it for every type of audience. Whichever way you pick, you are definitely going to a change in the conversion graph for your website. 

Since it is a list of visitors for your website, Google RLSA lets you set the terms for it. To put it simply, it is you who decides that kind of visitors are to be included in the list. You can pick specific actions that if performed by a certain user will lead to them being added in the list. 

It also lets you decide how many days do you want to keep the visitors on your RLSA. This is the ‘membership duration’ that you get to decide. This allows you to focus on a pool of visitors for a certain amount of time and then move on to the recent ones.  So, after the set duration, the visitors are automatically removed from the list. 

Further, your remarketing list can either be ‘Open’ or ‘Closed.’ An Open list gives room for more visitors to be added in it. The list of this kind will keep on adding more people as they visit your website as long as they are following the ‘rules’ (the action(s) that if a visitor does will then lead to them being added in the list) you have set up for your list.

A ‘Closed’ list generally means that you are only going to target people who have visited your website up until the time you created the list. The list won’t increase in size and will keep on working with the limited pool of visitors.  

The type of list you want to opt for primarily depends on your goal. If the goal is to bring the old customers back and rekindle their interest in your brand then a ‘Closed’ list will do the job. However, if you want to focus on every type of viewer or visitor for your website and feel like expanding the audience then keep your list ‘Open.’

Further, your ‘Open’ list will automatically ‘Close’ if you have not used it in the last 540 days. You can always activate it again for targeting whenever you need to. 

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The benefits of creating RLSA for your website

Out of the numerous benefits one can reap out of RLSA, the following are bound to make you want to try it for yourself:

Your Ad won’t get blocked by Ad blockers

Ads are annoying, let’s just all admit that for once. Most of us get so frustrated by popups that we install ad blockers on our systems. Businesses that target people using popup ads are not reaching out to all of their expected target audience. 

That’s where Google RLSA comes in. These lists are targeted for search ads. These ads do not appear as popups by display ads. They would only appear when the user is searching for the related product and hence won’t appear ‘intrusive’ to the user. The chances of the users seeing your ad and clicking on it increase with RLSA. 

You can engage more in less 

One of the reasons why you have got to try this strategy of engaging with more substantial audience is that it generally costs you list. When we launch ad campaigns with the audience we think are more likely to buy the product, we are not ruling out the ones that are never going to care about the ad.

When we use remarketing strategies such as RLSA, we are targeting people who have showed interest in our brand at some point. The budget set for this strategy will be used on people whose chances of becoming a conversion are more. 

You do not need to have a huge budget for RLSA. Additionally, you always have the option to increase or decrease bids on the keywords as per the progress so you do not have to overspend if a particular strategy is not working out for you. 

You can personalize ads for different audience

Our absolute favorite thing about remarketing strategies is getting all the tea about the consumer behavior. When you set the ‘rules’ for the visitors to be included in your remarketing list you are essentially monitoring their behavior.

Understanding your website visitors’ behavior is the key to getting more conversions. For instance if you see an upsurge of visitors on a specific page and don’t find any of them actually buying from you, tailoring ads specifically for them might help giving the push they need to buy the product. 

You get to experiment more

With RLSA, you are not restricted to use one list. The tool gives you the option to create as many lists as you like. Each list ought to be different from the others to check which one works best for you. 

You get to try several types of audiences and analyze how each of them performs. Introduce new keywords to experiment a little more.The bids can then be adjusted based on their progress. 

Ideally, you should have one list for each action e.g. landing page visitors, ones who added something to the cart before abandoning it, ones who added multiple items in the cart before abandoning it, the actual buyers, etc. Capitalize on demographic details and use them at your advantage. Defining demographics can also help narrow down your target audience to your benefit. 

Once you have done that, you can carefully place your bids for each type. Naturally you would place a higher bid on the visitors that made it to the cart than the ones who just hovered on the homepage and left. 

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Conclusively

With all the hard work that goes into reaching just the right list and keywords for your ad campaign, Google RLSA promises to return the favor. If done right, the strategy can significantly increase ROI without having you to spend a lot. Once you have found what parameters work for you, replicating them in the future comes easy. 

Prepare your lists today and make the most of every buck you spend on the search ads.