Remarketing is a marketing method used to approach people who have already visited your website or ticket shop. In short, people who have already shown an interest in your event location and the events you offer. At Stager we have made it easy to apply remarketing via Google Ads. We explain how in this article.
This article is valuable when
You want to approach people who have put something in their shopping cart, but have not paid.
You want to use an existing, or specific audience as a target for your new campaign.
You want to target a group of people who have completed a specific action on the website.
Set up your Google Ads account and start advertising
To get started with Google Ads, you obviously need a Google Ads account. Go to ads.google.com and create an account. Creating the account is free, you only pay when you are actually advertising.
In Google Ads you have different campaign types, but in this article we only focus on the possibilities for remarketing. We do this with a hypothetical case:
Example case
Suppose you want to create an advertising campaign in Google Ads for a new singer-songwriter who is coming to your venue. Ticket sales are not really moving. At the same time you also have a concert for Ed Sheeran planned. Of course, ticket sales are booming. With remarketing, you can capture all the people who bought Ed Sheeran tickets and use them to promote the unknown artist to the public. You begin by creating a remarketing target group.
Create a remarketing audience
If you have created a Google Ads account, you can now start creating target groups. In the Google Ads environment, go to 'Tools and Settings' at the top right. The menu that opens shows the option 'Audience management' under 'Shared library'. Click this. Follow these steps:
Click on the blue circle with the plus sign.
Choose the option 'Website visitors'.
Give the target audience a name (e.g. Ed Sheeran ticket buyers).
You have several options at 'List members'. In this case 'Visitors of a page' is the most relevant. Select ‘match a rule group’.
Select ‘URL’ and ‘contains’ and enter the URL you want people to visit. You do this by only including the part after the domain. If the URL is https://concerts.stager.nl/web/tickets/635373538 then enter: /635373538. See example in screenshot below.
Under ‘Initial list size’, leave ‘Include people from last 30 days’.
Membership duration depends on how long you want to keep people in your remarketing list. If you enter 30 days here, people will disappear from your list after 30 days. The maximum duration is 540 days.
Optionally, you can add a description of the target group.
Click on 'create target group' and you will find your first target group.
Repeat the steps above if you want to create target groups for multiple events or create multiple target groups.
Get your Conversion ID
Your audience has now been created in Analytics, but the group still needs to be populated with people who bought an Ed Sheeran ticket in Stager. In order to capture those people and put them into your target audience, there is one last step you must go through: your 'remarketing tag' must be added to Stager. Only when you add that tag to Stager can we forward the information about this audience to Google Ads.
You can find this remarketing tag under Tools and settings > Audience management and then select Audience sources in the left row.
Under 'Google Ads', click 'Details' and then 'Set tag' at the bottom of the page.
Then click on 'Use Google Tag Manager' and copy the Conversion ID.
Add the Conversion ID to Stager
The last step in the process is to add the Conversion ID to Stager. You do this via your Google Tag Manager.
By adding your remarketing tag to all your events once, you send all your data to Google Ads. There, by creating the different target groups, you have created a filter that ensures that your visitors automatically end up in the right target group. You can use these lists for your campaigns. A list for display must consist of at least 100 contacts and for search the list must consist of at least 1000 contacts.
Now that you have created target groups, you can advertise very specifically in Google Ads. For example, previous Ed Sheeran ticket buyers may be approached with a banner or text ad highlighting your singer-songwriter concert.
This banner or text ad will then appear on websites that your target group visits. If your remarketing target group clicks on the ad, they will end up on your page about the new artist. It is then up to you to ensure your content entices your previous visitor to go to this concert as well.