Google has announced that they have opened up availability of a new feature called remarketing, which was previously being tested by a limited group of advertisers.
This new feature will allow advertisers to reach visitors that had already shown an interest in their product, service or brand by accessing their ad or website in the past, but did not proceed to actually make a transaction or purchase.
This service is not the same as retargeting, as it does not require any data from Google.com.
To make use of remarketing, the advertisers can tag pages and use cookies to identify a visitor or a category of users who can later be shown an ad or offer, based on their interests.
Google AdWords explains this system, by giving an example of a basketball team wanting to sell tickets. By putting a code on the tickets page, they can later show relevant ads to all visitors to their site. The relevant ad could be in the form of discounted tickets or could be an offer for VIP hospitality or team merchandise and so on.
Even though, in essence, this new feature uses behavioural targeting to show ads to users, Google has chosen to call it “Remarketing” rather than simply “behavioural targeting” in order to avoid any controversy involving user privacy and the FTC.
Users can still opt out of personalised or behavioural targeting via the Ad Preferences Manager. Alternatively, users can specify ad categories, which they would be interested in, on the Ad Preferences Manager.
The remarketing feature was run in a limited beta test for the past one year. It has now been opened up to all AdWords advertisers. It could be a very effective way for advertisers to reach consumers who showed an initial interest in their content, but stopped short of making a purchase.
