Skip to main content

Digital Marketing

How to Increase Adwords PPC Bids for Past Visitors to Your Site

Looking for another way to target more relevant audiences with your PPC ads? Working with a tight budget and strict ROAS goals? Try Remarketing in Search bidding!
What is it?
Remarketing in Search bidding allows you to change your bids by audience. For example, since you know that people who have visited your site in the past are more familiar with you and are potentially more likely to convert, you may want to make sure your ad is higher on the page for those users than users who have never heard of you. With Remarketing in Search bidding, you can increase all bids by a specified percentage to increase how much you’re willing to pay for users within your remarketing audience.
Here’s how to do it!
First, click on the Audiences tab in Google Adwords.
Adwords Audience Tab
At the ad group level, click on the red button to add a remarketing list to this ad group.

Adwords Remarketing Audience Button

Choose the list you want to increase bids for. Below, you can see that All Visitors has already been added to this ad group which includes anyone that has visited any part of the website.

rmktbids3

If you want to continue targeting all searchers with your ads but want to increase bids only for those included in the remarketing list, make sure “Bid Only” is checked. If “Target and Bid” is checked the ad group will ONLY show ads for people in that audience and NOT display for anyone else.

rmktbids4

Once you save, you can see your audience listed on the main page of the Audiences tab.  You’ll see a dash in the Bid Adjustment column. By clicking on it you can change your bid for that audience.

Remarketing in Search Bids

Unfortunately, there’s no way to do it on the campaign level so you need to add this setting to each ad group individually. (A bit tedious don’t you think, Google?)
Once implemented, you can see the results by coming back to the Audiences tab later and scrolling down to the bottom. The Total – Eligible Audiences line gives you stats for just the Remarketing audience so you can compare it against the regular audience. As you can see in my example above, the remarketing audience has a much higher CTR.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Kelsey Cadogan

Kelsey has been in the digital marketing industry since 2010 with experience working both in-house and agency-side. Her specialty is in paid search marketing although her experience also includes search engine optimization, content marketing and social media marketing. When not in the office or relaxing at home, she can be found at the nearest volleyball court.

More from this Author

Categories
Follow Us
TwitterLinkedinFacebookYoutubeInstagram