Everything You Need to Know About Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)

The AdWords search ecosystem is evolving day-by-day. You can finally bid farewell to those days where the most prominent targeting method is just keywords. We will now witness some significant and effective targeting methods that work alongside keywords. Remarketing List for Search Ads is a perfect example of this. You must be wondering what is RLSA?

Well Web Solution Centre, a leading name in Ecommerce Website Designing Company in Delhi, is all set to take you on a tour to explore the nooks and depths of Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

What are Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads is a new Google AdWords feature that enables marketers/advertisers to mold their search campaign based on a fact that the visitors has previously visited their website/app or the pages that user explored.

Ways to Use Remarketing Lists for Search Ads?

First, by making bid adjustments on your ad groups for users (remarketing lists) who are searching information on Google using the keywords you are bidding on.

Second, design search ad groups only to bring in results or display ads if a user is on your Remarketing list, and is using the keywords to search on Google you are bidding on.

RLSAs Vs Traditional Display Marketing

With the introduction of Remarketing Lists for Search ads, everybody is confusing this new AdWords feature with traditional display marketing. The name “Remarketing Lists for Search ads” is quite deceptive and is often viewed as display marketing but on search network.

The only common feature combining the two is the use of cookies to track the user’s action on web subsequently adding them to the lists for advertiser’s use. The way those lists are put into use for RLSAs are entirely different from that of traditional display remarketing.

Another fact distinguishing the two is that while traditional marketing offers ads to the users when they are surfing on the Google Display network. Remarketing Lists for Search Ads don’t automatically delivers the text ads to the users just because they are on your remarketing list. The users need to be vigorously searching on Google using the keywords you are bidding on within your search campaign.

A Display Marketing Ad can show up all over the internet as an image, gif, or html graphic; whereas RLSA ad shows up as a text ad in Search.

RLSA Ad

How to use RLSAs

Set up your remarketing lists for search ads campaign

3. Log into your AdWords account
4. Go to the Shared Library
5. When you visit the “Audiences” section of the Shared library for the first time, you’ll see the “All visitors” list that we’ve created for you.

This list will also appear on the Audiences tab, under the main Campaigns tab. Follow these steps to start using remarketing lists in your campaign.

7. Create a new “Search Network only” campaign, or select an existing search campaign and ad group.
8. Click the Audiences tab, next to the Keywords tab.
9. Click + Remarketing.
10. Click the Add targeting drop-down menu and select
11. Click the Select categories drop-down menu and select Remarketing lists. You’ll find the “All visitors” list and any other rule-based lists you’ve created for your different groups of site visitors. Add the remarketing list to your ad group.

For more detailed step-by-step guide you can refer to Google AdWords Help Centre

Merits of Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)

With RLSAs you can strategically alter your search campaigns to target and attract more relevant and valuable users who have already visited your website, because you know they are genuinely interested. You can also,

1. Target those customers who have already explored your website thoroughly by making higher bids, so that they can see your ads in higher positions on Google.
2. Attracting qualified and active users to the site at a much higher rate than 1^st time comers.
3. Use detailed keywords searches to drive more users who have visited the site in the last seven days.

Effective strategies for using RLSAs:

Show Ads only to Qualified and Valuable Users: These strategies reap results by only letting the targeted keywords and ads be triggered when the user searching on Google is also a lead on your remarketing list. The list could be either of the visitors who have already visited your website or visitors of a particular page on your website.

Fully Optimize your Small Ad spend: Small businesses really can’t afford AdWords and if you have a shell-like budget then generating returns from PPC traffic alone can be extremely difficult without including some very time-consuming strategic optimization.

With RLSAs you can choose to only have your search ads shown only to those users who have already visited your website: This way your small ad spend will last a lot longer than on traditional search ads. The only drawback of this is that you need to have at least 1000 members on a remarketing list for it to be used on the search network. In a nutshell you need a traffic level of 1000 unique users or more on your site but within a time frame that you use for your remarketing list.

Bid on more generic keywords, but only for valuable users: Bidding on vague and common keywords in search engine campaigns, can be expensive and they often generate very less conversions. But with Remarketing Lists for Search Ads you can alleviate the chances of making bids on generic keywords because your audience is more streamlined and filtered.

Test your Brand Campaign: Compiling a list of benefits of bidding on your own brand name in one post is impossible. With RLSAs you could design a brand campaign and ad group that focuses only on users who have not previously visited your website. This is particularly beneficial for those brands whose campaigns are primarily focused on driving new visitors and can direct the brand spend to just new visitors.

Hopefully this blog has given you some guidelines on how you could use Remarketing Lists for Search Ads to get the most out of your AdWords search campaigns.