Introducing Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

As Google continues to evolve and introduces new ways to market, now seems like a good opportunity to give everyone a brief introduction to one of Google’s newest paid search offerings. They’re called “Remarketing Lists for Search Ads” (or “RLSA” for short), and these lists will dramatically change the efficacy of your Google AdWords campaigns.

How do Remarketing Lists for Search Ads Work?

RLSA lets advertisers customize their paid search campaigns for people who have previously visited a dealer’s website, and it allows users to tailor our bids and even ads. In other words, RLSA ads are search results (and not Google Display Ads) that are tailored and served to people who are already familiar with a business’ products and services. These ads are served to a prequalified audience with the expectation of better performance.

What do RLSA Results Look Like?

For the past few months, the LeadBuilder® performance marketing team has been testing RLSA with some live client campaigns. Overall, we have seen higher clickthrough rates (CTRs) and conversion rates (CVRs) than those of the regular campaign. Here are the results:

HVAC Test Client #1

• RLSA CVR of 38.46% vs 32.16% CVR with no RLSA
• RLSA CTR of 7.06% vs 2.29% CTR with no RLSA

HVAC (and Heating Oil) Test Client #2

• RLSA CVR of 16.67% vs 28.38% CVR with no RLSA
• RLSA CTR of 22.02% vs 4.43% CTR no RLSA

HVAC Test Client #3

• RLSA CVR of 29.31% vs 16.72% CVR with no RLSA
• RLSA CTR of 7.81% vs 1.47% CVR with no RLSA

As you can see, for the most part (with the exception of the conversion rate for the one client who sells heating oil), it’s clear that RLSA is delivering higher CTRs and higher CVRs. It’s hard to say whether the outlier is attributable to the difference in products, or if it’s simply just an anomaly. Further testing will be required to determine how often this might happen, and under what conditions it’s most likely to occur.

How Long Will It Take Home Services Companies to Build Lists?

As the LeadBuilder® team continues to expand and develop its search campaigns, this feature will be rolled out across most clients. However, since this is remarketing, RLSA’s ability to perform will be based off the list of people who have been to the sites.

In many cases, because of traffic limitations of many home service dealers, these lists will initially be small. This means that RLSA results for many home service clients will be very minimal until their list sizes are large enough (at least 1,000 visitors). For the average dealer, this ramp-up time could be anywhere between one to three months before an RLSA list becomes viable for this feature to be productive.

Are you looking to leverage the power of Google AdWords and RLSA to generate leads for your home services business? Contact the LeadBuilder® performance marketing team today and learn how paid search fits into your marketing mix.

Hansel Merchor manages the LeadBuilder® performance marketing team. He’s widely experienced on overall performance marketing, regional, local and international lead generation, branding, media planning and media buying, retargeting, attribution models, social media as well as e-commerce on nationwide and international SEM campaigns.

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