Google Remarketing

What is Google Remarketing?

Google Remarketing is advertising aimed at people who have already interacted with your business — typically visited the store or viewed a product. Their visits are collected into remarketing lists, and you can then show them ads as they move across the Google Display Network, YouTube, Gmail, and search results (called RLSA, Remarketing Lists for Search Ads). To build lists from site visitors, the Google tag must be installed on your pages so traffic can be matched to your audiences.

Why does Google Remarketing matter?

Most visits to an online store end without a purchase: people browse, compare, and leave. Remarketing brings them back by keeping your products visible after they go, catching them closer to a purchase decision. Because the audience already knows the brand, these ads often deliver a higher ROAS than cold prospecting. It is closely related to retargeting and is frequently paired with recovering abandoned carts.

Common use cases

• Show ads for a specific product a visitor viewed but did not buy (dynamic remarketing).
• Reach people who added items to the cart but did not complete checkout.
• Upsell and cross-sell to existing customers after a purchase.
• RLSA: adjust bids or ads in Search when past visitors search again.

Shopify perspective

Use Shopify’s Google & YouTube channel to connect the store to Google Ads and Merchant Center. The channel syncs your product feed and sets up the conversion and remarketing tags, which is the prerequisite for dynamic remarketing with the right products. Remember that an audience only starts serving ads once it reaches a minimum size (around 100 active users in the last 30 days), so new lists need time to build up.