Dynamic Remarketing

Remarketing allows you to show ads to people who have previously visited your website or used your mobile app. Dynamic remarketing takes this a step further, letting you show previous visitors ads that contain products and services they viewed on your site. With messages tailored to your audience, dynamic remarketing helps you build leads and sales by bringing previous visitors back to your site to complete what they started.

Before you begin

To set up dynamic remarketing you will need to do the following:

  • Tag with custom parameters Add the dynamic remarketing tag with custom parameters to all pages of your website. The tag adds your website visitors to remarketing lists and associates them with the unique IDs of the feed items they viewed. In Google Ads, you can find your tag in the Audience manager section of your Shared library.
  • Product or service feed Create a feed that includes all of your products or services, along with details about each item (unique ID, price, image, and more). These details are then pulled from your feed into your dynamic ads. You’ll upload your feed to the Business data section of your Shared library, unless you’re a retailer. Retailers will instead upload product feeds to the Google Merchant Center.
  • Create responsive Display Ads Responsive display ads are asset-based, and automatically adjust their size, appearance, and format to fit available ad spaces. Dynamic remarketing campaigns show customers personalized content from a product feed you control and attach to your campaign. Learn more about responsive display ads.

In this article we will focus on tagging with custom parameters for dynamic remarketing. For more information on product feed and responsive ads refer to these articles:

Dynamic Remarketing with Google Ads

You can use Google Ads for dynamic remarketing. This method is supported through implementations of the Google tag and Google Tag Manager.

  • If you’re looking to enable remarketing only, the Google Ads tag is recommended.
  • If you’re already running Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA), you can continue to use the same tag by modifying/updating the Google Ads Remarketing tag by passing the custom parameters.
  • Create remarketing lists based on web page URLs or custom parameters.

To create a remarketing tag, or retrieve the conversion ID used for remarketing, follow the steps below:

  1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
  2. Click the tools icon in the top right corner of your screen.
  3. Under "Shared library" click Audience manager.
  4. From the page menu on the left click Audience sources.
  5. In the Google Ads tag card, click Set up tag. If you already set up a Google Ads tag, you can edit the tag by clicking the more actions menu and then Edit.
  6. Select "Collect specific attributes or parameters to personalize ads". This option is also known as "Dynamic remarketing" and allows you to show ads to people on your remarketing lists based on their activity on your site or app.
  7. Select the business types that represent your products and services. Business types are used to tell your tags to collect information about activity on your website that is specific to your business. If your business type isn’t listed, select "Other (custom option)".
  8. Select the business type parameters you’d like to track.
  9. Click Create and continue.
  10. When the installation screen appears, your Google tag and event snippet will be ready for use. You can copy the code, use Tag Manager, download the tag, or email the tag to a web developer.

For detailed instructions about how to populate the event snippet for your business type, read how to Use event parameters for your business type.

gtag.js

  • Create a Google Ads tag from within Google Ads. If you already have the Google tag implemented, you don't need to make any changes to the tag.
  • Set up "Collect specific attributes or parameters to personalize ads" and choose to include event parameters for your business.

Tag example:

<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
  <script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=TAG_ID"></script>
  <script>
    window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
    function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
    gtag('js', new Date());

    gtag('config','TAG_ID');
  </script>

Event parameter tag example for a retail vertical:

<script>
gtag('event','view_item', {
  'value': 998.55,
  'items': [
    {
      'id': 1234,
      'google_business_vertical': 'retail'
    },
    {
      'id': 45678,
      'google_business_vertical': 'retail'
    }
  ]
});
</script>

Tag Manager

  • Get the Conversion ID for your Google Ads tag.
  • Setup to "Collect specific attributes or parameters to personalize ads" and choose to include event parameters for your business.
  • Create a new tag in Google Tag Manager. Make sure you select the "Google Ads Remarketing" tag type. Learn more about installing Tag Manager.
  • Deploy a Google Ads remarketing tag on every page of your site.
  • Pass dynamic values for each remarketing event to the remarketing tag on key steps of your site. These values can be things like the product ID of an item a user added to their cart, the origin and destination of a flight a user searched for, the promotion ID of an offer a user had clicked on, etc.)

For detailed instructions to implement dynamic values for the event parameters, read Google Ads Dynamic Remarketing.