A couple months back Google quietly rolled out a new feature
that completely changes how advertisers think about paid search. The new feature is called RLSA. If you
are running AdWords campaigns, and you don’t have RLSA enabled, stop what you
are doing and go check it out now.
In the past we couldn’t incorporate what we knew about
customers into what we showed them when they were searching on Google. In other words, we largely were serving up
the same ads to everyone on paid search.
Sure, we could vary the ads by region or device or language, but those
are fairly blunt targeting objects.
RLSA essentially combines re-marketing with paid
search. In other words, when someone
visits your website, you can tag them and put them into customer segments. You then show them different search results in
Google depending on what they have done on your website.
One of the easiest ways to get started with RLSA is to tune
your branded campaign. For example, you
can decide that you don’t need to pay for branded ads for existing
customers. With RLSA you tag existing customers
(e.g., visitors who come to your website and log in). In AdWords you then specify that visitors
with that tag don’t see your branded ads. You can greatly reduce your branded
search spend with this technique. Why
burn your marketing budget on paid ads for existing users who can just as
easily log in by clicking on your natural search results.
Once you have tuned your branded search, it is time to think
about visitors who are in key stages of the conversion funnel. For example, let’s say a customer has put
something in their shopping basket. You
might be willing to bid higher for those folks if you see them searching
again. Alternately, you might want to
show them a different ad. With RLSA, you
segment out the customers who have something in their shopping cart and then run
different campaigns for them.
Those are just two simple examples of how RLSA can be
used. It truly is a rethinking of what
paid search means.
