Users who have already visited your website are likely to be more engaged with your brand after their first visit. Typically, returning visitors browse more pages and convert more often when coming back to a website after their first time. Remarketing campaigns leverage this by targeting people who have visited a business's website (or watched one of their videos —  action must be "cookie-able") by showing them ads on other websites.

Remarketing is often cost-effective and helps lift the ROI of your entire account. 

Even if you're not ready to start a remarketing campaign today, it's a good idea to set up remarketing lists. When you do decide to launch a campaign, you can begin serving ads right away without waiting for your lists to populate.

Opteo checks for Display campaigns with associated audiences. If we can't find any, we'll flag up a task explaining how to create a remarketing campaign. 

Creating a remarketing campaign is a multi-step process, that, unfortunately, we can't do for you. Instead, we'll give you detailed, step-by-step instructions.

Note: We won't be able to detect your remarketing campaigns until they have accumulated a few impressions. If you've set up a remarketing campaign and Opteo is still pestering you about it, Dismiss the task for a week. If everything has been set up right, that improvement task won't come back!

For reference, these are the steps required to set up your first remarketing campaign.

If you are unsure about any of the steps listed here, see our in-depth guide to remarketing for more detail. Google also has extra info here.

Ensure your email has Administrative (or account manager) access to both Google Ads and Google Analytics.

In Analytics, under the Admin tab, navigate to Google Ads Linking in the Property column. Create a new link group for your Google Ads account.

In Google Ads, click the Tools icon and head to Linked Accounts > Google Analytics. Link the desired Analytics property.

For Universal Analytics follow these steps:

In Analytics, under the Admin tab, look for the Property column. Hit Tracking Info, then Data Collection. Slide both Remarketing and Advertising Reporting Features to On.

For GA4 follow these steps:

In Analytics, under the Admin tab, look for the Property column. Click Data Settings, then Data Collection. Slide Enable Google Signals Data Collection to On.

Make sure to Save before continuing!

In Analytics, under the Admin tab, navigate to Property > Audience Definitions > Audiences. You can now create new audiences! Your options are practically limitless. For ideas of audiences to target, take a look at our guide to remarketing.

Now you've created your audiences, do a quick check inside Google Ads to see if they've populated correctly. Navigate to Tools > Shared Library > Audience Manager. You should see each of the audiences that you created in Analytics.

In Google Ads, click the blue + to create New Campaign and used the wizard to create a new display campaign. After you've set up budget & bidding, under targeting select Audience segments and add your list. Under targeting, you have the option to switch off 'Optimized targeting' which will expand targeting beyond your customer list and typically spend more budget on a much wider targeting. This option is switched on by default.