The marathon of holiday shopping prep is nearing an end, and many marketers can probably already smell the faintest hint of turkey and stuffing and yams and apples and….you get the point.
But before you go home, there’s one last massive thing you absolutely have to do for your account right now – create Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) audiences comprised of visitors to your site during Cyber Weekend and the holiday season in general. Doing so will allow you to target these visitors throughout 2017, including next holiday season, thanks to recent RLSA changes.
How to Create Holiday Visitor RLSA Lists
Advertisers can create RLSA lists that are populated only with people who visited an advertiser’s site between two specific dates.
Using this option, advertisers can create lists specifically comprised of users who visit between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day and use those lists to target those people after the holiday season is over.
The most important thing to note, however, is that these lists have to be created prior to the dates included. For example, if you created a list to include visitors between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day on the Monday after Thanksgiving, no visitors between Thanksgiving and Sunday would actually be included in that list, as visitors can only be added to existing RLSA lists and will not backfill.
Thus, it’s incredibly important that you move to create these lists right now if there’s even a slight chance you’ll want to use them later.
Aside from creating general lists of all site visitors and converters during the holiday season, advertisers may also want to create more specific lists like Cyber Weekend visitors to use during the rest of the current holiday season, or perhaps create an audience comprised of last-minute shoppers to use next year.
Note: Advertisers do not have to add these audiences to campaigns now in order to accrue visitors – they just have to create them in their AdWords account prior to the dates targeted.
Google’s RLSA Update Opens up New Opportunity for Targeting Holiday Shoppers Next Winter
This is the first year in which users included in an RLSA list from this holiday season will stay in that list for targeting next year, as Google changed the number of days site visitors can remain in RLSA lists from 180 to 540 days in September. Longer duration RLSA lists also open up other possibilities such as targeting ads for six or 12 month subscriptions in a timely manner, and more aggressively pursuing annual purchasers for other holidays such as Valentine’s Day.
This means advertisers need to be thinking ahead about what types of lists they might want to target further down the road. For many, the upcoming holiday shopping season presents the busiest time of the year in accruing site visitors, and can thus be considered one of the most important times to create RLSA lists for future use.
Don’t be the naughty advertiser without any RLSA lists to target once the holiday season wraps up. Get those audiences created today.
