Google AdWords Email Targeting

Posted February 28, 2016

Email Retargeting Across the Google Display Network

Wouldn’t it be great if you could target your email list with ads to entice those users back to your site?

That email marketing list could be segmented and each segment targeted with unique offers or ads depending on earlier engagement or purchases or demographic data you might have collected along the way.

Email Targeting on Facebook and Twitter

Targeting ads by email address is already possible as part of a custom audience on Facebook and Twitter. See How Facebook Custom Audiences Work.

Enticing earlier visitors back to your website is already possible using the Google Display Network using AdWords Remarketing ads, or if yours is an eCommerce store, AdWords Dynamic Remarketing might perform even better still.

Rumour has it that Google AdWords might be planning to offer email targeted ads using its own platform too, though the rumours seem to suggest on its search platform rather than Display initially. That option seems a little surprising, given the success of remarketing ads on the Google Display Network.

Assuming a similar function to Facebook and Twitter, you’ll be able to upload a .csv file of your list to AdWords and use it as a targeting option for your campaigns as you currently can with other AdWords audience types.

Email Retargeting

We would always recommend caution that you don’t overwhelm your audience with your messages, but the rumoured AdWords email targeting could be a powerful asset.

Your email marketing list could now be targeted with:

email messages in their inbox
Facebook ads in the news stream
promoted tweets in the Twitter stream using the Twitter ads platform
banner ads across millions of pages on the Google Display Network and
ahead of, next to or over the top of millions of videos on YouTube

That’s a whole lot of brand reach and could easily lead to brand saturation for members of your audience if you’re not careful.

Email Retargeting Best Practices

For most platforms, expect to need around 100 active users for privacy reasons. If you’re going to this amount of effort, we’d suggest a lot more than that to make an email remarketing campaign worth your time.
Segment your email list so that you can target parts of your audience with more relevant ads. You’ll also be able to measure and compare responses from each segment to see which offers and ads each segment responds to and which generate the greatest ROI.
Use negative audiences to avoid crossover. Some members might be in your remarketing audience and in your email list. Two separate campaigns targeting the same users probably means double the number of ads they’ll see, which could do more harm than good for your brand, but also has a good chance of wasting at least some of your advertising budget.