Have you had ads follow you around lately? If you’re anything like me you’re probably seeing SEOmoz ads often enough to make your eyes bleed. Now there are several ways the search-savvy organisation could have placed that ad in front of me, but the question that really begs an answer is “How much longer am I gonna see these?!”.

Source: www.outrider.com.au

540 days. That’s how long. Unless I visit their site again, then it’s tears of blood for another 18 months. That’s remarketing, well the unimaginative kind anyway. Cookies kept in your favourite browser from sites you’ve visited via an ad - either on Google Search or the Google Display Network – can and do keep them coming back. Using tags, advertisers are able to mark you as having been interested in a particular service or product because you visited a specific page on their site.

Don’t panic though; this isn’t another big brother Google article, and contrary to the captivating start of this post, I really believe that this type of advertising actually aids audience relevancy. Who wouldn’t want to complete the set from Yuppie Chef with a KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixer having bought the spectacular KitchenAid Artisan Blender just last month? Smart advertisers know this, and they’ll use remarketing to sell it to you. So let’s get into smart advertising and how to avoid causing audience hyphema.

So what are you selling? Or rather, how long does it take you to sell it?

Vital question to start with. Identifying how lengthy the purchase cycle is can save you so much in ad spend. Let’s look at users buying something frivolous like flowers for the home.

A user comes into your website, buys flowers that will last two weeks to the day. You know this, you can use this. Setup a remarketing campaign in AdWords and place a unique tag in the appropriate place. What this will do is build a list of users (aptly called an audience) that you can then advertise to again on the very day the flowers expire. Messaging like “Worry doesn’t wilt, flowers do. Buy fresh flora fast” might work great!

Let’s take baby food as another example. I’ve recently learned that babies don’t always eat the same goop from 0 to 1 and I intend on applying this knowledge to a remarketing campaign. What I can do here is advertise a different baby food to an audience of mothers as their children get older. What’s more is that, if they just visit the site again, I can refresh the 540-day cookie. I chuckle to myself a little when I think about it, since potentially, I could guide the dietary habits of a child from birth to the moment they leave home with remarketing. Remarkable.

For more technical information as to how remarketing works visit the Google Help Centre.

What can you sell in 540 days?