How do you approach remarketing strategy in your SEM activity?

When it comes to remarketing, I focus on tailoring ads based on how far someone got in the customer journey—keeping things relevant is key. For example, if someone checked out a product page but didn’t buy, I’d target them with an ad highlighting the product benefits or a limited-time offer. For users who just browsed around, I’d go broader with ads that build brand trust or showcase popular items. Google makes this easier with automated remarketing lists and pre-set audiences, so you can reach these groups without much setup.

Privacy laws, though, have added a layer of challenge—users can opt out of tracking more easily, which means we have less data to work with. So while Google’s tools are helpful, staying flexible and mindful of privacy shifts is essential to keep remarketing effective without overdoing it.

When approaching a remarketing strategy in SEM, the key is to focus on re-engaging users who have already shown an interest in your product or service. Remarketing is highly effective because it targets users who are familiar with your brand but have not yet completed a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a contact form. The first step is to segment your audience based on their behavior, such as users who visited a specific product page or abandoned a shopping cart. This allows you to create highly tailored ads that speak directly to their interests and motivations. For instance, if a user viewed a particular product but didn’t make a purchase, you can serve them an ad offering a discount or highlighting key features of that product. Additionally, dynamic remarketing can be employed to show users personalized ads featuring the exact products or services they browsed on your site. Another important aspect is setting the right frequency caps to avoid bombarding users with too many ads, which can lead to ad fatigue. By carefully segmenting your audience and delivering relevant, personalized ads, remarketing can significantly boost conversion rates.

Right now this is a very sensitive subject regarding Google.

What with privacy concerns, data sharing, GDPR and more, remarketing right now is quite, well, tricky.

Google announced they were going to discontinue Google Universal Analytics and replace it with Google Analytics 4 or, GA4 as it’s more commonly known as.

This was their first step in trying to manage privacy concerns and data sharing between them and their users.

In more recent times Google has introduced Consent Mode version 2, which further aims to boost user privacy and data compliance.

Next time you’re on a website and you see a cookie banner pop up, if you accept all, you’re saying you’re happy for that website to place a cookie in your browser to track activity (and potentially remarket to you).

If you decline, well then you’re invisible - sort of like applying suncream when going out on a hot summer's day (but we don’t get those in the UK).

Nevertheless, it’s not worked how Google envisioned it would, now in the last month or so saying “We’re not really going to get rid of cookies, we’ll just depreciate them”. Who knows what that means? But time will tell.

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And here we are, remarketing, what can we do?

Well inside Google Ads, Performance Max has remarketing built-in, so that’s an option.

Remarketing List For Search Ads was always my go to, but again, for how much longer?

And with all these privacy concerns, data compliance, as well as Google Antitrust case - remarketing and this whole area of Google is extremely sensitive at the moment, so time will ultimately tell what happens!