Manager Level Remarketing Intro

Before understanding manager level remarketing you must know what a manager account is. This is simple, it is a Google Ads account that holds multiple individual AdWords accounts. A manager account is used by large complex companies with multiple brands. This allows each brand to run separately in an individual account, but then combine data in the manager account for overall business performance. Manager accounts are used when companies have multiple brands, domains, locations, etc. To learn more about Hanapin’s expertise when it comes to multi-brand companies take a look at PPC Strategy for Complex Businesses.

Hanapin Marketing - PPC For Complex Businesses

Remarketing via the manager account allows you to create audience lists all in one place for easier management. When you create audience lists in the manager account you can share them with any individual account that resides under that manager. Create an audience list once, share with all, and that’s it. For instructions on how to share audiences: Set up Remarketing List Sharing.

Benefits of Manager Level Remarketing

Firstly, no one can deny that being able to combine all individual account data for an overall performance report on SEM is fantastic. That is one of the biggest benefits for my clients. But the actual holy grail of this feature comes into play when talking about remarketing strategy.

We are using manager level audiences to remarket to users across accounts. For a simple example, there’s a company with vertical A and vertical B in two separate AdWords accounts. Vertical A is where this company currently receives the bulk of its revenue and users, however, they really want to push vertical B because the margins are better. We take vertical A users and remarket vertical B’s services to them.

If you’re having trouble understanding how this works within AdWords, here are the basic steps:

  • Create an audience list in the manager account that captures vertical A users
    • This could be all users, converted users, users who visited a specific page, etc.
  • Create a campaign in vertical B’s account and target the above-mentioned list
    • You could create a display campaign, use it as RLSA, or both
  • Implement hyper-relevant ad copy and creative that speaks to these users as vertical A customers
    • If attaching the audience to a search campaign you can create ads using IF functions to have ad copy that is specific to that list. About IF functions

AdWords Audience IF Function

Providing customers more value with multiple services or products increases overall LTV and cross-account remarketing gives you a platform to implement these strategies.

Potential Downsides

Housing all audience lists in one place can quickly become overwhelming when you are a company with 40 brands. Luckily, Google Ads has several filter options to quickly find what you’re searching for, as well as, the option to add and filter by labels. However, you will still need to be strategic in what lists you are creating and also the naming convention of each.

AdWords does have a limit on how many audience lists you can create. According to Google Support, you can create up to 25,000 audience lists and dynamic targets combined. I have never hit the maximum to date.

Your audiences may be vastly different across accounts and it may seem absurd to remarket from one to the other. In some circumstances, yes this will be the case, but I encourage you to take a small amount of budget and try anyway. It’s always worth testing.

Conclusion

Leverage the customers you already have to increase value across all brands. Push volume where you need it and give users the opportunity to go through the brand they already trust. Lastly, don’t forget to set up manager level conversion tracking!