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Dynamic remarketing

Dynamic remarketing is a form of remarketing whose ads show past visitors the products they viewed on a store's site, taken from its product feed.

How it works

The Google tag on the store’s site sends events, such as view_item, add_to_cart and purchase, each with the product’s ID. Google Ads matches that ID with the Merchant Center feed and takes the price, image, title and link from it. For a retailer, the item ID the site sends must equal the product’s id, item_group_id or display_ads_id in the feed.

Dynamic remarketing runs only in Display, Performance Max and App campaigns. In Performance Max with a linked Merchant Center account, it switches on by itself once the site is tagged for dynamic remarketing. Dynamic remarketing for online stores covers setup and what to do when ads show the wrong products.

Where you see it

On the site: the Google tag on every page, plus its event snippet on product, cart and order confirmation pages. In a Display campaign: Settings → Additional settings → Dynamic ads. Google Ads does not report dynamic remarketing by product, so product-level results need your own tracking.

Example

Example store, not client data.

A visitor opens a blue dinner set on the tableware shop’s site. The tag sends view_item with the ID “DS-114”, the code printed on the product page. In the feed, the same set has the id “1146” from the shop’s platform. Nothing matches, so the set cannot appear in the visitor’s ads; sending “1146” from the site fixes the match.

Not to be confused with

  • Remarketing — advertising to people who have already visited the store’s site or are on its customer lists. Dynamic remarketing is the variant whose ads are filled with products from the feed.

Right and wrong readings

  • Wrong: “The ad showed a product the visitor never opened, so the tag is broken.” Right: Google’s recommendation engine picks the mix of products for each ad from the feed, by popularity as well as by what the visitor viewed.

Sources