Nowadays, to view your campaign performance (impression, clicks, conversions) by country, you can just go to the Dimensions tab in your Adwords online interface and select GeoGraphic from the View list on the top left. Make sure to select a date range long enough to have substantial data (say the past 3 months).

What’s up with movie fans in Italy?

I was looking at this report today for my Movie Collector campaign and I found that when sorting the report by Impressions, Italy was the 4th country in the list. This is strange, but doesn’t have to be a problem if the conversion numbers are similar. However, when sorting by Conversions (trial sign ups in my case), I found that Italy was at position 10. The conversion rate on those italian impressions was way lower than average. Looking at actual sales stats, the results were even worse: Italy was nowhere to be found in the top 20 countries.

It turns out that in my case, for this particular campaign, it doesn’t make sense to spend money advertising to Italy. So I removed Italy from the Country list in my Movie Collector campaign settings. Making my Adwords account a tiny bit more profitable again.

BTW: in my previous blog post about this topic I reported having removed Greece from my campaign settings. See the trend here?

Should you remove Italy from your campaigns too?

So do I have something against Italy? No of course not, on the contrary. I love Italy, italian people, italians cars, etc… And I love selling software to Italy and will continue to do so. But my stats just tell me that for my business, for this particular product, it does not make sense to spend my advertising money on Italy.

Am I suggesting you should remove Italy from your campaigns too? No, definitely not. My recommendation is just to take a look at your Adwords account, at the GeoGraphic reports for your campaigns and find out for yourself which countries you should be advertising to and which ones you should remove from your your campaign settings. As always: your mileage may vary.

The other solution

Of course, there’s a different action you could take after finding that ad impressions in a particular country don’t convert well. You could of course tweak your ads, tune your landing page, maybe even improve your product and try to increase your conversion rate there. And you should.
But still, while you’re doing all that, until your conversion rate has improved, I would still recommend lowering your ad spend in that country.

For instance, I am now investigating why Movie Collector doesn’t sell well in Italy. Maybe the Italian translation sucks, maybe I am missing some important Italian payment methods, maybe it’s just that the coverage of italian movies in our online movie database isn’t too great. All things that can be fixed., but that will take time. In the meantime, google.it isn’t getting my money.

10 years ago, when users ran into a software problem, they just contacted the developer for help, resulting in a useful conversation where the user got his problem solved and the developer got useful information about possible bugs.

However, nowadays a user is more likely to just complain about the problem in a public place like Facebook, Twitter, the App Store or the Android Market. No request for help, no conversation and therefore: no solution.

The App Store Attitude

Let’s call this behavior the “App Store Attitude“, because it’s most apparent for mobile apps, where users, instead of contacting Support, immediately jump to “warning other users” by posting a review in the App Store or Android Market.
I must say though, that I am finding that this attitude is spreading beyond the App Store and is also starting to happen for desktop tools and for web applications.

The Collectorz.com situation

Before I discuss how we’re trying to fight the App Store Attitude, let me explain the Collectorz.com situation and our mobile apps a bit more.

You see, we’re not selling 99 cents apps, discardable gimmicks or even games. For that category of apps, I can kind of understand the App Store Attitude. If you buy an app like that, and it crashes, has some kind of problem or even just sucks, then yes… I can accept that the user just moves on, finds an alternative or just forgets about it. For 99 cents, it’s not worth doing the conversation with those pesky programmers.

However, at Collectorz.com we are selling seriously expensive software solutions. Our mobile apps cost $9.99 and on top of that, these apps can only be used by people who already own our Windows or Mac software (a $49.95 purchase). So our mobile app users have spent at least 60 bucks with us, but most users own multiple $49.95 products and one of our barcode scanners (ranging from $19.95 to $144.95). They have a serious amount of money invested in our stuff, not something to discard easily.

Which also means that users who buy our mobile apps already know who we are, know how to find our website, and most importantly, they know that we can easily be contacted through our Support Page, in our Forum, on our Facebook page (17,500 fans) or via Twitter (2,500 followers).

So in short: our app buyers have spent serious money with us, they have all reasons to get their problems fixed, and they know how to contact us.
But still, as soon as a problem occurs with their mobile app, most of them immediately resort to the reviews section and just “state” their problem, anonymously.

Fighting the App Store Attitude – first attempt

In the comments on my previous post about this, some commenters (Rico, Jerry) suggested that the App Store and Android Market were to blame for this, because both only provide a standardized way to post reviews and do not offer a similarly standardized way of contacting the developer for support. And I agree, it would be great if it was more easy for users to get in contact with the developers.

But other commenters (Steven, Geoff) suggested that as long as the App Store does not provide an easy way to contact Support, why not build that into your app yourself. Provide a feedback button that makes it dead-easy to contact you and start that conversation.

Great idea, so today we did just that, we added a new Help button in the toolbar of our 5 iPhone apps.
The Help button pops up a little message that says “Looking for help?” with 2 buttons: “Check the FAQ” and “Contact Support”. The FAQ button opens Safari on the correct FAQ page, the Contact button opens the user’s Mail app on a new email, with our support email address and Subject already filled in, ready to fire away.

Let’s see if this helps. I hope the ease of contacting us will prevent most users from posting their problem in the reviews section. Of course, this solution won’t work if the app immediately crashes on start-up (no way to reach the Help button). Oh well…

I will of course report back with our findings.

My company Collectorz.com will sponsor the pre-event meeting on November 18 in BAR92 at the conference hotel. So if you will be attending the ESWC come say hi and have a couple of drinks on me.

BTW: I will also be speaking on the first conference day, at 1:15 PM. My topic:

How to sell more stuff to your existing customers

Attracting and converting new visitors is very important, we all know that. But don’t ignore your existing customers. There’s good money to be made selling more stuff to people who already purchased from you before.
This session will focus on cross- and up-selling to existing customers, using email campaigns, newsletters, auto-responders, Facebook, Twitter, etc…

See you there!

I was quite happy when this was announced. I have been using both for a couple of years now, using a few simple campaigns on both. The extra traffic that both can bring is nice, but is still very low compared to the amount of traffic (and sales) that Google Adwords is generating.

Which meant hat I could never afford to spend much time on optimizing my Yahoo or MS ads. I am hoping that this merged system, with combined traffic from Bing and Yahoo Search, will bring enough traffic to justify more tweaking and testing. More results with less work, can’t say no to that.

Moving Yahoo Search campaigns over to Microsoft adCenter

Yahoo suggested that I move my Yahoo campaigns over to adCenter, with their automated transition tools. Sounded like a good idea, because my Yahoo campaings were more advanced than my adCenter setup.

The first problem I ran into was that my adCenter account was a Euro account, and it refused to import my Yahoo USD campaigns. But that was easily resolved by creating an extra USD account in adCenter, under the same login. I retried the import and this time it was quick and smooth.

However, when I examined the resulting campaigns, I was less happy:

• I lost all my bids. All keyword bids were set to 5 cents.
• All keywords were set to broad match. While I was using exact match only on Yahoo Search.
• Content match was switched on for all keywords. While I was not using Content Match on Yahoo at all.

Switching off Content Match was easy, as it can be done at the Campaign level.
(Tip: on the Campaign tab, select all Campaigns, then choose Bulk Edit from the menu under the More button).
But changing match types and bids would be more manual labour. Not looking forward to that. Microsoft has an offline editing tool for doing modifications in batch (adCenter Desktop), but there is no Mac OS X edition. Now what?

Importing Google Adwords campaigns into Microsoft adCenter

The Tools page of adCenter says it can import Adwords campaigns, so let’s try that instead. My Adwords account is tweaked and tuned to perfection, so it would be great to get all that into adCenter with a simple import.
Well, that turned out to work a lot better. Here’s the steps to get your Adwords campaigns into adCenter:

• Export your Adwords campaigns to CSV : The online Adwords interface does not have any campaign export tools, so exporting needs to be done from Adwords editor. Just right click a campaign in the panel on the left and choose “Export Spreadsheet (CSV)”
• Edit the CSV : The resulting CSV file can be imported into adCenter unchanged, but you may want to perform some editing on it first. For instance, all my ad URLs in Adwords contain the tracking code “?from=google”, so I used Excel to replace all these with “?from=ms”.
• Import into adCenter : In adCenter, choose the Tools tab, then “Import campaigns”. Browse to one of your Adwords campaigns CSV and click Continue.
• Fix your ads and keywords : After importing, adCenter will take you through a few steps to fix possible problems, for instance, ads that are too long, duplicate keywords, etc…

And that’s it. Your Adwords campaign is now running in adCenter. It even transfers your match types (broad, phrase, exact) and your negative keywords (at both campaign and ad group level). Amazing.

However, in my case all my keyword bids were again set to 5 cents. But that probably is because my Adwords campaigns are all set to use conversion optimizer, that is, I’m bidding for conversions, not clicks. So I still needed to dust off my old Windows laptop and install adCenter Desktop to fix that. Oh well…

First results

My adCenter campaigns have been running for 4 days now. My first impressions (both literally and figuratively):

• Impressions are at about 10 percent of my Adwords impressions for the same campaigns.
• Average CTR is slightly higher than Adwords.
• First two adCenter-generated sales are in. They happened to be high price sales too.

Of course, it is still very early. Moreover, I still need to go through my keyword lists, to see if there are any that are generating too many impressions and bad clicks.

Keep in mind that the matching algorithms or Adwords and adCenter are likely to be very different. So a broad match keyword that is doing well on Adwords may generate lots of bogus impressions in adCenter. Or vice versa.

Worth a try?

If you have a perfectly tuned Adwords account up and running, I would definitely recommend taking a look at adCenter. Importing your Adwords campaigns is a breeze, so you’ll be up and running in no time.

However, do keep a close eye on your new campaigns, especially during the first few days, maybe even weeks. You may need to re-adjust your keywords lists and bids. Also, the adCenter landscape will probably be changing quickly, because of many new advertisers coming on board.

Whatever you do, don’t leave your adCenter account running on auto-pilot. But that has never been a good idea for Adwords either, so nothing new here.

Mexico? We hardly ever sell to Mexico.

A quick peek at the Ecommerce tab confirmed that: In the same period only 0.37% of my sales came from Mexico. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if all that traffic was organic and thus free. But what if I am paying for those visitors with Adwords?

Sadly, information like that is not readily available from your Adwords interface. You will have to run a Geographic Performance report to get to the data. And even then, it takes some work to turn the data into actionable information.

But, it’s definitely worth doing. For instance, I found that for the past five months, a considerable part of my Adwords spend had been going to Mexico and a couple of other countries (Greece, Spain) that were not resulting in enough sales.

So I highly recommend that you spend some time to analyze your own Geographics Performance report. To help you do it, I have created a step-by-step tutorial on creating and analyzing this important report type. Here we go…

Creating the report

Start with running the report and saving the report data:

• In your Adwords account, choose Reporting, then Reports from the drop-down menu.
• At the top, choose Create a New Report
• Under Report Type, choose Geographic Performance
• Under Settings,
  • Set Level of Detail to Account
  • The View (Unit of Time) setting is fixed to Daily. I would prefer to use the Summary option here, but it is not available for Geographic Reports. Oh well, we can do the aggregation ourselves with Excel or Calc…
  • Choose a Date Range that gives you sufficient data (I’d recommend to select a couple of months of data, maybe even more)

  

• Under Advanced Settings, click Add or Remove Columns, then check choose the following columns:
  • under Attributes: I’d recommend to select just Country/Territory, unless you’re doing local ads.
  • under Performance Statistics, choose Impressions, Clicks and Cost
  • under Conversion Columns, choose Conversions (1-per-click), or if you are tracking your sales and sign ups separately (like I do), then choose the Sales Conv and Sign-up Conv fields instead.

  

• Click “Create Report” at the bottom and wait for it to complete.
• Open the report, then at the top left choose Export Report and click “.csv (for Excel)

  

We now have the raw Geographic Performance data saved on our computer. Let’s open it in Excel or Calc to massage it into something useful.

• Now open the saved CSV file in either Excel or OpenOffice Calc. Note that Adwords report are called CSV (as in COMMA Separated Values), but are actually TAB separated. So make sure you choose Tab as the delimiter when importing.
• (At this point you may want to Save the report in your spreadsheet’s native format, .XSL for Excel or .ODS for Calc.)
• Delete the top 3 rows (REPORT, ACCOUNT and DATE RANGE) and the bottom row (Totals) from the sheet.
• I also like to:
  • Make the header row bold so that it stands out more
  • Rename some of the column headers to something shorter (e.g. Country, Sales, Sign Ups).

This should give you a sheet that looks like this:

Aggregating the data per country using a Pivot Table

As you can see, the Geographic Performance Report gives us performance data per country per day, not very useful. To get a useful summary per country, we need to aggregate the data by country using a Pivot Table (or as OpenOffice Calc calls it, the Data Pilot). Here’s how to do that:

• Select the entire sheet by hitting Ctrl-A (or Cmd-A for us Maccies).
• In Excel, choose Data / PivotTable Report. (or in Calc, use Data / DataPilot / Start).
  
  (the following steps may differ depending on your version of Excel or Calc, but the main thing to get right is the Layout)

• As the destination of the pivot table, choose New Sheet (in Calc, this is under More / Results to).
• For the Layout of the pivot table, drag the Country field to the Row box and drag the Impressions, Clicks, Costs and Conversions fields to the Data box.
• Make sure the Data box now says “Sum of …” for all fields. Double click each field to change it if necessary. (For some reason my Mac Excel defaults to “Count of …”.)
• Leave the Column box empty.

Like so:

After generating, this will result in the following pivot table:

• We selected multiple data fields and by default these appear vertically arranged. However, we want to be able to sort on each of these fields, so we prefer to have them as separate columns. To make that happen, just drag the header of the Data column one cell to the right and drop it on the cell that says Total (in Calc that cell is empty).

  

  And presto, we have an aggregated performance report by Country, with nice totals for Impressions, Clicks, Costs, Number of Sales (and in my case, Number of Sign Ups):

  

Analyzing the data

Now the fun begins. Let’s see where we are making money and, more importantly, where we are losing money.

• First sort the table on the Cost column. This may already provide some eye-openers. For instance, I saw Mexico appearing as the fourth country from the top.
• Now let’s create a column that is a rough estimate of our earnings in each country. Just call it Revenue or something like that. In the first data cell of that column, use a simple formula ito fill it with the Number of Sales times your average sales value (e.g. “=E5*60″). Copy that formula down the entire column (just click in the cell and drag its bottom right corner down).
• Create a 2nd new column called “Margin” and use another formula to fill it with the value of the Revenue column minus the Cost value (for me, that became “=G5-D5″). Again, copy it down for all cells in that column. This Margin column is essential, as it shows us whether we are making money or losing money. Hint: negative values are bad
• To make the negative values stand out more, I use Conditional Formatting (Formats menu) to set the background of values < 0 to red.

The result:

Now take a close look at the countries with a red Margin box, especially the ones near the top and the ones where you are loosing a lot of money. Try sorting on this new Margin column to quickly find the biggest money wasters.

How to use this information?

As promised in the introduction, I have shown you how to turn the raw geographic data into actionable information. But what action should you take?
Should you modify your Campaign settings to remove the “bad” countries and stop advertising there? Or should you try to improve your sales process for those countries? In other words, to fix your negative margins, do you fix the Cost side or the Revenue side?

The easy way out is to remove the countries from your Campaign Settings. But before you do, try to think of the reasons you are not selling well in these countries? For example, if sales in Germany are below par, this could be because you are not offering specific local payment methods that are popular in Germany. Or maybe you need to consider translating your product and/or creating a localized “punkt de” website.

Modifying your Campaign Settings

If you do decide to stop advertising in the “red” countries, either permanently or temporarily (while you optimize your sales process), here’s how to modify your Adwords settings. In Adwords, Location settings are at the Campaign level, so you will have to modify these settings separately for each campaign in your account. But don’t worry, there’s a trick in Adwords Editor that lets you copy country settings between campaigns.

For the first campaign I like to modify the Location settings in the online Adwords interface (the bundles and the map make it a bit easier to find the countries):

• Go to the Campaigns tab in your Adwords account.
• Click the first campaign in the navigation bar on the left.
• On the right, go to the Settings tab.
• Under Locations, click the Edit link.

  

• This will open the “Select a Location” pop-up.

  

• Modify the list of locations here, removing your bad countries. Make sure to verify the list of remaining one under “Selected locations”.
• Click Save.

That’s one down. Now if you want to use the same Location settings for other campaigns, I recommend to use Adwords Editor because it lets you copy/paste the settings from one campaign to another:

• Start Adwords Editor and Get Recent Changes.
• On the right, go to the Campaigns tab.
• Select the campaign for which you already modified your Location settings in the online interface.
• Right click that campaign and from the context-menu, select Copy Campaign Targeting.

  

• Select a campaign that you wish to copy the Location settings to.
• At the bottom, to the right of Location Targeting, choose Paste.

  

• Do the same for the other campaigns that need the same targeting. No need to Copy Campaign Targeting again, just hit the Paste link for all of them.

A word of warning though: it may make sense to have different Location settings per campaign. Considering the targeting of your campaigns and products and decide which countries you want to advertise to in each one. If necessary, re-run the above steps to generate a campaign specific Geographic Performance report.

Your results?

Here’s what happened to my Adwords account after I performed the above steps:
Costs dropped, conversion rates increased…

How did it work out for you? Did you discover locations where you were losing money? What happened to your daily costs after modifying your Location Settings?
I would love to hear about your results, just post below.

Here’s some of the first effects I am seeing when using a microsite as the target URL and, more importantly, the Display URL of Google ads.

Book Database

Microsite: www.bookdatabase.com

Music Database

Microsite: www.musicdatabase.com

DVD Database

Microsite: www.dvd-database.com

Obviously, I still need to work on optimizing these pages for conversions.
But for now, I am quite happy with my improved CTRs.

Message and Destination Page

Quoting from my earlier post about remarketing:

You are targeting people who have already visited your site at least once, you can assume that they already know what your product is about.
Your message should be focussed on getting them back to your site.

This is what I tried first, the direct approach. An image ad with a special $10 discount offer, linking straight to the shop, with the coupon applied:

This resulted in some sales, but not many.
I began to wonder whether this approach was too direct. Are these people ready to buy? I know they visited my site, but maybe their visit was short. Many of them didn’t even download the trial edition yet. So hitting them with an invitation to Buy Now could be too bold, or at least too early.

Interestingly, the ads resulted in only a couple of normal conversions, but many “View-through conversions” (Adwords terminology for “conversions that happened within 30 days after a user saw, but did not click, a display ad”). It looks like the image ads *were* helping to remind visitors to return to my site. And not only that, they were now signing up for the free trial after all.

So maybe a simple reminder of our existence is enough. As a quick test I added my regular Content Network image ads to my remarketing ad groups, linking them to the regular Content Network landing page:

This resulted in higher CTRs and more conversions, both regular and view-through.
Maybe for our stuff I should use remarketing purely as a way to stay top-of-mind, to remind visitors of our product, to reinforce our brand and to create credibility.

At the moment I am testing this “reminder approach”, using an image ad that just states what our product does (“Catalog your comics”), a tag line, our product name and a “Try it Free” button:

Targeting, or: Who to cookie?

Up until today I have been cookying all visitors, separating them into 5 remarketing lists, one for each product. All visitors to my Comic Collector product page get added to the comic collector list, anyone who visits the Movie Collector home gets added to the movie collector list, etc…

After visiting our site, you immediately start seeing our banners. This includes all members of the Collectorz.com team. We are getting our own ads everywhere. Sometimes three on one page, in three different formats.
But that’s not the worst: existing customers are seeing the banners too. This was instantly visible after I emailed all Music Collector customers about our version 9.1 update. The next day I saw a huge jump in the number of impressions of my Music Collector remarketing ad group.

The solution (I hope): cookie more selectively. Today I have added some PHP code to my site that includes the cookying script only for first time visitors, on their first page view. That should improve the targeting of the remarketing lists.

Campaign structure and settings

When I started out two weeks ago, I added the new remarketing ad groups to my existing Content Network campaign. I figured that remarketing was just another way to target the Content Network and thus the same campaign settings would do fine.
Now I am not so sure, for two reasons:

• Site exclusions: In my regular Content Network campaign, I am continuously adding campaign-level site exclusions. Sites that are not targeted enough and/or don’t perform well. But with remarketing, you are targeting specific visitors, regardless of the site they are on. Your remarketing list controls who sees your ads. If you cookie the right people, the targeting is always okay. In other words, you don’t need or want to exclude sites. But if your remarketing ad groups are in the same Content Network campaign, all site exclusions will apply to those ad groups as well. Not a good idea.
• Bidding type: I am currently using CPA bidding for my Content Network campaign. It works well for me, as it lets me control how much I spend per sign up. However, CPA bidding only counts regular conversions, not view-through conversions. But my remarketing ads seems to mainly generate view-through conversions. The result: Adwords gives you less impressions, because it “thinks” the ads are not converting. My guess is that good old CPC bidding may work better.

A separate campaign for remarketing ad groups, with its own settings, seems to be better after all. Changing that today.

Overall, I am happy with my new remarketing toy. Of course, I will keep trying to improve results and will keep reporting em here

What is Remarketing?

First let me explain what remarketing is (or my understanding of what it is). Remarketing is a cookie-based system that lets you show your ads to people who have visited your site, but have not purchased yet. Your ads can appear on any site that the user visits, provided that your ad company has an arrangement with that site. And that’s the beauty of adwords now offering remarketing: its content network is huge.

Here’s an example:
A user visits my Comic Collector product page. Maybe he clicked my search ad on Google, or an image ad on the Content Network, or the Comic Collector listing in the organic results. It doesn’t matter really, he may even have come from Bing, or a link on a comic forum discussing cataloging software. This user doesn’t buy and leaves the site (annoyingly, that still happens to us sometimes ). Maybe he downloaded the trial edition, maybe not.
Now after he visits my website, this user goes on to browse the internet, visiting other websites. And suddenly everywhere he goes, he sees Comic Collector ads. Site-wide leaderboards, towers, inline rectangles, even little text ads. My ads are following him around, almost stalking him.

One important thing to understand: remarketing ads do not only appear on websites related to your product, like your “normal” content network ads. No, they appear everywhere, on any site.
Remarketing let’s you target specific users wherever they go, as opposed to all users on specific websites.

How does Remarketing work?

As I said, it is a cookie-based system. Every user that visits your website (or a specific section of it) gets cookied by your ad system. Then, when the user leaves your site without buying, this cookie is read by the same ad system on other websites. And if your bid is high enough, the ad system then shows your ads to that specific visitor. As soon as your stalking makes him give up and finally buy your stuff, he is un-cookied and he will not see your remarketing ads again.

Quick guide for setting it up in Adwords

Remarketing is not something you just “switch on” in your Adwords account. There’s two main steps to complete: Creating lists and then targeting those lists with ads.

Creating a Remarketing List

• Click the “Control Panel & Library” link at the bottom of your Campaigns list on the left, and click Audiences.
• Click the New Audience button and choose Remarketing List.
• Give it a name and choose a “membership” duration. (It looks like Adwords does not do the un-cookying bit, it simply stops showing your ads after a predefined number of days)
• Save your remarketing list. You will see it appear in the list.
• Click the link in the Tags / Rules column, to get your Remarketing code ( a piece of tracking Javascript).
• Paste this piece of code right before the ending “body” tag of the pages whose visitors you want added to this particular list.
• That’s it. All visitors to those pages will now be added to your Remarking List. You can see the number of users that are on the list on the Audiences page.

Targeting your Remarketing Lists with ads

Targeting a list is done using the new Audiences tab that is now present on any ad group page. You can add your list to any existing ad group, which will show that group’s ads to your defined remarketing audience. But I’d recommend to create a new ad group that targets only the remarketing list, so no keywords, no placements. This makes it easier to track the results.
And what’s more important: you probably want to show different ads here anyway (see “How to use Remarketing” below).

• In your ad group, go to the Audiences tab.
• Click the Add audiences button.
• Now select the Remarketing List you created above and click “add”, then Save.
• Then go to the Ads tab and create some ads for the new audience.

How to use Remarketing?

Well, I am still trying to get my head around that, but here’s some ideas.
You can of course simply show your regular ads to the remarketing audience. That should be somewhat effective, as it can remind those users of your product or website.

But as you are targeting people who have already visited your site at least once, you can assume that they already know what your product is about. So there’s probably less need to explain your product to them.
You can use an entirely different message now, focussed on getting them back to your site. You can go for a soft reminder, showing a branding-type of ad. Or you can be more direct, offering them a special discount if they buy now, making the ad click directly to your check-out page.

Currently, I am hesitant to make it too obvious to users that they are remarketed to, that they are seeing your ads because they visited your website earlier. Privacy-sensitive people may not like that. I mean, you could go as far as showing them an ad that says “Hey, remember Comic Collector? Please come back, and I’ll give you an extra discount if you buy now”. Tricky?

This is what I am trying now for Comic Collector:

For comparison, this is one of my regular image ads for Comic Collector:

Results?

Well, I started two days ago, and my new image ads have not even been approved yet. But I am seeing my Remarketing Lists filling up with users already (around a thousand each now).
My guess is that remarketing will become more and more effective as your lists grow. I have set the membership duration of my lists to 60 days, so one would expect the lists to stop growing after 60 days. You could set the duration even longer to let the target audience grow bigger, but I wonder how useful that would be. For our products, if people haven’t purchased after 60 days, they won’t.

I will let you know as soon as I am seeing results, as in actual sales. The special coupon should make it easy to spot “remarketed” sales.

For some reason, both got flagged for manual approval, but now look at the Status of both ads:

Of course, I clicked the little question mark thingies for help.
Here’s the description of both Status values:

Pending review
We haven’t yet verified that your ad follows all of our advertising policies. Your ad is eligible to run on Google search pages but your ad won’t run on our search partners or on content network placements until we review and approve it.

Under review
When your ad is “Under review,” it’s not running anywhere. Additional investigation is required before we’re able to approve or disapprove this ad.

Ah, that clears it up then….