GLASGOW: Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs), a new tool available via Google's Enhanced Campaigns, are proving popular with search marketers who report significant savings in budgets.

"RLSA is amazing," Alistair Dent, head of pay per click at independent UK PPC agency Periscopix, told The Drum. "It's one of the greatest product developments Google has ever given us."

Enhanced Campaigns, launched in February 2013, offers agencies the ability to modify bids for mobile devices relative to those on other digital platforms, and lets them "stack" modifications for geo-location and time of day.

Alan Boughen, SVP for global search at Havas Media, told the recent London ad:tech conference that such capabilities could, for example, enable brands to hit a football fan watching a team in their home stadium with a mobile ad just at the end of the game – if his or her team had won, they were likely to be in a more receptive mood, he said.

The addition of RSLA allows marketers to adjust bids depending on whether a person has already visited their site or interacted in any way, such as buying a product or downloading an app. By avoiding remarketing to people who have already converted, they save money which can then be reallocated.

"We are talking big numbers," said Dent, who also claimed that savings of up to 30% were possible in some cases.

And he cited the example of a client advertising on its own brand term who might not know if that was generating incremental sales.

"But if you know they have been to your site before you can turn off the ads as it's a repeat visitor and you know those aren't incremental," Dent explained. The money thus saved could, for example, be "put back into the new-customer acquisition portion of budget".

Meanwhile, Bjorn Espenes, of the Finch online advertising service, hailed RSLA as a development that enabled the search funnel to be quantified. By creating different profiles "you have given yourself a way to bid more aggressively on the clicks that yield more financial gain for your business," he added.

Data sourced from The Drum, Finch; additional content by Warc staff