When it comes to online advertising, Google Ads campaigns are one of the most popular marketing strategies for small businesses. It’s an efficient way to have your advertisements seen on the internet.

However, Google Ads has standards to follow for ads that target people with personal hardships, including those who are bereaved. Let’s go over the rule that your funeral home needs to know.

Personal Hardship Examples

Google Ads defines personal hardships as health conditions, treatments, procedures, personal failings, struggles, or traumatic personal experiences. Under the section Relationships in Personalized Advertising, these are examples of personal hardships: divorce services, books about coping with divorce, bereavement products or services, and family counseling services.

This means your funeral home can’t use personalized advertising with remarketing lists to promote your products and services. What does that mean exactly? We’ll explain in the next section.

Google Ads Personalized Advertising with Remarketing Lists

Since remarketing is considered a form of personalized advertising, that class of campaign follows the same advertising guidelines. For those who are unfamiliar, personalized advertising lets you target your ads to a specific audience. Many times, people use remarketing lists, which are the lists of people who’ve previously or recently visited their website, to help target their ads to potential customers.

But Google Ads doesn’t allow the use of personalized advertising with remarketing lists when advertising to those with personal hardships, including the bereaved. The reasoning behind this is that they “don’t want ads to exploit the difficulties or struggles of users.”

However, this rule doesn’t apply to more generalized Display Network advertising that appears throughout the internet wherever ad space is available. It also doesn’t apply to generalized demographic-based advertising, aka ads targeting locations, age groups, or other large-group demographics, as long as the targeted list isn’t unreasonably specific or small.

This rule also doesn’t apply to search advertising — advertisements that appear next to Google search results — as long as they don’t use remarketing lists. When marketing to those who are bereaved, your search ads can’t use remarketing lists of users who’ve visited your funeral home’s website.

If you have any questions about this advertising rule, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Interested in learning more about Google Ads advertising for your funeral home? Here at Frazer Consultants, we’re Google Ads certified. Call our SEO specialist today at 608-318-4973 to learn more!