What Is RLSA? How It Works, How to Set It Up and How to Use It [2026]

Remarketing is widely used in display advertising, but
did you know you can do the same thing in search advertising?

It is called remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA), and
it lets you show ads only when a user who has already visited runs a search,
or weight your keyword bids up and down.

This article covers how RLSA works, its advantages and disadvantages, how to set it up and the points to watch.

※The article below explains how search advertising works and how to run it in more detail. Do read it alongside this one.
Related article:
What is search advertising? A plain explanation of how it works, how to set a budget and how to manage it

1. What is RLSA (remarketing lists for search ads)?

RLSA, remarketing lists for search ads,
shows ads in response to searches run by users who have visited the advertiser’s site.
With this feature you can customise the search ads shown to site visitors and adjust your bids for them.

RLSA reaches users who have visited the site once — in other words, it reaches high-intent users efficiently, so the conversion rate tends to be higher than with ordinary search advertising. It is therefore a setting well worth using to improve the results of your ads.

RLSA can be run on the search advertising of the main platforms, Google and Yahoo!, and setting it up uses a remarketing list that accumulates site visit history.
Yahoo! calls it site retargeting rather than RLSA; the name differs, but the mechanism is the same.
Remarketing brings display advertising to mind, but apart from the format there is no great difference from search advertising, and the broad idea of showing ads to site visitors is the same.

To use a remarketing list
you need more than 1,000 users over at least the past 30 days, so
prepare it in advance so that it is ready when you want to go live.
Creating a remarketing list requires a dedicated tag on the site, but that is outside the scope of this article.

2. Advantages and disadvantages of RLSA

Here are the advantages and disadvantages of RLSA.

RLSA has three main advantages.

①You can reliably reach users who have already visited

As touched on above, on top of ordinary search advertising, for users who have visited the site
you can adjust bids, so you can efficiently attract high-intent users who have already shown interest in your product or service.
That raises the conversion rate and makes better results likely.

②You can optimise the claim you make and the landing page

Because you can serve different content to site visitors and others,
you can optimise the ad copy and the content of the landing page.
Say, for example, that on a home renovation site
a user arrives from ordinary search advertising.
They do not decide on that visit and move into a period of comparing you with other firms.
At that point, compared with the first time they saw the renovation site,
what if they see ad copy that pushes the strengths of the service and the campaign harder?
Precisely because they are weighing you against other firms,
the chance of them choosing your business for the renovation should go up.
Being able to approach users this way is one reason to set RLSA up.

③The retention period for an audience list is limited

RLSA has a fixed retention period.
At present the limit is 540 days on Google search advertising and 180 days on Yahoo! search advertising.

3. When to use RLSA

Next, here are three ways RLSA can be put to use once you have it running.

①Raise bids to push harder on high-intent users

By introducing RLSA and
adjusting the bid ratio, you can weight serving differently between users who have visited the site and
those who have not.
Set a higher bid for site visitors, so that when a visitor searches again on a related keyword your ad appears near the top.

For example, for a user who visited the site once but left without converting and then searches again on a related term, you might raise the bid 20% above normal. For a product people buy repeatedly, you raise bids by a large margin for anyone who has converted before. That way you push hard on the users most likely to convert.

②You can compete on highly contested head keywords

Keywords with high search volume, the so-called head terms, have many competitors, and the cost per click climbs.
RLSA makes it possible to win conversions efficiently even on those head keywords.
By limiting who sees the ads to users who have visited the site or have a purchase history, you spend the advertising budget effectively, with nothing wasted.
If your budget is small and head terms eat all of it up,
you can narrow serving to the users most likely to convert and push harder there.

③Vary your approach by user

With RLSA
you can use different ad copy and landing pages for new customers and for existing ones, meaning users who have visited the site before.

For a user searching and visiting the site for the first time, for example, set ad copy that gets across an overview of the products and services you offer.
For users who have already visited, set ad copy that pushes your strengths in a way that grabs them further.
On a second visit, ad copy making the case for a limited-time offer, such as “free until the end of the month”, can win the conversion before they drift to a competitor.

Site visitors are searching repeatedly on related terms and are very likely comparing several firms.
Varying the claim you make between new and existing customers is an effective nudge towards conversion.

4. Audience lists you can use with RLSA

In general, any audience list you can use for remarketing or site retargeting can also be used for remarketing lists for search ads. There are six lists available in all.

Types of audience list	Google Ads	Yahoo! Ads
Standard remarketing list	○	○
App remarketing list	○	○
YouTube ads remarketing list	○	×
Google Analytics remarketing list	○	×
Remarketing list based on customer contact details	○	×
AdWords optimized list (Google Ads optimised list)	○	×

Here is a closer look at the six lists.

Standard remarketing list

A list you can build from the behaviour history of users who have visited the advertiser’s site.
The list is built by loading a tag embedded in the website in question. For Google Ads you place a remarketing tag; for Yahoo! Ads, a site retargeting tag.

App remarketing list

A list built from behaviour history inside an application the advertiser owns. To see the available apps you need to link a Firebase account or a third-party app analytics platform to your ad account.

Video remarketing list

A list covering users who have watched the advertiser’s YouTube channel or videos, built from their behaviour history within the channel. The YouTube channel in question has to be linked to the ad account.

Google Analytics remarketing list

A list based on Google Analytics data. It becomes available once Google Ads and Google Analytics are linked.

Remarketing list using customer data

A list of customer data the advertiser holds, such as email addresses, phone numbers and postal addresses. The information in the list is encrypted (hashed) and used in Google Ads.

Google Ads optimized list

A list built by combining several data sources, such as Google Ads tags and Google Analytics. It is useful when you want to serve different search ads depending on whether a user has used an advertiser service linked to Google Ads.

That covers the lists you can use with RLSA. Before you build a list and set RLSA up, here are the points to watch.

5. Points to watch with RLSA

List size

As mentioned when covering the disadvantages,
you cannot serve ads if the remarketing list has too few users.
RLSA is a setting that serves ads to users who have already visited the site, so if the list is too small you get no volume.
On Google, serving will not even start without at least 1,000 entries.

As mentioned when covering the disadvantages,
you cannot serve ads if the remarketing list has too few users.
RLSA is a setting that serves ads to users who have already visited the site, so if the list is too small you get no volume.
On Google, serving will not even start without at least 1,000 entries.

Targeting

RLSA lets you serve different ads according to user behaviour, so you can target users that keywords alone cannot narrow down.
But if you split the conditions too finely, then as explained above the list becomes too small to serve ads— and that becomes much more likely, so take care.

List quality

Raising the quality of a list often reduces its size.
A good way to proceed is to protect the quality of the audience list when you go live, test with two lists — new customers and existing ones — and adjust gradually to push the results higher.
Watch the balance of quality and size and adjust as you go.

6. How to set up RLSA

For Google Ads

1. Place the remarketing tag. To use RLSA you need to embed a remarketing tag on the site, just as for the Google Display Network (GDN). If you are already running remarketing on GDN you can use that one.

2. Create a remarketing list. To serve ads to users who have visited the site once, you need a remarketing list.

3. In the ads interface, select the ad group you want to set the audience list on and click “Audiences”

4. Click “Edit audience segments”

5. Click the “Browse” tab and select the remarketing list to attach

6. Once you have selected the list you want to use, click save and you are done.

Next, here is how it works for Yahoo! Ads.

For Yahoo! Ads

1. In the ads interface, click “Tools” and then “Target list management”.

2. Tick the target list you want to set, click “Association settings” and choose “Set on ad group”.

3. Check that the audience list is selected under “Select target lists”, then under “Select ad groups to associate” set the ad group, campaign first and ad group second. Click save and you are done.

That is how site retargeting is set up in Yahoo! Ads.

7. In closing

We hope that was useful.
This article has covered remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA).

Set up and used well, it is a serving configuration that makes conversions easier to win while keeping CPA down, so do give it a try.

Related article:
What is search advertising? A plain explanation of how it works, how to set a budget and how to manage it