Creating Remarketing Lists in Google Analytics

Are you remarketing to your website visitors? If you know that a potential buyer makes several visits to your website before they make a purchase, then you also know that your marketing efforts shouldn’t stop after their first visit either.

So how do you go about remarketing to your website visitors? By using Google Analytics of course.

Google Analytics is Google’s free tool for website analytics and reporting. It provides all the information needed to analyze a website’s performance regarding content, conversion. user experience and more. If you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your website, you’re missing out on a lot of valuable data.

Among the data your analytics collects, is information regarding conversion on your sales pages. Varied data is gathered on each visitors’ action during the sales process. Including what they viewed, and which products were clicked on or added to their carts. And even which products were bought or eventually abandoned. All of this data is essential for a successful remarketing campaign.

Remarketing involves showing online ads to users who have visited your website before. Using ads and products that are heavily dependent on their actions during their visits.

There are plenty of benefits to using google analytics for remarketing purposes. Let’s take a look at a few.

Benefits of Remarketing for Your Business:

• You can create targeted ads, aimed at people who are already interested in your products and services.
• Remarketing ads work as a reminder for people who might have an interest in your offering but forgot about them. Because of the amount of content we consume daily, it is easy to forget something you viewed just for a few seconds, regardless of how appealing it was.
• It allows you to target previous visitors, increasing your conversion rates when they eventually make a purchase.
• Remarketing options include Cost-per-Action. Cost-per-Action means you’ll only get charged when a user clicks on your ad. It’s a cost-effective method for reaching a targeted audience, making it a budget-friendly addition to your marketing strategy.
• Apart from having a targeted audience, we also have targeted ads. Users are only shown products they have expressed a previous interest in. This means that ads are tailored to resonate with each viewer individually.

Using Google Analytics to Create Remarketing Lists/Audiences

Google Analytics collects all visitor information needed to create a remarketing list. This makes it a lot easier to use remarketing if you already use this analytical tool. Google Analytics will make creating, segmenting and updating your remarketing list a lot easier.

If you’re not familiar with how to navigate Google Analytics, there are introduction tutorials for beginners that can help you out.

When it comes to your remarketing list, there are 7 types of users you can target, called audience definitions. Let’s take a look.

The 7 Audience Definitions:

• All users: This refers to all users who have visited your site within your set period of time.
• New users: Users who have only visited your website once, or conducted one search session.
• Returning users: users who have conducted more than one search session on your site.
• Users who completed a goal conversion: With this option, ads will target users who successfully completed a goal conversion, e.g., sign up for a discount, put a product in their cart, etc.
• Users who visited a specific section of the site: Only users who visited specific pages, or conducted specific searches will be targeted.
• Users who completed a transaction: This refers to users who have made at least one purchase on your site/app.
• Google’s Smart List: This is Google’s generated audience for you, depending on your remarketing needs. If you’re not sure about what users you want to target, you can let Google manage your audiences.

Are you ready to create your remarketing lists? We’ve taken away the guesswork and created this simple step-by-step guide.

Creating a Remarketing List Using Google Analytics:

1. Sign in to your Google Analytics.
2.  Click on Admin, and navigate to the property in which you want to create the audience.
3. In the Property column, click Audience Definitions, then click Audiences.
4. Click on Add (+) New Audience.
5. Create a name for your remarketing audience.
6. Once in the Audience Source, you can choose a view where you will include the users who will be shown ads in your remarketing campaign.
   – Remember: Anyone filtered out in View will also be removed from your remarketing campaign.
7. Click to the Next step, and define your audience (choosing from the options established above).
   –  You can either create a new audience or import a segment.
   –  An estimate of your audience size will be shown to you as ‘Users over last 7 days’.
   –  It will only include users who have met the set criteria in your Remarketing Audiences and an estimate of the number of users that will meet that criteria, using data from previous traffic patterns.
   –  NOTE: Unless you have manually configured sampling using SampleRate or set SampleRate before the data is sent to Google Analytics, it does not define the size of your remarketing audiences.
   –  Sampling effects the predictive estimate of an audience’s size, not the actual audience.
   –  It also does not affect the number of users who are eligible for your remarketing campaign, regardless of how much difference is found in the estimate.
8. Next, set up the Membership duration for your audience. This will define the number of days the users in these criteria will be made recipients of your remarketing ads.
9. Go to your Audience Destinations and select the advertising account that will be used for the remarketing campaign.
   – NOTE: Once you save your Remarketing Audiences in this selection, it cannot be changed.
10. Click Publish.

One of its major benefits is that Google analytics allows you to create audiences that are targeted in a way that AdWords’ functionalities may not be able to support. The Google Analytics software is designed to create a remarketing list for the best possible results, using the data collected. It also doesn’t require any changes to your website.

Although these advanced options pose obvious benefits, it also might pose to be difficult for a new user to know where to start. Hopefully, this short guide will help you along your way. And if you’d like to learn even more about using Google Analytics, here’s a really great Google Analytics training program that is geared for beginners through to advanced users.

Do you have any questions that were not answered in this guide? Let us know in the comments section below and we can help you out. If you found this helpful, we’d like to hear from you too.

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