Remarketing with Google Analytics

By Megalytic Staff - September 02, 2014

People are visiting your website, they’re checking out your products or services, but they’re not converting or buying. It’s frustrating – right? We’ve all been there.
Some folks need an extra nudge to move from browser to buyer; remarketing supplies that nudge. With Google Analytics, you can isolate visitors based on their behavior, and create a remarketing list to show them targeted ads and nudge them toward conversion.
While it does take some setting up, the results are worth it. Here’s how to do it.

remarketing with google analytics

 

What is Remarketing

Have you ever been browsing a website and noticed an advertisement for something you had just been looking at a day or two ago? For example, maybe you were checking out the Nikon D300 on your favorite camera Ecommerce site yesterday, but didn’t make a purchase. Now, you are reading a camera review blog, and you see an advertisement for the Nikon D300 from the site you visited yesterday. Coincidence? Probably not. Most likely, it is an example of remarketing.

With remarketing, you place an advertising network’s cookie on your website that keeps track of visitors. The advertising network then knows who visited your site and can show those people your ads when they are browsing other websites that participate in their network. Here is an overview of how remarketing works on the Google Display Network.

You can use Google Analytics to select the site visitors that you want to see your remarketing ads. For example, you might want to show ads to all visitors except those that bounce. Google Analytics can create a list of those visitors and pass it over to AdWords for use in a remarketing campaign.

Creating a Remarketing List in Analytics

The first step is to create a remarketing list using Google Analytics. In the Admin panel, select Remarketing from the Property column.

 

select remarketing from google analytics admin panel

 

Next, click on Audiences (under Remarketing) and select “+ New Audience” to begin defining your remarketing list.

 

create a new remarketing list in google analytics

 

As you can see in the image above, there are a few steps you’ll need to complete before you can begin working with remarketing lists. First, you’ll need to ensure your website includes an acceptable privacy policy. Second, you need to make sure your tracking code has been modified to support display advertising.

There are five choices for defining the remarketing list, which Google labels in this form as “Remarketing type.” In this example, we have selected “All of my users.”

Smart List – Google uses its proprietary machine learning algorithms to identify which of your customers are most likely to convert with remarketing. These algorithms look for onsite behavior that correlates with purchases. Powerful stuff! To use this, you will need to have Ecommerce tracking set up, and also generate at least 500 transactions a month and 10,000 daily pageviews.

All of my users – Google uses every visitor to your site to construct the remarketing list.

Users who visited a specific section of my site/app – Google builds the remarketing list using only the users who visit a page in the specified sub-directory of the website. For example, if we wanted to remarket to users who had shown genuine engagement by visiting one of our support pages, we would use this option and set the section to ‘/support.’

All users who completed a conversion goal – This is a great option if you have a goal set up that indicates readiness to buy. In the case of Megalytic, we might build a remarketing list from users who had created a trial account, since we have a goal set up for tracking trial account creations.

Create my own remarketing type using Segments – When you select this option, Google uses a segment you define in Google Analytics to determine the users who are included in the remarketing list. For example, you can do things like select any user who has visited at least twice and spent three minutes or more on your site. The next section of this post looks at this option in more detail.

The Membership duration option tells Google how long users should stay in the remarketing list. In this case, we’ve entered 90 days. So, all users who visit our site will remain in the remarketing list for 90 days. If they come back to the site at any point, the counter is reset and they will remain on the list for another 90 days from the time of their last visit.

Note that Membership in the remarketing list is cookie-specific. If the same user visits from different devices, the remarketing list features in Google Analytics have no way of tying those visits together. So if John comes by my site via desktop, he will not see my remarketing ads when he is browsing on his phone because his desktop browser has a different cookie than his phone browser.

Lastly, you need to select the AdWords account for your remarketing list. This requires that your Analytics and AdWords accounts be linked.

 

saved remarketing list in google analytics

 

Once you have completed the configuration of your remarketing list, click “Save Remarketing List” and your list will now appear.

Once created, it’s time to use your list in a campaign.

Using a Remarketing List in AdWords

To use the remarketing list, we log into our AdWords account and navigate to the Shared Library. By clicking on “Audiences,” we can see our newly-created remarketing list – “Megalytic – All Users” – at the bottom of the table.

 

remarketing list in the adwords shared library

 

From here, we click on “Add to ad groups” to activate the remarketing list in one of our campaigns.

 

add remarketing list to adwords campaign

 

We’ve added this remarketing list to the campaign “Display Network – Opt,” in the “Remarketing” ad group.

Using Segments to Create Remarketing Lists

Google Analytics Segments offer a powerful approach to creating remarketing lists by targeting a specific group of your website visitors. For example, maybe you want to reach users who have been engaged with your site content, but have not yet made a purchase. You know these users are already familiar with your product or service, and you want to nudge them toward conversion by showing them a special promotion, or an advertisement featuring a free trial.

To do this, first create a segment that identifies engaged users. We are going to create a segment including users who have visited at least twice, have not purchased and who have signed up for a free trial.

 

creating segment for remarketing in google analytics

 

Under the Behavior section of the Segment Builder, we have defined “Sessions >= 2” and “Transactions = 0.”

 

additional conditions on segment for remarketing

 

Under Advanced > Conditions, we have specified the goal “New Account – Trial” has been completed. We have named the segment “Engaged Trial Users.”

Next, we open the Admin section of Google Analytics, open the “Remarketing” section (as we did in the first example) and select “Audiences.” As before, click “+ New Audience.” But, this time, we are going to import our newly created segment.

Under “Remarketing type,” select “Create my own remarketing type using Segments,” set the “Number of days to lookback” to 30, and click “Import.” (If you want to target more recent visitors, you can set the lookback as low as 7 days.)

 

viewing remarketing segment in google analytics admin section

 

Once you have created your list, give it a name. Using the same name as the segment will make it easier to keep things straight between Google Analytics and AdWords. At the bottom of the screen, click “Save Remarketing List.”

Now, you can go into AdWords and add this remarketing list of engaged users to an existing campaign, or create a new campaign with a particularly relevant message, like – “Sign up Now and Save 20%.”

Conclusion

Remarketing combines the power of Analytics to identify groups of users based on behavior, with the reach of AdWords to target customers with specific messages to nudge them toward conversion. It takes a bit of effort and practice to master this technique, but the payoff is worth it: Highly targeted advertising to reach an audience ready to convert.

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