There’s no question that remarketing works! Most marketers are familiar with Remarketing via Search, but what about Remarketing powered by Google Analytics? Remarketing with Google Analytics allows you to create highly customizable remarketing lists based on user engagement and behaviors that can then be imported into AdWords. Every lead is not created equally. Some users are more engaged than others and ideally, you may want the opportunity to remarket to users to reach specific deeper level pages over users who simply make it to the home page. Customizing your remarketing lists based on site engagement data allows us to super charge your overall remarketing strategy and maximize those additional touchpoints to the most engaged users to your site.
This article takes look a Remarketing lists with Analytics for Search, which allows us to segment down to a specific user behavior to create a list around.
Smart List: “Smart Lists are built using machine learning across the millions of Google Analytics websites which have opted in to share anonymized conversion data, using dozens of signals like visit duration, page depth, location, device, referrer, and browser to predict which of your users are most likely to convert during a later visit. There are a few requirements to utilize Smart Lists:
- Over 10,000 Pageviews daily
- 500+ Ecommerce Transactions
If you are new to Remarketing with Analytics and running campaigns yourself, this may be an easy way to get started.
All Users: Google Analytics simply targets every visitor to your site.
New Users: These users are identified as a visitor who has not previously been cookied.
Returning Users: Conversely if a visitor has already received a cookie and is returning to your website again, this visitor is tagged and added to the returning user audience list.
Users who visited a specific section of the site: Google Analytics builds this list with data only from visitors who came to a specific page on the website. This is a very powerful way to create relevant display ads that catch the attention of your shoppers and entice them to come back to your site and convert.
Users who completed a goal conversion: This is an excellent list you can create to shape a campaign that targets users who did not convert, but who still accomplished a micro-conversion.
Users who completed a transaction: This is an audience list based on users who completed a transaction or sale on your website. The distinction between this list and the goal conversion list described above is that a sale has taken place (Macro-Conversion). You can leverage a list such as this to offer prior customers a coupon to come and shop again.
Here are a few use cases for utilizing RLSAs in Google Search:
Event Marketing: Find customers in your location
- Let’s say you are bringing a special event to a particular location and you want to target users specifically in the area with a special offer. You can build an audience list based on the targeted location and users who viewed the registration page, but did not register.
Shopping: Abandoned Shopping Carts
- Suppose you are an ecommerce store and want to understand why shoppers come to the site, fill their carts and leave without making a purchase. You can create a list of all users who’ve abandoned their shopping carts and target them with a special offer to entice them to come back and complete their purchase.
Shopping: The Undecided Shopper
- With so many options today, users often visit a site 4x or more before they make a purchase. To reach customers who are early in their process, you can define a remarketing list that includes visitors who have come to the site multiple times and visited a series of pages (let’s say 4 or 5) but did not make a purchase. We can utilize Google Analytics to create a list by visitor segment and target those users via the Google Display Network with a special offer.
Lastly, here are a few things to keep in mind when creating Remarketing lists with Google Analytics:
- The maximum lifespan of a Google Search ad is 180 days
- The remarketing list for Google Search must have at least 1,000 cookies before it is eligible for remarketing
- RLSAs that include Google Display Network dimensions like age, gender and interest are not eligible for RLSA.
- You can create a list from an existing segment in your current property or build a new one to import into Google AdWords.
Many marketers experience tremendous success re-engaging users with Remarketing. Utilizing Google Analytics will help super charge your overall digital strategy, targeting the most engaged users on your site from visit to purchase.
