Online Marketing | Web Analytics

Web Analytics Tutorial: Creating Remarketing Lists with Universal Analytics – Part 1

Amazee Metrics’ recent blog post, Remarketing with Google AdWords – Part 1, introduced the topic of remarketing and gave instructions on creating remarketing lists in AdWords. But did you know that you can also create remarketing lists in Google Analytics?  Google Analytics gives you access to more advanced options than AdWords. It offers you the chance to use all of Google Analytic’s detailed data about pages, users, and events to define highly targeted lists.

AdWords and Google Analytics work together to create a powerful remarketing system. First, in Google Analytics you identify the users that you want to target based on their behavior on your site, then with AdWords you create campaigns to target those users. This tutorial will show you how to configure Google Analytics to identify your target users: these groups of users are called Remarketing Audiences or Remarketing Lists. Part 1 will introduce remarketing features in Google Analytics and how to think about defining remarketing audiences.  Next week, Part 2 will show you how to configure those audiences.

Remarketing Features in Google Analytics

To begin with remarketing, you should first link your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts in the Admin section of your Google Analytics account, if you have not already.

Next you can start to configure remarketing features.

Google Analytics Admin Remarketing
  1. Visit the Admin section of your Google Analytics Account.
  2. Select the Property for which you would like to set up remarketing.
  3. Click ‘Remarketing’ in the Property column, then click ‘Audiences’.
  4. If there are no audiences created yet for your Property, Google Analytics will directly open the dialog to create a new audience.  If there your property already has remarketing audiences, you will see them displayed in a table.

Defining Remarketing Audiences

To add audiences, you can create your own new audience, or ‘Import from Gallery’ to import ready-made audiences prepared by Google Analytics experts.  The Google Analytics Solutions Gallery contains many helpful remarketing audiences based on generic engagement measures. You might want to begin by importing those.  Creating a remarketing list does not automatically start a remarketing campaign, so you should feel free to experiment and add lists.  You can later delete any you do not need.

To really tailor your remarketing campaigns to your site, you should also create your own audiences. Think about the kinds of user behaviors that are most important on your website: what would indicate that a user is interested in your products, services, or content, but has not yet completed the goal that you’ve defined for users (like a purchase, contact form, or newsletter subscription)?

Here are some ideas about users you might want to target, to get you thinking:

  • Users that have searched on your site for a specific term or terms
  • Users that have viewed a specific page
  • Users that entered your site on a specific landing page
  • Users that completed a form
  • Users that clicked on a specific banner or page element

Once you have decided how you want to define your audiences, you can then set them up. Part 2 of this tutorial will explain how to do this.