In a previous post, we have pointed out the importance of an effective remarketing strategy for your online marketing campaigns.
A crucial aspect of a successful full-funnel marketing strategy is using website data to precisely define your audience and optimize your remarketing campaigns. With a well-organized database, you can display targeted and relevant ads to significantly increase your chances of generating leads and revenue.
A particularly effective and simple method is the creation of remarketing lists based on audiences in Google Analytics 4.
We will show you in 6 steps how to configure an audience in GA4, activate it in Google Ads and which prerequisites and minimum requirements must be observed. If you want to find out how to use remarketing successfully in your marketing funnel first, you can read this blog post.
Step 1: Link Google Analytics with Google Ads
To set up remarketing audiences with Google Analytics and Google Ads, you first need an active GA4 property that collects data and a Google Ads account where you want to run said remarketing campaigns. These accounts must be linked to oneanother so that they can exchange the audience data.
To link the accounts and create audiences in GA4, you will need the corresponding user rights: In GA4, the “Marketing expert” role is usually sufficient at property level to create audiences. To link the accounts, however, you need “Administrator” access in Google Ads and either “Administrator” or “Editor” access in GA4. You can make the link directly in your Google Ads account or your GA4 property.
Step 2: Activate Auto-tagging Option
Another important step is to activate auto-tagging in Google Ads. You can make this configuration directly in the settings of your Google Ads account.
Step 3: Activate Google signals and personalized advertising
To leverage your audiences created in Google Analytics for remarketing in Google Ads, you must also activate Google Signals and Ads Personalization for your GA4 property. Both options can be found in the data collection settings of your GA4 property. Optionally, you can also activate the option “User-provided data collection” to further optimize data collection.
Step 4: Set up the consent mode
The Digital Market Act, which has been in effect since March this year, obliges large companies such as Google to demonstrably respect users’ consent to data processing. This means that website users have to decide whether their data may be used for marketing (Google Ads), statistical (Google Analytics) or other purposes. To this end, Google expanded the “Consent Mode”, which has been mandatory within the European Economic Area since March 2024.
We have summarized how to proceed when setting up Consent Mode and its effects on your marketing activities.
For remarketing using audiences from GA4 to work, Google Consent Mode must be set up correctly on your website.
Important: There are minimum requirements for remarketing lists in Google Ads
A certain number of active website visitors is required for the remarketing campaign to actually be displayed to your users.
Google has the following minimum requirements for this:
- Google Display Network: At least 100 active visitors or users within the last 30 days.
- Google Search Network: At least 1,000 active visitors or users within the last 30 days.
- YouTube: At least 1’000 active visitors or users for the last 30 days.
(“Active users” or just “users” is the number of recorded users who have interacted with your website or app).
Step 5: Create your first audience in Google Analytics
In this guide, we will create an audience that contains all users who have completed a newsletter subscription on the website.
The prerequisite for this is that this event is tracked by GA4. In our case, the event is called “newsletter_subscribe”.
Click on the images to better follow the exact process.
- Go to the admin section of your GA4 property and select Audiences under Data display.
- Click on New audience:
You now have the option of creating a new audience, using a template or adopting a suggested audience.
We select “Create a custom audience”.
- Choose a suitable name and description for the audience.
- Click Add new condition to include users in the audience. Conditions refer to dimensions, metrics and events. For our example, we select Include users as the condition if the event “newsletter_subscribe” was tracked. We also select the maximum membership duration (18 months) for this audience. Users who have triggered the “newsletter_subscribe” event are therefore in this audience for 18 months.
- The summary card at the bottom right shows the number of users who have met the specified conditions in the last 30 days. This gives you an estimate of the potential size of the audience.
- For our first audience, this is already the complete configuration. Click on Save to save your conditions and create the audience. You can then view your new audience in the Audiences menu, but you can only change the name or description here, not the conditions.
When you create your new audience, you have many additional options in the condition settings to optimize the segmentation according to your needs.
a. Here you define when your condition should apply. The following options are available for this:
– Across all sessions
– Within the same session
– Within the same event
b. Membership duration: Here you define how long the users are part of this audience, up to a maximum of 540 days. Each time users meet the criteria for inclusion in the audience based on their behavior, the validity period is reset to the full value of this option.
c. With Audience Triggers, you can trigger events when the definition of the audience applies to certain users and they are included in the group.
d. Click Add condition group to define another condition.
e. Click Add sequence if you want to add users who fulfill conditions in a specific order and optionally within a specific time period. For example, step 1: “newsletter_subscribe”, step 2: “purchase”.
f. User groups that you want to exclude can be defined here.
You can find more information on creating an audience in Google Analytics directly from Google.
Once you have created your audience, it can take up to two days for the lists to appear in Google Ads. If you link a Google Analytics 4 property to a Google Ads Manager account, all managed accounts will have access to the corresponding audiences.
When you link your Google Ads account to Display & Video 360, any of your Analytics audiences that you’ve exported to Google Ads and any of your Google Ads audiences that include Analytics audiences as segments are exported to Display & Video 360 along with all the rest of the Google Ads audiences.
Step 6: Activate the audiences from Google Analytics in Google Ads
If you meet the minimum requirements and your audiences have been created, you can activate them in Google Ads. Please note that it can take up to two days for an audience from Google Analytics to appear in Google Ads.
You can find an overview of your remarketing lists, including the audiences from GA4, within Google Ads under Tools -> Shared library -> Audience Manager. (You can create a filter for Source: Google Analytics and Firebase.)
Your audiences from GA4 are now ready to be used for remarketing campaigns.
Summary
To summarize, creating and activating GA4 audiences for Google Ads remarketing is very easy, after a few initial configuration steps.
It is important to follow the individual steps carefully to ensure that the audiences are defined correctly and can be used optimally for your campaigns. Don’t forget to take Google Consent Mode into account to ensure data processing in accordance with the applicable data protection guidelines.
