Amazee Metrics’ recent blog post, Web Analytics Tutorial: Creating Remarketing Lists with Universal Analytics – Part 1, introduced remarketing features in Google Analytics and how to think about defining remarketing audiences. Now Part 2 will show you how to configure those audiences.
Configuring Remarketing Audiences
To create your own audience, click ‘+ New Audience’ and fill out the options:
1. Link Configuration
Select the View whose data you want to use to define the audience and the Advertising account you want to use to create the Remarketing Campaign.
2. Define Audience
There are many options for how to define a new audience. You can:
- Create New Audience: Click ‘Create New’ to define a new audience from scratch.
- Import Segment: Click ‘Import Segment’ to define an audience based on a Segment already configured in your Google Analytics View.
- Recommended Audiences: Select one of the ‘Recommended Audiences’:
- Smart List: Google automatically creates an audience of users most likely to convert based on data gathered from similar businesses.
- All Users
- New Users: Users that have never visited your site before.
- Returning Users: Users that have visited your site.
- Users who visited a specific section of your site: You must define the section of your website to match, based on the URL.
- Users who completed a goal conversion: Conversions are based on the goals set up in your Google Analytics View.
- Users who completed a transaction: If you have Ecommerce tracking configured, you can select users that have made a purchase.
If you select ‘Import Segment’ or ‘Recommended Audiences’, you will have a simplified process with a limited number of options to click through.
If you select ‘Create New’ you have access to advanced filters that include all the metrics and dimensions available in Google Analytics. Create a filter that corresponds with how you decided you want to define your target users. For example, the screenshot below shows an audience of users that subscribed to the Amazee Metrics newsletter. (See our Google Tag Manager guide to find out more about how we track subscriptions as an event using Google Tag Manager).
After you define your audience, you can select the Membership Duration. This defines how long a user should stay in the group. This can be between 1 day and 540 days. To understand why this is important, consider the following example. For an ecommerce site, one might create a list of “Last week’s purchasers”. In this case, one would set the Membership Duration to 7 days.
Finally, you need to give your audience a name that describes it.
Next Steps
Now that you have defined some remarketing lists, you should set up remarketing campaigns in AdWords. See our guide, Remarketing with Google AdWords – Part 2 for instructions.
