Remarketing with Google Analytics

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Remarketing campaigns are essential for most (if not all) advertisers. Your goal is those users who already know you, and you aim to help them become your future customers by providing a better web experience on your website.

If you are now convinced how beneficial Remarketing can be we will take a deeper look at how to create your campaigns. We are going to use Google Analytics to create lists and organize the data that it is available to use, for example, time spent on page, location, technology and more. The essential part is that these lists will help us create much more specific and targeted campaigns. Remarketing usually requires advanced planning, since every list starts without any users and it is mandatory to gather enough data so you can consider starting your campaign.

It is also recommended and considered as beneficial to set up your Remarketing lists before you have the budget available for your campaigns, this will help for your campaigns to be ready and good to go as soon as they are needed. We will now take a look how you can segment successfully your lists so you can run your Remarketing campaigns.

If you are new to Google Analytics, then please read this article first to make yourself familiar with it and it’s basic functionality.

How to use Google Analytics for Remarketing:

Well, Google Analytics gives us much to create Remarketing lists and use them in our AdWords campaign. More specifically, you can segment users based on several factors:

Web site. Segments users according to the duration of the session, the date of the first session… One of my favorite lists projects that are targeted at users who lead is visited, but has not completed the form (visits without conversions).
User Location. Create a list of users who are in a specific area. It’s perfect if you have a special offer for a city.
Leaving the shopping cart. This is very interesting for online stores; you can re-engage users who left the shopping cart and any action in your online store. Offering a banner with a small promotion that will seduce them to complete the purchase this can be a good.
Frequency of visitors. Segments users if you have recently visited, and if they are recurrent or new users for example.
Customer value. You can create a list of users who meet certain requirements that we consider important or valuable to our business and impact them with a different message, for example by offering an exclusive discount.
Traffic Sources. This is also my favorite, can create lists of users coming from Google organic, PPC, Facebook, an email marketing campaign…
Visits. Use lists with users considering sessions that is started in the chosen period or the days since the last session.
Online auctions. We also have a group of customers or sales transactions what they have done on our site.

And the best thing is that, we can combine these options as we want! Thus we find that it is much easier to deliver the right message to the right user at the right time, improving the results we aim for. For example, we can combine our goal:

Online sales objective: users that visited 3 times in the last days and who have not purchased.

Objective branding: users who have visited a specific landing page, which were interested and have been more than 5 minutes on it.

Step by Step Guide:

Do not think that this takes a lot of effort, because it is simple! Here are some of the steps to get these magnificent Remarketing lists in your AdWords account:

You need to have administrator access to Google Analytics account.
Have updated the new version of Analytics.
Linking Google Analytics account with Google AdWords. If you do not know how to do it (there are several steps to do.
Updating the Analytics code inserting a new line in the code. This is done only once, regardless of the lists that we add later.
You can also easily implement Google Tag Manager.
Updating the Privacy Policy of your website.
Now we will create the list from analytics.

Then we can choose all the segments you want to apply to our marketing list.

Once we keep, we already have the list created in our AdWords account (we can always see it as shared library – public). Now it is time to analyze and get the most out of our Remarketing campaigns.

This article is written by Albert Palacci. He is graduated marketing specialist from London Business School, he is passionate about digital marketing, and he is regularly writing for several online blogs and magazines.