Segmented Google Analytics Audiences: Your Pandora’s Box to Remarketing
What are your customers doing on your website the first time they visit? Are they looking at specific pages? Putting items into a cart, but not following through with the purchase? Maybe they’re reading your Contact page, but not getting in touch.
That’s ok. Most website visitors don’t become customers right out of the ‘Pandora’s Box,’ so to speak. To convert their interest into a sale, they will need to return to your site.
Remarketing is a very effective and inexpensive way to remind them to return to your site through Google Adwords. But targeting every visitor who lands on any page on your site may not be the most effective way to increase sales.
A better use of your advertising dollars is to set up Segmented Audiences. By targeting only visitors who meet a certain criteria, you are increasing the chances they’ll return and ultimately become a customer.
The more you segment your audiences in Google Analytics, the more targeted your advertising can be. When it comes to remarketing, Google Analytics provides plenty of audience creation options.
Audiences are created using the Audience Builder in your Google Analytics. Navigate from Admin (lower left side navigation panel) > Property > Audience Definitions.
The first audience is always ‘All Users.’ If your All User audience is not set up, follow these instructions.
Once you have your ‘All Users’ audience, go to the ‘Audiences’ home page.
Opening Pandora’s Box of Remarketing
There are multiple combinations of audiences you can choose from. The more targeted your audience, the more precise your remarketing campaign will be.
Google Analytics’ ‘Audience Builder’ lets you go deep with segmentation. Let’s take a look at some remarketing audiences you can choose from:
Custom Audience Targeting
If you don’t like any of the standard choices below, you can always just build a custom audience to suit your needs by using the ‘Conditions’ on the Audience Builder home page. You will be amazed at the options available.
I have built many custom audiences to remarket to visitors who:
- Abandoned their shopping cart;
- Abandoned the Contact Us page without completing the form; or
- Visited a group of product or service pages.
Behavior
This is a powerful audience option because it’s based on what people actually did on your website.
You can target website visitors by:
- Number of sessions – Visitors coming to your site a lot are likely considering a purchase, but something is ‘holding them back.’ This is the perfect time to give them an offer they can’t refuse.
- Session Duration (per user or per session) — An indication of website engagement. The longer they are on your site, the more engaged they are with your brand.
Date of First Session
This targets people who visited your website during a specific time period (holiday period, special promotion period, etc.). Simply select your desired start and end dates.
Traffic Sources
Traffic sources are based on Campaign, Medium, Source or Keyword (taken from UTM Parameters) from previous marketing programs.
Using these traffic sources allows you to retarget people who have visited your website from other campaigns run in the past.
Technology-Based Audiences
This is a great option if you need to reach website visitors who have visited your website with specific technology types. As you can see, it gets quite detailed, from operating systems to browsers (even browser versions), screen resolutions, mobile device brand, and a lot more.
Demographic Audience Targeting
Despite being, well… boring, demographics are a staple in many advertising programs. This audience builder lets you pick through your standard demographic criteria:
- Age
- Gender
- Language
- Location (city, province / state, city)
The remaining criteria pull their designations for Google AdWords.
Just Remember: Minimum Audience Size for Google Remarketing
Google likes big audiences. It takes a minimum of 100 users over 30 days to make presenting ads economical for you and them. So as you set up your remarketing audiences, check to see how many of your website users meet your criteria). If it’s too small, don’t bother.
