Ep 30: Remarketing Audiences For Google Ads

Any ad account that’s looking to scale up ad spend needs to have a plan for remarketing to previous customers and visitors. Today I’m covering how I build remarketing audiences and the audiences that I recommend everyone have in their accounts.

Hey everybody. Jim Lastinger here. Hope everything’s going well for you.

Today we’re talking about remarketing audiences, what they are, how to build them and how I use them. First of all, what is a remarketing audience? It’s a pretty simple concept. A remarketing audience, that’s also called retargeting depending on which platform you’re in, a remarketing audience is a group of people that’s usually collected through Google Analytics that you want to be able to advertise to. So a pretty simple concept. It probably makes sense to talk about the types of audiences I recommend that you use as the next step here.

First, every good remarketing campaign needs to consider previous website visitors. The idea is that anybody that’s been to your site is more likely than not going to be a targeted new someone that you should target ads to in the future. I recommend making lists of visitors from the last two days, the last seven days, last 30 days, last 90 days. Those are for starters. You can add other time periods as you collect data and see what makes sense for your particular site. The reason I say create audiences for the last two days and last seven days is typically people that have been to your site very recently they’re kind of hotter prospects, so to speak. So you’ll want to be able to aggressively advertise to those folks.

Next you might want to make an audience of people that took a specific action on your site. For example, if you’re an e-commerce company, you might want to have an audience of people that viewed a particular product or a particular product category, or maybe even added a product to cart. This is a pretty common practice. You’ll see that on just about all e-commerce campaigns. If you’re a different type of company, maybe you have a page that makes sense that you want to track such as, create an appointments page or a directions page, you want to be able to target people that have visited those pages or even taken actions on those pages.

These are pretty basic audiences, but you can get as refined as you want. Maybe you want to create an audience of people who added products to cart, but didn’t check out. That’s definitely doable and something that a lot of advertisers do. Maybe you want to create an audience of people who visited your site from Facebook or from an organic search. Maybe you only want to target people who have visited at least five pages on your site. All of these things are definitely possible.

The only real limit that you have is the size of your audience. You can’t use an audience in a campaign until it has at least a thousand members. So keep that in mind. If you want to get really specific and create an audience with only two people in it, so if you’re going to have a lot of different variables and get that specific, it’s not going to benefit you because an audience that only has two people is never going to display.

Okay. Next, how do you actually create these remarketing audiences? Most of this is done directly in Google Analytics. That’s the way I prefer to do it. You’ll go to the admin tab and look for the audience definitions link. That’s where you’ll be able to create audiences however you see fit. There’s a handy built-in tool that’ll tell you how many people would have been in that audience in the last seven days, so that you can check your logic and make sure that you’re kind of getting what you’re expecting to get when you create that audience.

There’s also a handy tool where you can import audiences from a gallery. These are publicly available options, templates, so to speak. I recommend doing it this way if you’re just trying out audiences for the first time, that way you can make sure that you’re getting things set up correctly. You can always build out your own version of these audiences alongside the important ones and see if you’re getting the same numbers.

That’s it. That’s all for this week’s episode. I’ll be back soon with another episode of Marketing and 10. Until then, take care and have a great day.