Have you been wondering what’s the next step in optimizing your campaigns? Is keyword optimization only getting you so far? It’s time to take you campaign strategy to the next level. How? With Google Analytics audiences.
Whether you’re running a search or display campaign, you can greatly benefit from the awesome targeting provided through GA audiences. Let’s talk marketing strategy for a moment –
Who do you think is more likely to spend money on your service, someone who has never heard of your brand or someone who is familiar with it? How likely is someone who has previously used your services to use them again? What if Google could automatically find more people like your past customers? Now we’re getting somewhere.
Display advertising in AdWords has had remarketing capability for quite some time, but recently search advertising has also joined in with this capability. Let’s dive into Google Analytics and find out how to put this amazing feature to work.
In GA, click the Admin tab at the top of the page. Next, click on Tracking info in the middle column, and under that click Data Collection. Make sure you have Remarketing turned on, as well as Advertising Reporting Features.
Next, look farther down that column where you clicked Tracking & this time click on Remarketing then Audiences below it. Now click +Audience and you’re on your way to creating your first audience.
Within the new audience creator, select the view you want to pull your data from, and then select the AdWords campaign that you want to apply the audience to (this requires that you first link Analytics with AdWords). Click Next Step to begin defining your target audience.
This is where the magic happens. If you want Google to use all their data to help you find good audiences, select Smart List and you’re on your way – but this isn’t really remarketing & isn’t why we’re here. To create a custom audience select All Visitors & then click the pencil in the top right of the box. Here you can set exact parameters about your audience – how many times they’ve visited your site, how long their visit was, which device they’re on, gender, age, traffic source, you name it. We recommend you try settings like “spent more than X time on the site” or “viewed more than X pages”. This will help you eliminate the people who bounced or were uninterested in your site. Once you’ve narrowed down your audience, press save.
The last thing to do is select the membership duration of your audience. Type in the # of days you want people to stay on the list and you’re good to go. Happy remarketing!
