5 Google Analytics Audiences You Should Be Remarketing To

May 15, 2013

Collective Measures
Now that Google Analytics Remarketing has been out for nearly a year – we thought we’d share with you five of our favorite audiences to remarket to.

Now that Google Analytics Remarketing has been out for nearly a year – we thought we’d share with you five of our favorite audiences to remarket to.

1. Visitors Who Abandoned Your Conversion Funnel

Whether you’re a lead-gen or an e-commerce site, if you have a conversion funnel, you should be remarketing to visitors who started your conversion funnel but did not complete your final conversion. To reach these visitors, you can use Google Analytics Remarketing List’s Visitor Segments. With Visitor Segments, you can set up a sequence filter to segment visitors that have completed specific sequential behaviors on your site. You can set these segments up for each step of your conversion funnel by including visitors who visited the pages of your conversion steps leading up to your conversion while excluding visitors who visited pages that appear later in the conversion funnel (see example below). This will allow you to send messages specific to each audience as they move through the conversion funnel.

Google Analytics Remarketing List - Visitor Segments

Real world example: You sell custom screen printed t-shirts online. Your site uses a quoting engine to generate quotes on screen printing tee-shirts prior to the final sale. Below are example audiences you could remarket to with unique messaging.

– Site visitors who created a custom shirt design but did not receive a price quote. Remarket to these visitors with messaging to bring them back into the conversion funnel where they left off. Example: “Get a quote on your custom tee shirt design now!”

– Site visitors who received a quote but did not order the tee-shirts. Remarket them with messaging to drive them to order. Giving these visitors a unique offer in the ad to save XX% could help drive to higher clickthrough and conversion rates. Example: “Order your tee shirts now and save 15% off your purchase!”

2. Past Purchasers

When you sell a product that has low involvement in the purchase decision, remarketing to previous customers can be a great way to drive sales. One way to do this is by creating a Remarketing List in Google Analytics that targets visitors who have completed a purchase goal on your site.

For most products, you are going to want to wait to start remarketing to your customer as they may not be immediately ready to make another purchase from you. The length of how long you wait to start remarketing depends on your sales cycle. For a product whose sale cycle begins again after 30 days of purchase; you could create a custom combination list in AdWords that targets site visitors who have completed a purchase in the last 90 days and that excludes site visitors who have completed in the last 30 days. See examples below.

Google Analytics Remarketing List - Converting Visitors

3. Visitors Interested In Specific Products/Services

For some products/services with longer sales cycles, you can target to visitors who have not yet converted on your site but have indicated that they are interested in one of your specific products/services through Google Analytics Visitor Segments. There are two ways I generally like to do this, but there are many other ways it can be done.

The first way I segment my visitors is by time on page. If a visitor stays on one of my pages about a specific product/service for longer than that page’s average time on page, I want to remarket to that visitor using an ad specific to the product/service they were viewing. This is set up by using Google Analytics Remarketing List’s Visitor Segment’s sequence filter to include page and time on page. See example below.

Google Analytics Remarketing List - Visitor Segments Time

The second way I like to segment my audience is by, again, using Google Analytics Remarketing List’s Visitor Segment’s sequence filter to create an audience of visitors who have visited 2+ pages on my site related to a particular product or service. This is done by adding to steps of page visits in the sequence. See example below.

Google Analytics Remarketing List - Visitor Segments Page Views

4. Soft-Lead Converters

Another way you can remarket to visitors who are making a high involvement purchase decision is by remarketing to visitors who have completed soft leads on your site without completing your ultimate conversion goal.

Real world example: Using the screen printing tee shirt company as our example again; you can remarket to visitors who have signed up to receive offer emails, but have not made a purchase on your site. For these visitors, showing them an offer ad might produce better results as they have indicated that they are interested in your brand but are waiting for a deal to make a purchase.

5. Visitors Within Highest Conversion Rate Range Metrics

Using your data in Analytics, you can determine when visitors are converting on your site at the highest rates. This can be based on number of visits, time on site, page views, and basically any other metric.

One example of this could be using Google Analytics to determine the number of visits that visitors convert at the highest rate. You might find that your visitors convert at the highest rate between five to six visits to your site. It may be that these visitors needed to visit the site more than once to gather more information to make a conversion. You might also see conversion rates drop after six visits because these visitors may have converted through another channel and are now visiting the site for very specific information and not to convert again. Using this information, you can create a remarketing list that target visitors to your site who have visited two to five times. To set this up, you can use the Google Analytics Remarketing List’s Visitor Segment’s dimension & metrics filter and include visitors based on their count of visit metrics. See example below.

Google Analytics Remarketing List - Visitor Segments metrics

Happy remarketing, friends!