How To Use the Google Analytics New Custom Audience Report For Better Remarketing

Source: Neil Patel

On most sites, over 90% of visitors leave without converting.

That’s an estimate for all traffic to your site.

As bad as that might sound, the numbers are even worse for first-time visitors. You can expect that only 2% of your site’s visitors will convert on their first visit.

Regardless of what your goals are for your website, these statistics are a bit depressing.

It might be enough to lead you to despair. After all, if you don’t do anything to bring these visitors back, many of them will never return.

But that’s only if you don’t take any further action. Thankfully, you can take matters into your own hands to get conversions from these once-lost visitors.

That’s where remarketing comes in.

Remarketing is one of the best ways to avoid losing potential customers.

When you do it correctly, it can be a great way to bring users back to your site and increase the percentage of your visitors who become customers or clients.

But much like any other channel, creating an effective remarketing campaign requires careful planning and a strong understanding of your target audience.

Google Analytics has long been one of the most important places to find data to help you understand your audience. And now, Google offers even more help.

The new Custom Audiences Report in Google Analytics gives you access to in-depth information on how users respond to your campaigns and help you create even more effective remarketing ads.

If you aren’t yet using it for your remarketing, now is the time to try it out. In this post, I’ll teach you how you can use your audience data to improve your remarketing efforts.

But first, you need a basic understanding of what this report is. Let’s start there.

What is the new audiences report?

If you’re familiar with Google Analytics, your first thought may be that an “audience” report is nothing new.

But it’s important to note that this new feature refers to a completely different set of data than the standard “Audience Overview” report.

If you have access to this report, you may have seen the following announcement after logging into your account over the past few weeks.

If you see this notification, you can click “See Report” to access the new audiences report.

If you don’t see this notification, you can access your data manually by selecting “Audiences” from the “Audience” tab.

If this is the first time you’re accessing the report, you’ll see another banner that provides more detail than the first.

As this pop-up explains, Google designed the new audiences report to help you “easily view how your audiences are performing and evaluate your remarketing efforts.”

However, this report will only show data if you’ve enabled demographics and interests reports and have audiences configured in your Analytics account.

So if you haven’t yet created audiences, you’ll need to do so before you can gain any value from this new report.

Fortunately, the process is fairly straightforward. In fact, you should be doing this anyway if you’re running any marketing campaigns with Google’s ad network.

How to create an audience in Google Analytics

First, it’s important to understand what the term “audience” means in the context of Google’s advertising platform.

Fortunately, it’s not all that complicated.

An audience is a group of users that you want Google Analytics to group together based on any combination of attributes that is meaningful to your business.

These attributes can be as broad or as specific as you’d like them to be.

These attributes allow advertisers to deliver custom ads in real time.

For example, if you want to create an ad campaign that targets all of your customers, you might create an audience that includes all of the users who have ever made a purchase on your site.

This would necessitate a fairly general ad, but it would give you a large pool of potential viewers.

Now, let’s say that you want to create an ad campaign with the goal of earning new customers.

In this case, you might want to create an audience segment with users who have downloaded a whitepaper on your site but have not yet made a purchase.

This way, you can focus your efforts on the visitors who don’t yet think that buying from your site is worth it. This will allow you to tailor your campaign toward convincing them.

Regardless of the exact qualifications you choose, this is an excellent way to focus your ads on the exact audience you want to reach.

And, if you’re ready to get started, you can create a new audience in either Analytics or AdWords.

In this article, we’ll focus on how audience creation works in Google Analytics.

But once you’ve created an audience, you can activate it on AdWords, too, as long as you log into the same Google account.

To get started, navigate to the “Admin” page of your Google Analytics property. Then, select “Audience Definitions” and then “Audiences.”

Next, click “+New Audience.” From here, you can choose from preconfigured audience types or create your own new audience definition.

Google’s recommended audiences make it easy to create audiences based on criteria that many marketers find important. Here are some of Google’s recommendations:

• Smart List: Smart Lists use machine learning to determine which users are most likely to convert in subsequent sessions. It uses signals like location, referrer, session duration, and page depth to compile this list.
• All Users: This type of audience includes all of your visitors with necessary advertising cookies.
• New Users: This includes users who have only conducted one session on your site.
• Returning Users: These users have visited your site more than once.
• Users who visited a specific section of my site: These audiences include users who’ve visited specific pages or directories within your site.
• Users who completed a goal conversion: These users have completed a goal on your site.
• Users who completed a transaction:…

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