Remarketing is a must if you plan on running an online marketing campaign. Here is how to set up a remarketing audience.
About remarketing audiences in Analytics
Re-engage audiences that are likely to convert.
A remarketing audience is a list of cookies or mobile-advertising IDs that represents a group of users you want to re-engage because of their likelihood to convert. You create remarketing audiences based on user behavior on your site or app, and then use those audiences as the basis for remarketing campaigns in your ad accounts like Google Ads and Display & Video 360.
In this article:
Identifying behavior
Overview of creating and using remarketing audiences
Next steps
Related resources
Identifying behavior
You can use broad behavioral criteria like having simply initiated a session on your site or opened your app, or you can use more narrow criteria like interacting with specific products.
For example, you might create each of the following remarketing audiences and engage the users in them with the following kinds of ads.
Audience criteria Ad type
Users who viewed product-detail pages, but didn’t add those items to their carts Ads for the items they didn't add to their carts
Users who added items to their carts, but didn’t complete their purchases Ads with a discount code for the items in their carts
Users who purchased items X and Y Ads for related item Z
When a user’s behavior meets the criteria you’ve specified, the associated cookie or Device Advertising ID is included in the audience. When any of the users with those cookies or IDs later visit sites on the Google Display Network or use Google Search, they are eligible to see one of your remarketing ads if you win the ad auction.
As you get comfortable with remarketing, you can tailor your creatives and apply remarketing best practices.
Overview of creating and using remarketing audiences
You can use remarketing audiences in Google Ads and Display & Video 360. The Google Ads integration is available to all Analytics accounts. The Display & Video 360 integration is available only to Google Analytics 360 accounts.
To create a remarketing audience, you indicate the advertising account you want to use, and then specify the audience criteria.
To specify the audience criteria, you can:
Choose from preconfigured audience definitions
Create a new audience definition
Import a segment
When you save an audience, it becomes available in the advertising account you indicated, and you can use it in the remarketing campaigns you manage there.
To use an audience in Google Ads, you need to add it to a least one of your ad groups.
If you want to use a remarketing audience in more than one Google Ads account, link your Analytics property to an Google Ads Manager account, then share remarketing lists. If you want to use the audience in more than one Google Marketing Platform account, you need to recreate the list for each linked account.
Google Ads integration
The integration with Google Ads offers some additional options that augment standard Google Ads Remarketing:
Create remarketing lists based on Analytics data. Build your audiences from Analytics metrics and dimensions (for example, Session Duration, City, and Goal Completions), and engage users who perform a specific sequence of actions on your site (for example, users who visited product page A and then clicked the “add to cart” button).
Enable Remarketing with a simple Admin setting in Analytics. You don’t need to make any additional code changes or add any additional remarketing tags to your site.
A remarketing audience must include a minimum of 100 unique cookies in order for the Google Display Network to serve ads to the audience. Remarketing lists for search ads must include a minimum of 1000 unique cookies. These minimum-cookie requirements are the same for the Google Ads and Analytics tracking pixels.
Google Ads remarketing tags vs. Analytics tracking code and Data Import
The Google Ads remarketing tag and the Analytics tracking code require different implementation efforts, and they each collect different data. Analytics also offers Data Import, which lets you import a wide variety of additional data beyond what you collect with the tracking code.
In Google Ads, you build remarketing lists from the data collected by the remarketing tag. In Analytics, you build remarketing audiences from any of the data you have in Analytics. You can combine the two in a Google Ads account linked to an Analytics account.