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On most sites, over 90% of visitors leave without converting.
Thatâs 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 siteâs 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 donât do anything to bring these visitors back, many of them will never return.
But thatâs only if you donât take any further action. Thankfully, you can take matters into your own hands to get conversions from these once-lost visitors.
Thatâs 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 arenât yet using it for your remarketing, now is the time to try it out. In this post, Iâll 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. Letâs start there.
What is the new audiences report?
If youâre familiar with Google Analytics, your first thought may be that an âaudienceâ report is nothing new.
But itâs important to note that this new feature refers to a completely different set of data than the standard âAudience Overviewâ 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 âSee Reportâ to access the new audiences report.
If you donât see this notification, you can access your data manually by selecting âAudiencesâ from the âAudienceâ tab.
If this is the first time youâre accessing the report, youâll see another banner that provides more detail than the first.
As this pop-up explains, Google designed the new audiences report to help you âeasily view how your audiences are performing and evaluate your remarketing efforts.â
However, this report will only show data if youâve enabled demographics and interests reports and have audiences configured in your Analytics account.
So if you havenât yet created audiences, youâll 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 youâre running any marketing campaigns with Googleâs ad network.
How to create an audience in Google Analytics
First, itâs important to understand what the term âaudienceâ means in the context of Googleâs advertising platform.
Fortunately, itâs 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 youâd 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, letâs 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 donât 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 youâre ready to get started, you can create a new audience in either Analytics or AdWords.
In this article, weâll focus on how audience creation works in Google Analytics.
But once youâve 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 âAdminâ page of your Google Analytics property. Then, select âAudience Definitionsâ and then âAudiences.â
Next, click â+New Audience.â From here, you can choose from preconfigured audience types or create your own new audience definition.
Googleâs recommended audiences make it easy to create audiences based on criteria that many marketers find important. Here are some of Googleâs 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 whoâve 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: This type of audience is only available for e-commerce site owners. It includes all users who have made a purchase from your site.
If none of these criteria meet your needs, you can also create a new custom audience with the audience builder.
This option can take a bit longer than using one of Googleâs preconfigured definitions, but it gives you much more control over which users you include in your audience.
You can determine who your audience is based on demographic information, device, behavior, date of first session, traffic sources, e-commerce actions, and more.
The criteria you use will depend on what your goals are, but itâs important to consider that you would typically want to use audiences for the purpose of remarketing.
And most remarketing campaigns center on users who visited your site but did not take the action you wanted them to take.
So whether you want to reach users who visited a specific page without converting or users who never made it to a conversion page in the first place, your audiences should reflect that goal.
Once youâve created an audience, Analytics will populate it with up to 30 days of data and make your audiences report available within 24-48 hours.
How to use the new audiences report for your remarketing campaigns
The audiences report will give you insight into specific sets of your siteâs visitors.
And thatâs great!
But itâs only useful if you know what to do with that data.
So first, itâs important to understand what you can expect to learn from this report.
To put it simply, it allows you to dig into data regarding each audienceâs acquisition, behavior, and conversions.
This way, youâll be able to see how well each audience performs in comparison to other audiences and your siteâs overall traffic.
And the way you respond to this data will depend on how well the specific audience youâre looking at does at moving your business closer to your goals.
Letâs look at some different scenarios of what your data can tell you about your audiences and how you can respond to that information.
Scenario 1: An audience performs well
If an audience is performing well in terms of engagement and conversions, this indicates that theyâre a valuable set of users for your site.
In this case, youâll want to allocate more of your budget to ads for those users. Or, if you arenât yet running ads for these users, youâll want to create ads for them.
For example, Marketo just took this approach.
Their ads were already performing well.
But, later, they defined their audience further in Google Analytics to push personalized ads through AdWords.
They saw 200% more conversions for B2C and 150% more for B2B by segmenting between two groups to create personalized ads.
If you want to see numbers like this, then follow Marketoâs example.
If an audience is performing well, donât settle for âgood enough.â When you discover that a particular audience is yielding results, itâs time to double down on your efforts to convert them.
Upping your advertising budget for them isnât a blind risk. Itâs a reasonable investment in light of real data.
You also may want to consider expanding the number of sites on which you advertise to those users to maximize your chances of bringing them back to convert.
Unfortunately, not all audiences will perform well.
Letâs look at what you can do when an audience isnât yielding the results you want.
Scenario 2: An audience performs poorly
On the flip side, if an audience shows low engagement or conversions, this indicates that it isnât a high-performing set of users for your site.
When you discover this, how should you respond?
Youâll either want to scale back on any ads that target this audience or spend some time editing the audience.
GarentaDAY, an auto leasing website in Turkey, developed a remarketing strategy to push special discounts to previous site visitors who did not convert.
GarentaDAY segmented their audiences by location and keyword terms for their remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA).
The edits they made to their audience paid off. 30% of their revenue came from the remarketing ad campaigns.
If you decide to edit an audience, itâs important to note that one of the most common issues among remarketing campaigns is that the targeting is too broad.
For example, letâs say that you created an audience that targets all of your siteâs visitors over the previous month.
You might think that this is an effective way to target users before they forget your brand altogether.
But what if a large chunk of them found one blog post or piece of content via search, read it, and left?
These users likely have no intention of becoming a customer so targeting them with ads is a waste of your budget.
But revising this audience to only include users who visited a product page could eliminate the issue â and have a major impact on the overall performance of your ads.
Scenario 3: An audience is attracting users who donât convert
Some audiences are clearly high or low performers.
But in many cases, itâs not quite that black and white.
For example, letâs say that you have a campaign thatâs targeting a specific audience. This campaign is effective in attracting site traffic, but it doesnât lead to many conversions.
In this case, you shouldnât write off that audience entirely.
After all, those users are showing interest in what theyâre seeing in your ads. They just arenât following through on that interest.
And itâs up to you to figure out why that is.
Dig into your campaigns and look for any disconnects between your ads and the content they direct your audience to.
For example, you can look at which goals in Google Analytics are converting your audience more and then develop new ad campaigns and landing pages around those goals.
If your campaigns donât provide this level of convenience and simplicity, you could be missing out on conversions simply because users donât want to spend time navigating your site.
Identifying and remedying any disconnects could be the solution. It might be exactly what you need to help your high traffic numbers translate into results for your business.
Scenario 4: An audience is attracting low numbers but high conversions
On the flip side, some of your audiences may turn out to have high conversion rates but low overall numbers.
This can be extremely frustrating because it indicates that youâve found a great set of users, but there arenât very many of them.
Fortunately, you donât have to limit your ad targeting to just your siteâs visitors. You can also use your high-converting audiences as a starting point for creating similar audiences.
If youâre unfamiliar with Googleâs similar audiences, this feature helps you expand campaign targeting by including users with characteristics similar to a siteâs visitors.
Once youâve identified an audience that performs well for your business, you can use this feature to target other users who havenât yet visited your site.
This way, you can expand your campaignâs overall reach. And, as you do so, you can have confidence that the new set of users youâre reaching has the potential for a high conversion rate.
Conclusion
Bringing new users to your site is challenging.
So, when those users leave without taking action, it can be extremely frustrating.
Fortunately, remarketing makes it possible to bring them back to your site and encourage them to convert.
But achieving that goal requires strategic targeting.
You need to make sure that youâre reaching the visitors who are likely to become customers and that youâre communicating with them in a way that will make them want to return.
And with the new audiences report from Google Analytics, you can access the data you need to make informed decisions about your targeting and your campaigns.
The custom audiences report offers you detailed data about how your site visitors are responding to your conversion efforts on your site.
By digging into the behaviors that each audience takes on your site, you can see if they are performing well for your business.
Then, you can use that insight to decide how to improve your results moving forward.
You may find that you should ramp up your campaigns, adjust your targeting, alter your ads, or experiment with similar audiences. Each audience will likely necessitate that you take a different course of action.
And thatâs precisely why these reports are so powerful. Theyâll show you how you should respond to the audiences you set up so that your marketing efforts to them will be effective.
And if you use multiple custom audiences, you may find that you need to combine all of these actions.
But with each improvement you make, youâll become more successful at turning lost visitors into customers for your company.
How will you use Googleâs new Custom Audience Report to help you with your remarketing campaigns?
