Google Analytics can be a great resource to create remarketing audiences. You can segment by behavioral metrics, time on site, converters etc. In general, there is much more usability to Analytics’ remarketing audiences than with the more common AdWords tag.
To further build this case, we can build out remarketing audiences around what medium they arrived to our site from. To give ourselves a quick analytics refresher, the 4 main mediums of traffic are:
- Direct
- Paid Traffic (CPC)
- Organic Search (Organic)
- Web Referral (Referral)
When we think about the user intent behind these traffic mediums, there’s a chance it could vary. For instance, if we are heavily promoting Display ads, an argument can be made that an ad click is less valuable than an organic click due to the inherent qualities of those channels.
It’s by this thought that we may want to segment these mediums for remarketing purposes. And, good news, with Google Analytics…we can!
The process is a relatively simple one as long as your AdWords and Analytics profiles are synced. All we have to do is navigate to the Admin tab in Google Analytics and dive into Audience Definitions:
Once in our Audiences tab, we hit +New Audience, select our destination Adwords account, then hit the Create New button.
You’ll now be given access to a wide array of behavioral and site metrics. You’ll also notice the ‘Traffic Sources’ tab:
This is where you’ll be able to customize your remarketing audience based on what traffic source they came to your site through.
This can be a GREAT test if you’re running display heavy campaigns or are looking to try something new with your current campaign roster. From our experience, users who find your site organically tend to have more value via remarketing lists and testing this definitely can be worth it!
