Now that Halloween is behind us, that we are replacing our decorated pumpkins with plastic Santa Clauses and that our American neighbors are preparing in style for Black Friday , I dare to hope that the merchants of the province have already eagerly planned their holiday strategy, unless it's already in motion!
For those (and for the latecomers!), creating remarketing lists using Google Analytics will make it easier to track the customers you want to target online. Like AdWords remarketing lists, those created from Analytics make it possible to precisely retarget users who have visited your site in order to display AdWords ads encouraging them to return to the site.
Some companies with a powerful CRM or marketing automation solution might not see the value in this tool, but it's a real boon for those just starting out in their CRM business.
At first glance the option to create remarketing lists in Analytics is open to everyone, but it will be impossible to use them until you have done this:
Of course, we must not forget that a maximum of possibilities are offered to you if we take into consideration that you have already implemented the asynchronous code of Analytics and configured your conversion objectives before today.
While lists created from AdWords tags only count users targeted after the list was created, those created from Analytics can pick up users who have visited your site (or match the criteria of the filters you want to target ) up to 540 days back. Of course, this is to be taken with a grain of salt. As with all cookies, the user must have stored them on their computer so that they can be retargeted.
What's more, you can start displaying ads instantly after the listing is created instead of having to wait until it has at least 100 users like AdWords listings. It is here that we realize that this tool can be a beneficial last minute addition to our strategy if the fateful day of Christmas is fast approaching.
Even if it is possible to import Analytics objectives into AdWords to use them as conversions or inside retargeting lists, the operation is never done without a hitch (waiting for a first completion from the source cpc to be able to import, discrepancies in statistics between AdWords and Analytics). On the contrary, the new lists solve these problems and allow the creation of very elaborate and precise targeting lists with the statistics of visits and completed objectives as calculated in Analytics.
If you've already been using AdWords tags for a while and have tweaked your campaign over Google's improvements (implementing a single code, importing Analytics objectives), this news may seem less interesting. However, the addition of sequence filters (impossible until now) makes the transition to this feature unavoidable. These filters allow you to target users who have performed a series of actions on your site during the same visit.
With this new tool in our arsenal, the possibilities of using it wisely are multiple. Since this is a Google product and the listings can only be used with AdWords, the advertising mediums are the same as usual: Text ads and banners on the GDN ( Google Display Network ), ads self-service video on YouTube, and… in conjunction with new AdWords features coming soon!
Interesting lists to build include:
With lists like these allowing for quite a bit of digging, the level of detail you can give to your campaigns and ads will be up to you!
With the new functionalities that are added to Analytics, such as the integration of data from external systems , the measurement tool is improving its offer and could become a must in the measurement of commercial data, whether web or not. Speculators have believed for some time that it could be beneficial for Google to offer its own CRM solution . Analytics, Google Apps, Google Apps Script, … there's enough to build a whole marketing automation solution at least!
But hey, besides this speculation on my part, do you plan to create retargeting lists soon? What do you think are the must-have lists to create?
Thanks to Pascal-Philippe Bergeron and Thomas Dobranowski for their participation in the post.