3 Types of Google Analytics Audiences for Digital Marketing Success

Audiences and remarketing have become critical pieces of any digital marketing campaign. By ensuring you are showing an ad to the right person, on the right channel, and with the right message, you can greatly improve marketing efficiency and effectiveness. Audiences are critical in this endeavor. Learn about a few types of Google Analytics (GA) audiences that can be imported into Google Ads in order to drive digital marketing success.

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1) Multi-Channel Audiences

Multi-channel audiences are critical if you oversee marketing campaigns across multiple channels, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Bing, or AdWords.  By creating an audience where the conditions are source, medium, or source/medium, and identifying whichever platform you choose, you have the ability to create a list of individuals who you know came to your site from that platform.

For example, let’s say you push a high-funnel prospecting campaign on Facebook and want to ensure consistent language, imagery, and branding across channels. You should create an audience in GA that groups people whose acquisition medium contains “Facebook,” and also create a SEM campaign that targets those individuals specifically to control creative and messaging throughout the purchase funnel.

You can also use the audience insights feature to compare audiences from different channels and see if there are any key demographic, geographic, or device differences among your users from separate channels.

2) Site-Related Audiences

A great way to prioritize audience creation is to look at which landing pages are most popular on the website. Navigate to Behavior à Site Content à Landing Pages report to see the most popular pages in any given time frame.

If you are an ecommerce advertiser, creating audiences for your top product pages not only gives you insights about the type of people interested in that product, but it also enables you to show highly targeted ads to the individuals who have viewed those products – without needing a dynamic remarketing feed.

If you are a lead-gen advertiser, consider making dedicated pages for all of the industries you serve. You can then create an audience of viewers of each industry page and target them specifically. This way, individuals identify themselves as being in a specific industry by clicking on the industry page most relevant to them. Thus, you have a highly-qualified audience who you can then show ads with industry-specific imagery and language.

Finally, both lead-gen and ecommerce advertisers can utilize blog posts to drive relatively more volume than the “business” portion of the website. Audiences created from blog post viewers are beneficial because you know the individual is already interested in what your blog is addressing, with the added bonus that they are at least a little familiar with your brand name. If you have a blog post titled “4 Tips for Lowering Your Facebook CPMs”, you would not want to show individuals who have viewed that blog post ads for your general digital marketing offerings. Rather, show them an ad demonstrating how you can improve Facebook performance specifically. Similarly, if you are an electronic goods supplier with a blog post about how to improve the speed of old computers, you want to show viewers of that blog post ads for new computers, rather than ads that promote all products or highlight your business as a whole. Typically, there is an agenda behind any blog produced by a company, and showing complementary products to users who have self-selected as being interested in that topic will make advertising efforts that much more targeted and successful.

3) Content-Related Audiences

Content-related audiences are valuable for lead gen and ecommerce companies alike. For lead gen clients, one critical aspect is moving a user down the purchase funnel from discovery to consideration and research, all the way to purchase. If you have a very expensive service offering that takes a long time to research and consider, you likely don’t want your only content to be a free trial. Instead, familiarize the individual with your offering while providing valuable content along the way.

With GA audiences, you can easily nurture individuals through all the steps of the purchase funnel. If someone views an imbedded video to completion, make an audience of those users, and then target them with ads that offer a whitepaper. If they have viewed the whitepaper but have not requested a free trial, put them in contact with a sales expert who can help answer any questions they might have. GA audiences will allow you to track these groups of individuals throughout the purchase funnel and hit them with the right content, on the right platform, at the right time.

These audiences can be very beneficial for ecommerce advertisers as well. Say you sell a very high-priced espresso machine that takes a lot of consideration before purchase. Make an audience of viewers of that product page who have not converted yet and show them reminder advertising or “% off” coupons.

If the product or service you offer has a high repeat-purchase rate, like vitamins or haircuts, consider using time decay audiences to show ads to these individuals at the perfect moment. If you sell 60-count packs of vitamins online, create an audience of individuals who converted between 60-90 days ago and show them an ad reminding them it is likely time to purchase again. Same thing with haircuts—create an audience of people who completed an online reservation form between 14 and 28 days ago and give them 10% off coupons in order to encourage them to come back.

Ecommerce advertisers can also utilize GA audiences to show complementary products or to upsell products. Continuing with the espresso machine example, you could create an audience of individuals who purchased the espresso machine by using fields like product SKU or product contains “espresso machine name.” Then, once that list is large enough to remarket to, you can show those individuals ads for complementary products like coffee beans or grinders as well as higher order value items like cleaning products for the machine or an insurance or warranty package.

Finally, don’t forget that audiences can also be beneficial to use as exclusions. Contact us if you would like to learn more about how Google Analytics audiences can help drive digital marketing growth.