Why Use a Custom Audience for Retargeting?
Retargeting (used interchangeably with “remarketing”) allows you to advertise to visitors who have interacted with your brand. More often than not, this means advertising to people who have visited your website recently.
The concept allows you to reinforce key value propositions or call to actions to those who are already “primed” to engage with you.
This is especially powerful when your retargeting lists are made up of Lift AI segmented visitors. For example, high intent visitors may see a call to action ad while medium intent visitors may see a nurture ad, while low intent visitors are excluded from the list.
To set up retargeting, you would commonly use a list of visitors which is collected via a piece of code on your website. For example, to retarget through Facebook, you would have to install the Facebook code “pixel” on your website first so that it can start collecting a list of visitors who have been on your site to retarget later. For this article, we are exploring how to create a Lift AI list inside of Google analytics.
The ads are then placed inside of “networks” - the most common being Google Display Network which can use the newly created Lift AI list (where users see banner advertising on the websites they visit) or social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn (where users see ads in their typical social feeds).
Setting Up a Custom Lift AI Audience in Google Analytics
Marketers can create a Google Ads Display Remarketing campaign following the typical process found here, but now they can target a specific Lift AI list.
The easiest way to create a custom Lift AI audience for remarketing campaigns is to create the audience inside of Google Analyitcs following the instructions below:
1. Log into Google Analytics
2. Click on the “Admin” panel
3. Under the “Property” column, select “Audience Definitions” and then “Audiences”
4. Click “+New Audience”
5. Leave audience source as “All Website Data”
6. For “Audience Definition” select “Create New” and then click “Conditions” on the left tab
7. Click on the Filter Dropdown menu and select “Event Action”, then “Contains”, then the score range you want. Click “Or” at the end of the row to add another range
8. Do this for all score ranges you want to include in this specific audience. As an example, the below audience is a broad “High Intent” which includes all score ranges between 65-94.
9. Note: Depending on your implementation your score events could be in event label not action. Check you implementation documentation provided by your client success manager. If you have "Event Action" available, he score ranges must be inputted exactly as they are created by Lift AI - you cannot simply add a range of “60-94” as there is no Event Action by that range. In the below example, 95-100 is excluded as those visitors are so primed to purchase that advertising to them may not be needing (called "self sabotage advertising"). If you have "Event Label" available, you can simply input "Event Label Contains High Intent"
10. Name the audience e.g. “Lift AI High Intent 65-100” then press “Save”
11. Under “Audience Destinations” click “+Add Destinations” and select the client’s Google Ads account. You may have multiple accounts, it can't hurt to assign this audience to all of them.
12. Click “Publish” - the audience will start collecting visitors inside of those score ranges. Note: Google Ads require a minimum of 1,000 visitors in a list before it allows you to target them
13. Inside of Google Ads, the client can now target the list as a “Custom Audience”
Now you can create highly targeted remarketing campaigns to visitors who you know have a high intent, optimizing your spend and enhancing conversion metrics.
