So What Are Audiences?
In basic terms, an audience is a list of users that have been tracked (generally with a browser cookie) that allows you to tailor ads towards them based on their previous encounter with your website (or mobile app).
Depending on which study you look at “acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one” – Gallo. A, Harvard Business Review. With this in mind, audience list campaigns (remarketing campaigns) can definitely boost your account’s performance by en-engaging people who have been to your website before as they are looking for your product or service. This helps move them further down your sales funnel with a high chance of converting them.
Creating Your Audience List?
Audience lists are pretty easy to set up in AdWords or Google Analytics. There are two options to create audience lists, these are seen below:
Option 1: Use Pre-Configured Audience Lists
In Analytics, the analytics team have created pre-configured audience lists that can be applied to most accounts. There are various different kinds that you can use focusing on different metrics like engagement, devices, gender…and many more. This is the easiest way to get audience lists in your account to start gathering data /audience traffic.
Option 2: Create Custom Audience Lists
If you don’t want to use a generic pre-configured list, you can always create your own custom audience list where you can select the conditions for users to be added to the list. If you want to create your own list in Analytics, it is important to note that you will need “Edit” permission / access in order to do this.
How To Use Your List In AdWords?
Now that you have your list/s created, the audience list will need to get traffic / users tagged to build it up. One of the requirements for audience lists is that you have over 1,000 users in the list to start running ads to it. Once these lists are built up and ready to use you can create your remarketing campaign/s.
To create your first search / display remarketing campaign check out the AdWords support article on Creating your first display remarketing campaign for step by step instructions. Once your campaign is up and running it will start showing ads to users from your audience list, which are considered to be a lot more qualified.
Conclusion
Audience lists can definitely assist your AdWords strategy to re-engage previous visitors and if done right can improve your bottom line. For a more indepth article on how remarketing works, check out the WordStream blog entitled How Does Google Remarketing Work?. Otherwise, contact us and we would be happy to walk you through setting up your audience lists and any other AdWords assistance.