How to Get the Most Out of Google Analytics Remarketing

Utilizing remarketing lists in Google Analytics can be extremely powerful for education advertising campaigns. Prospective students have thousands of touch points across weeks and months of decision-making before they choose a school to enroll at. Turning to remarketing tactics to ensure these prospects continue to be impacted by your school and messaging is key to turning them from an interest into an inquiry.

Through the Ads integration in Google Analytics, we are able to create remarketing lists not only based on what pages within your site users have visited, but through customized criteria as well. This includes user demographics, site behavior, device used, behavioral segmentation, and much more. All designed to give your ads specific groups of prospects to target, based upon their proven interest in your school.

Before creating a remarketing list, it’s important to enable remarketing in your Analytics property. Because there is a minimum list size of 100 users, having remarketing enabled for a few weeks before the campaign is set to begin can be essential depending on the list criteria and levels of website traffic. Once the list has populated to a significant size, you can really begin to uncover the power of Google Analytics Remarketing.

Basic Level

You can create many types of remarketing lists, many of which are basic and are determined by a user visiting the site as a whole, a certain page, or taking a conversion action. These site retargeting options can be useful for many marketers, but it is just scratching the surface of what Google Analytics can do for Remarketing Lists.

Smart Lists are quite simple to use and should be at least tested in most campaigns. These allow for Google to auto-optimize your lists based on conversion data from schools similar to yours. This is much more of a hands-off approach for list optimization than can be utilized, but it may be ideal for the marketer who doesn’t have time to be looking at their campaigns every day.

Advanced Level

Being able to segment much deeper than page views is one of the powerful features of Google Analytics. The same segmentation is available with Google Analytics Remarketing. The Audience Builder allows for the same data to be used as custom segments in the reporting section of Analytics. These data requirements can be layered with each other to create a virtually endless number of segment options.

As seen in the Demographics tab above, you can sort by user information to only remarket to the most important users to your site and not just everyone that has been on a page. Being able to combine the criteria of your choice to target only a specific group of users allows for lower costs and more effective advertising opportunities.

Sequences for remarketing lists are a favorite among marketers thanks to the ability to reach users with messaging relevant to their current place in the conversion funnel. While there are endless examples of how powerful these reports can be, getting into Google Analytics and creating remarketing lists is the best way to get familiar with all of its capabilities.

Benefits for Education

Remarketing has a particularly important place when it comes to marketing your school and programs. There are many conversion actions a user can take, and oftentimes with such a big decision they don’t happen in a day. Turning to Analytics and AdWords to segment users allows for many ways to re-engage prospective students during the education research process:

• Reaching out users who begin an application but don’t finish
• Provide additional information to users who look at a specific program without inquiring
• Send ads based around student testimonials to users with multiple site visits who haven’t inquired yet

The list of education-related remarketing possibilities is endless.

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