Guide To GA4 Audiences for Remarketing In Shopping Campaigns

Imagine this: you've spent time, effort, and money driving traffic to your website, yet only a small fraction of visitors convert into paying customers.  This is a common frustration for marketers where 97% of website visitors* leave without taking any action, and if that traffic was acquired through ads, much of that investment could go to waste.

But what if you could bring those potential customers back? 

This is where remarketing comes into play. Remarketing has changed how businesses recapture lost opportunities, especially with shopping ads. Business2Community says retargeting campaigns can be 10 times better than standard display ads.

With GA4, Google makes it easier to set up and manage remarketing campaigns that connect with your audience. GA4 has powerful tools for creating specific, intent-based audiences that work seamlessly with Google Ads. This helps you get the most out of your remarketing efforts.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to use GA4’s audience builder to create ads tailored to each stage of the buying journey. Whether you're new to GA4 or looking to sharpen your strategy, you'll learn how to improve your remarketing campaigns.

*Stats courtesy of Monetate

What are GA4 audiences

GA4 audiences are groups of users based on specific criteria, like how they got to your site, their demographics, or what actions they took. It can also include predicted behaviors on your website or app. These audiences share certain traits and have shown similar behaviors.

These groupings are helpful for ad managers. They let you match ads and messages to what visitors did on your site.

How GA4 audiences work

In GA4, audiences are dynamic groups of users created using specific criteria that your website tracks. This could include details like user demographics, actions taken, or predicted behaviors. Once you set the criteria, users who fit the description will automatically be added to that audience. This makes it easy to target them with the right ads.

For example, if you run a kitchen appliance store, you could create an audience of users who visited the "Blenders" page but didn’t buy anything. Each time someone visits that page without purchasing, they’re added to this audience. You can then target them with ads, like a special discount on blenders.

The flexibility of GA4 audiences allows them to be as broad or narrow as needed. A broad audience might include everyone who visited your site in the last 30 days. A narrow one could focus on users who viewed specific products or added items to their cart but didn’t check out.

Types of GA4 audiences available for remarketing

GA4 has several audience types for remarketing. Each serves a different purpose in a shopping campaign.

1. Predefined or templated audiences

These audiences are automatically set up by GA4 based on common user behaviors and characteristics. They offer a quick way to target broad user segments without requiring much manual configuration. For example:

• All Users: This audience includes everyone who has ever visited your website or launched your app. In a shopping campaign, this could raise awareness or retarget past visitors with new products or promotions.
• Purchasers: This audience consists of users who have completed a purchase. You could use this segment to cross-sell or upsell complementary products. For example, if someone bought a coffee maker from your store, you might retarget them with ads for coffee accessories or gourmet beans.

2. Suggested audiences

Suggested audiences are generated based on the industry you selected when setting up your GA4 property. These are tailored to common use cases within your industry, making them highly relevant and easy to implement.

For an e-commerce site selling kitchen items, suggested audiences might include:

• Frequent shoppers: Users who have made multiple purchases within a certain timeframe. You could target these users with loyalty discounts or exclusive early access to new products.
• Cart abandoners: Users who added items to their cart but didn’t complete the purchase. A remarketing campaign could target these users. It could remind them of their abandoned cart or offer an incentive to complete the purchase.

3. Predictive audiences

Predictive audiences are based on GA4’s machine learning models, which forecast user behavior. These are particularly powerful because they allow you to anticipate user actions and engage them at the right moment.

For instance:

• Likely 7-day purchasers: An audience of users predicted to make a purchase within the next 7 days. This segment is key for time-sensitive promotions, like flash sales on ice cream makers or blenders. Their sales depend on the season.
• Likely 7-day churners: Users predicted to stop engaging with your site or app within the next week. You could target these users with retention ads. Perhaps offer a special deal or remind them why they visited your site.

4. Custom audiences

If suggested or predictive audiences don't work, create custom ones from scratch. This allows for maximum flexibility in defining the exact user behaviors and attributes you want to target.

For example, to target users who viewed multiple "Kitchen Gadgets" pages but haven't purchased, create a custom audience with those conditions. This level of precision helps you deliver highly relevant ads, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

How to setup GA4 audiences

Step 1: Access the audience builder

1. Navigate to the admin section:
   
   • Open your GA4 property.
   • Click on the gear icon (⚙️) at the bottom left of the screen to access the Admin panel.
     
     
2. Locate the audience section:
   • In the Admin panel, under the "Property" column, scroll down to find the Audiences link under the "Data Streams" section.

Step 2: Create a new audience

1. Start a new audience:
   • In the Audiences panel, you’ll see a list of any existing audiences. Click on the New Audience button at the top right to start creating a new one.
      
2. Choose an audience template:
   • GA4 provides templates for common audience types, such as "All Users" or "Purchasers." You can select one of these templates or choose the Create a Custom Audience option to define your own criteria.
     
3. Name your audience:
   • Enter a clear, descriptive name for your audience. For example, “Recent Visitors - No Purchase” or “High-Value Cart Abandoners.” This helps in keeping track of your audiences as you create more over time.

Step 3: Define audience conditions

1. Set up inclusion criteria: In the custom audience builder, you can define the conditions that will add users to this audience. Click Add Condition to start specifying these. You can set conditions based on:
   
   
   • Demographic data (e.g., age, gender, location).
   • Behavioral data (e.g., pages viewed, items added to cart).
   • Acquisition data (e.g., referral source, campaign).
   
   For example, to create an audience of users who viewed a specific product category but didn’t make a purchase, you would add conditions like:
   
   
   • Page path contains “/blenders” (for users who viewed the Blenders category).
   • Event count equals zero for "purchase" (for users who didn’t buy anything).
     
     
2. Sequence and scope: You can further refine your audience by setting up sequence conditions if you need users to take actions in a specific order. For example, first viewing a product page, then adding the item to the cart but not checking out.
   
   
   • Use scoping to specify whether the conditions apply to a single event, a session, or across all sessions.
     
     
3. Exclusion criteria: Optionally, you can add exclusion criteria to prevent certain users from being included in the audience. For instance, exclude users who have already made a purchase to focus only on non-converters.

Step 4: Apply predictive metrics (optional)

1. Add predictive conditions:
   • If available, use GA4's predictive metrics to include users based on likely future behaviors. For example, those predicted to make a purchase in the next 7 days.
   • To use predictive audiences, your property must meet some prerequisites. It needs enough data and to enable certain predictive events, like "purchase" or "churn."
      
     1. Your property has to send the purchase and/or in_app_purchase events.
        
        
     2. You must have a minimum number of positive and negative examples of the predicted events which could be purchases or churns. 
        
        I.e. In the last 28 days, at least 1,000 returning users must have triggered the relevant predictive condition (purchase or churn) in a seven-day period. And, at least 1,000 returning users must not have triggered it.
        
        
     3. The Model quality must be sustained over a period of time to be eligible.
        
        
   • Note: Please enable the toggle for "Modeling Contributions & Business Insights" in your data sharing settings. This setting helps Google’s machine learning models improve their accuracy over time.

Step 5: Review and publish the audience

1. Preview audience size:
   • GA4 provides a summary card that shows an estimate of how many users currently match your audience conditions. Review this to ensure your audience is neither too broad nor too narrow.
2. Save the audience:
   • Once you’re satisfied with the setup, click Save. Your new audience will start populating based on real-time data.
3. Import to Google Ads:
   • If you plan to use this audience for remarketing, you can easily import it into Google Ads. In the Audiences panel, click on Link to Google Ads and follow the prompts to integrate your GA4 audience into your ad campaigns.

Step 6: Monitor and adjust

1. Audit audience performance:
   • Regularly check how your audiences are performing in terms of size and engagement. Adjust the conditions as necessary based on your campaign goals and results.
2. Stay updated:
   • As GA4 continues to evolve, keep an eye on updates to ensure that your audience setups are taking advantage of new features and capabilities.

Examples of GA4 audiences

Let's imagine that we are running a US site that sells household consumables, but for some reason, sales for shaving creams have been on the decline. To monitor this trend, we must create an audience. It would help us visualize the share of US male visitors. Males are the target for this product.

This means that we will have to define the audience based on demographic attributes as seen below

We added Facebook and Pinterest share buttons to a product page. We want to track how many visitors clicked these buttons. This will help us estimate our referral coefficient: the ratio of social shares to total visitors.

To achieve this, we would need to create an audience around link texts or URLs as seen below

These segments are straightforward. But, in shopping campaigns, the audience requirements may be larger and more complex. This is why we would be exploring how to construct your audience map based on your remarketing needs

How To Use audiences to construct  remarketing touchpoints

To create remarketing audiences, you need a clear map of user interactions on your website. It should describe and explain the various interactions.

This would require some basic inquiry. Or, watch session recordings from tools like Microsoft Clarity, Mouseflow, Crazy Egg, or Hotjar.

These recordings would help you find patterns that match: a purchase, an add to cart, a checkout_start, product page abandonment, and site search events. If using session recordings to build your interaction map is too time-consuming, use this Chatgpt prompt to speed it up.

Prompt: 

My site is in the [Your industry], sells these products [List Your Products] across these main collection pages [List Your Collections] 

The Home page of the site contains [List all key elements on the Home page] 

The collection pages contain [List all key elements on the page]

The product pages contain [List all key elements on the page]

The cart page contains [List all key  elements on the page]

The checkout page [List all key elements on the checkout page]

As a Flowchart builder, please create a series of segments. They should detail my site's interaction map and serve my Google shopping ads remarketing campaigns. Produce the result in tabular form. It will be used to build remarketing audiences in GA4

This is my example of this same prompt 

And the results of this alternative approach are readily actionable as seen by this  output table below

How To audit audiences for relevance

It's great to create audiences for remarketing. But, it's also important to audit them regularly for relevance. Over time, issues like site changes, ad blockers, and browser add-ons can lower your audience quality. This may hurt your campaign performance. Audience auditing helps you keep your segments accurate and relevant. It ensures they align with your marketing goals.

For example, if you create an audience based on users who clicked a wishlist icon, and later the wishlist is removed or its HTML is changed, that audience may become redundant. Similarly, if a link structure changes after a site migration, audiences based on those links might no longer be viable

These developments mean we must constantly evaluate the audience's conditions. We need to ensure they are relevant and actionable. 

Below is a step-by-step guide on how to conduct a GA4 audience audit:

Step 1: Review your marketing goals and KPIs

• Identify Objectives: First, revisit your marketing goals. These may include increasing conversions, improving retention, or boosting engagement.
• Align Audiences with Goals: Ensure that your existing GA4 audiences are aligned with these goals. For example, if your goal is to increase repeat purchases, you should have an audience segment for returning customers.

Step 2: Inventory your existing audiences

• List All Audiences: Create a comprehensive list of all the audiences currently set up in GA4.
• Categorize Audiences: Group them by purpose, like remarketing or user engagement. This helps in identifying redundant or overlapping segments.

Step 3: Evaluate audience definitions

• Check Accuracy: Review the conditions and parameters used to define each audience. Ensure they accurately capture the intended user behavior. For example, check that the "Cart Abandoners" audience includes users who added items to their cart but did not buy them.
• Review Membership Duration: Examine how long users remain in each audience. Adjust the duration based on your campaign needs, such as shortening it for flash sales or extending it for long-term engagement.

Step 4: Analyze audience performance

• Use GA4's reports to analyze each audience's engagement and conversion rates.
• Identify Underperforming Audiences: Look for audiences that are not meeting their objectives. Consider adjusting their definitions or re-evaluating their relevance to your marketing strategy.

Step 5: Optimize audience segmentation

• Refine Segments: Consider whether your audience segments are too broad or too narrow. If a "High-Value Customers" audience is underperforming, tweak the criteria to better find high-value users.
• Test New Segments: Based on your findings, create new audience segments to test against your existing ones. For example, you might create an audience of users who viewed high-ticket items but did not add them to the cart.

Step 6: Ensure proper integration with Google Ads

• Check Audience Linking: Ensure your GA4 audiences are linked to your Google Ads account. They should be used in your campaigns.
• Optimize for Retargeting: Use your most valuable audiences in retargeting. For high-intent segments, increase bid adjustments.

Step 7: Document and report findings

• Create an Audit Report: Document your findings. Include any issues found, audiences removed or adjusted, and new segments created.
• Recommend Actions: Recommend ways to optimize audience use. This may include redefining segments, adjusting membership durations, or testing new audience configurations.

Here is a simple auditing checklist that can also be used to replicate the steps included in the guide above.

Before we conclude, here are a couple of assignments. You can use them to test your understanding and to consolidate the knowledge from this article.

Audience building assignments in GA4

(1) User adds items to cart, reaches checkout page but bounces

Situation: A user visits your kitchen items e-commerce site and adds a high-end blender to their cart. They proceed to the checkout page but abandon the purchase after entering their shipping details, possibly due to the price or distraction.

Task: Create a GA4 audience segment. It should capture users who added blender category items to their cart but did not buy them. 

Goal: To use Google Shopping ads to serve dynamic product ads. They should showcase the exact blender left in their cart, with a time-limited discount or free shipping.

(2) Users who spend time comparing related products

A user spends a lot of time comparing blenders on your site. They read reviews and toggle between product pages, but don't buy.

Task: Create a GA4 audience for users who have viewed multiple blender products and spent a considerable amount of time on these pages. Serve Google Shopping ads that compare the blenders they viewed. Focus on key differences like power, features, and price.

Goal: To serve Google Shopping ads. They should compare the blenders the users viewed. Also, they should highlight key differences, like power, features, and price.

Please test yourself with these challenges above and if you run into blockers, then connect with me on LinkedIn.

Conclusion

Mastering GA4, especially for audience building, is vital. It separates novice Google Ads users from seasoned experts. Precise audience targeting lets advanced marketers excel. It boosts campaign performance, earns huge payouts, and enriches their portfolios. 

I hope this article has sparked your curiosity. I also hope it inspires you to explore GA4's complexities. 

Keep pushing the limits of what's possible. Let this be the start of your journey to GA4 expertise.