One way to re-engage existing users in your app and find new users from the web is through remarketing. Let’s take a look at how remarketing works using Google Analytics and AdWords:
Introduction
Remarketing is a powerful tool that lets you target ad content to users who have already visited either your website or app.
App remarketing lets you target ad content to existing users who you want to engage again. You could create special incentives such as free in-app tools or special features to incentivize those users to open your app again.
Website remarketing generally targets ads to new users who have visited a website like a promotional page for your apps, but didn’t download it. Web remarketing could target either new or existing users with special offers for downloading your app.
Note, that to enable Remarketing with Google Analytics, you must make a change to your Google Analytics tracking code.
Audience Lists
Once you set up remarketing, you can create specific Audiences that let you target sets of users based on common attributes. For example, you could build an Audience List of users that last opened your app a month ago. You can then specify that an ad campaign only show when users match the audience targeting criteria in order to offer them special incentives. This way, only users that haven’t opened the app for awhile will see the offer.
For apps, Audience Lists are collections of unique tracking IDs that your app sets when users visit for the first time. Note that users can reset their ID at any time. For websites, Audience Lists are collections of cookies from users’ browsers that visited your site with Google Analytics and remarketing tracking code enabled. You can use these lists of cookies or tracking IDs when setting up a remarketing campaign to target ads to those specific users.
When you create an Audience List in Google Analytics, you can use one of these pre-defined audiences:
- all users to your website or app
- users that visit a specific page or area of your website, or screen of your app
- users who complete a specific goal conversion
- new users that Google determines to be viable candidates through machine learning
You can also define your own lists based on existing segments you configured in Google Analytics. For example, you could build lists from the segments we’ve previously discussed in this course, like the monetized and non-monetized segments, or the segments we built for users who had claimed free goods during their sessions.
The Analytics integration with AdWords also lets you identify groups of users based on a specific sequence or combination of actions. For example, you could build an Audience List based on Go Fish! app users who completed a level, then visited the Bait and Tackle shop screen, but didn’t make a purchase.
How remarketing works
When users visit a site or app with remarketing code enabled, it evaluates the session against the Audience List criteria you’ve specified. When a session meets that criteria, the remarketing cookie or tracking ID is added to the Audience List unless it already exists on the list. When a user associated with one of those cookies or tracking IDs visits a site or app on the Google Display Network, that user may be served a remarketing ad, based on rules that you’ve defined.
When you create an Audience List, you specify the AdWords account in which you’d like that list to be available, and it will appear in AdWords within minutes. You can then use that list as a target audience for your AdWords campaigns.
Conclusion
Remarketing is a powerful way of finding new users from websites or re-engaging current users who haven’t visited your app in a while. Using Google Analytics, you can figure out which users it makes sense to target in your remarketing campaign.
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