Google Analytics has been a tremendous asset for marketers. It tells them where your site visitors come from, what they look at, and what they’re most interested in. Google Analytics pairs seamlessly with AdWords and the two can be used to create highly targeted campaigns. But Google is taking it one step further and has recently released Remarketing with Google Analytics. Remarketing was available in the past but it required custom code and the retargeting criteria was limited. Now that Remarketing is tied to Google Analytics the process is more seamless and your targeting options are much greater.
As the word implies, remarketing is simply marketing to those who have already been on your site. Say that an anonymous customer searches for a certain product, a pair of shoes. He browses a site for a while, but doesn’t make a purchase and leaves. Remarketing comes into play now. Since cookies were collected from his search, he will start seeing ads for shoes appear on any site he visits later that day that is part of the Google Display Network (GDN) – or any site on the GDN the marketer chooses. Because of remarketing, he is now more likely to come back to the site he initially visited and make the purchase. What does this mean for Google Analytics?
Not only will remarketing with Google Analytics be easier than it was before, it will be much more in depth. You will be able to remarket based on more online criteria. You can still focus on customers who visit specific pages or add items to their cart and leave, but imagine creating much more sophisticated lists based on many of the collected Google Analytics behaviors such as any goal that is being tracked, custom segment that is built, a geography or operating system language.
Google Analytics, combined with Remarketing, is a powerful targeting and measurement tool kit. Clients ask me all the time what is the value of anonymous online data, and here is direct proof of that value. However, what if you would like to incorporate this online data capture, marketing and measurement process into your full customer intelligence ecosystem in order to gain a complete view of the customer and apply those insights in all channels? Google does not provide access to the customer level behavioral data so for now this is not possible using Google Analytics with Remarketing. Part 2 will focus on the steps required to build a similar solution that can be incorporated into your current customer intelligence system that drives targeting and measurement in ALL channels.
