Below is a list of the Essential Google Audiences the every e-commerce site should create in their Google Ads Account. Even if you don’t plan on using them right away, creating them now will ensure that they can grow so they are ready to be used in the future.
Google’s Built-in Audiences
Before we create our own audiences, we first need to install the Google Ads Dynamic Remarketing Code. This triggers Google to automatically create some built-in Remarketing Audiences:
| Audience Name | Duration | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Shopping cart abandoners | 30 days | People who added products to the shopping cart in the past 30 days but did not complete the purchase |
| Product Viewers | 30 days | People who viewed specific product pages on your site in the past 30 days but did not create a shopping cart |
| Past buyer | 30 days | People who purchased products from you in the past 30 days |
| All visitors | 30 days | People who visited pages that contain your remarketing tags in the past 30 days |
| All converters | 180 days | People who converted on your site in the last 180 days. Based on your conversion tracking tag. This is not necessarily people who have purchased from you, but anyone who has triggered a “conversion”. (eg: Phone call from an ad) |
| General Visitors | 30 days | People who visited your website in the past 30 days but did not view any specific products |
Additional Audiences
The additional audiences to create follow the same pattern used in Google’s built-in audiences, but with expanded membership durations. The main focus is on Shopping Cart Abandoners, Product Viewers, and Past Buyers.
Shopping Cart Abandoners
Google will have already created a “Shopping cart abandoners” audience with 30 day time window. We will create the following additional audiences for 7, 14, 90, and 180 day durations:
| Audience Name: | Shopping cart abandoners: xd “x” will be the duration. Eg: Shopping cart abandoners: 7d |
| List Members: | Visitors of a page who did not visit another page |
| Visited page: | URL contains cart |
| Unvisited page | URL contains thank_you |
| Membership Duration: | 7, 14, 90, 180 days * 30 day duration is already created by Google |
Past Buyers
Google will have already created a “Past buyers” audience with 30 day time window. We will create these additional audiences for 14, 90, 180, 365, and 520 day durations:
| Audience Name | Past buyers xd “x” will be the duration. Eg: Past buyers: 14d |
| List Members | Visitors of a page with specific tags |
| Tags | Purchase |
| Membership duration | 14, 90, 180, 365, 520 days |
Product Viewers
Google will have already created a “Product viewers” audience with a 30 day duration. We will create additional audiences with 14, 90, 180, 365, and 520 day durations.
| Audience Name: | Product viewers: xd “x” will be the duration. Eg: Product Viewers: 14d |
| List Members: | Visitors of a page who did not visit another page |
| Visited page: | URL contains product |
| Unvisited page | URL contains cart |
| Membership Duration: | 14, 90, 180, 365, 520 days * 30 day duration is already created by Google |
General Notes
- The Membership Durations are somewhat arbitrary. You can get more or less granular, and set your own intervals. It is however best to start with something simple and add granularity later on.
- A Remarketing Audience needs a minimum of 1,000 members to be eligible to serve. When creating your audience durations, consider how much time it will take to reach 1,000 memebers. eg: How long will it take before your site generates 1,000 abandoned carts, or 1,000 purchases? That will probably be the shortest duration with which you should start.
- You should generally add all these lists as “Observations” to all your campaigns.
Alex Czartoryski 