Building Audience Strategies: Custom, Suggested, and Template Options

So that's the distinction. Now let's talk about how to build new audience options. Right, so as we understand, you can create a custom audience from scratch, you can use a recommended audience, or you can use a template.

So let's look at those options. Go to your admin. In this case, we're going to look at Data Display and click on Audiences.

And we come to the page where we can click on New Audience and now set up a new audience. So we will go to the Custom Audience last. Of course, it's the more complex option.

But we see here that we have Suggested Audiences. Create audiences quickly with pre-built audience suggestions. So they are suggesting seven days, the top suggestion, for seven-day inactive users.

Users who were once active but have not been active for the last seven days. Right, or other options include regionally active users, users who have been active in a recent period. Generate leads, users that are potential business leads, users that are new leads.

Right, so these are suggested audiences I can just click on, and then I'll just have to determine how many days I want people to stay in that audience and, you know, determine that and maybe fine-tune it a little bit. But these are the suggested audiences that have already been pre-built. Here are the cart abandoners, right, users who add items to the cart without purchasing.

So, for e-commerce activity, there are a lot of pre-built audiences, suggested audiences that you can pick. Non-purchasers, users who have visited your website and have not made a purchase, you know, maybe you can offer them a special promotion. Item viewers, users that have viewed a specific product, you know, they came to your website, they looked at men's sneakers, but they didn't purchase anything.

So now you can create an audience and maybe send them, you know, an ad or something like that. Predictive audiences, okay, so anywhere on Google Analytics where you see this magic one, this means that this is some degree of AI integration, and you're seeing more and more of this on all marketing platforms, including Google Analytics. And in this case, it's predicting based upon statistical analysis, users who will likely be seven-day purchases, likely make a purchase in the next seven days, or predicted 28-day top spenders, users who are predicted to generate the most revenue in the next 28 days.

And it's based on their recent behavior on other sites, on your site, and it creates these predictive audiences that you can use and, you know, as I mentioned before, with some limited customization. Now, in this case, it's telling me I'm not eligible. With this account, that might be the case when you first start, you know, marketing, because a lot of times it depends on a certain level of volume before it can do this type of analysis.

But if it were available, I would be able to pick that. Okay, so that's the suggested audience. And then the final category is audience templates.

Essentially, you are taking, let me just back up one moment, so you have different categories, demographics, technology, and acquisition, and you can click on any of these categories, and then you customize the template, right? So you might want to, you've done some analysis of your audience, we're going to be talking about reports a little later, but you might know from your reports of who's already visiting your website, maybe you are a skincare brand, and your key audience is 18 to 34-year-old women. So I can go here, condition is one of, and then say 18 to 24, and 25 to 34, right? Apply gender, contains female, apply filter for language code, English, whatever the case may be, and then that is an audience that I can use to reach those particular types of consumers. All right, I just want to switch this account again, just give me one moment.

All right, so let us do that again, create a new audience, and in demographics, right, so in his case, gender, unknown male, female, it should come down as a dropdown, the language, you know, English, US, English, you know, so those are other considerations, interests, and this could be in addition to the age, I might say, women who are shopping, shopping enthusiasts, right, and then following the country that they come from as well. So these are all ways that you can customize that template around demographic or audience based upon demographic criteria. Then there is technology, right, so again, what platform that they are on, web, the OS version, you know, if this is relevant to you, device category, desktop, right, so the brand even, you know, and even the brand model, so you get very specific as to the technology that people are using that might be useful if you are, you know, marketing an app that is only working on certain platforms or, you know, certain OS versions or certain models of the phone, right, and then finally there is acquisition template.

All right, so we're going to get into what was meant by first user, first user medium, so I won't get into detail at this point. When we discuss reports, we'll break that down a little bit more, but you can create filters around where people came from, like where they came from, Facebook, Google, direct, meaning that they directly typed in the, you know, URL address into the browser in the various referral sites and such, so you might say, hey, I want audience of everyone who came through organic search, right, so this is what is meant by acquisitions. You can modify where the traffic came from, where the traffic was acquired from, the source of the traffic, the medium, meaning how they got there, they got there through an ad or they got there through organic or they got there through a referral site, so we'll go break that down a little bit more, but the main point here is that you can create a report based upon acquisition, all right, and then finally the other option is to create a custom audience.

I won't go into great detail with this, but you can include users when any number of conditions are met, so you have, you can do it on the basis of demographics, right, I only want women between 18 and 34, but in addition to that, I want those who have purchased a particular item, the item ID or item name, or I want only those who come from a particular country, or they visited a particular screen, you know, page on a website before they made a purchase, so forth and so on, and source, we talked about traffic source, so where they came from, you know, a returning user versus a new user, so use all different dimensions that can be specified as you build a custom audience, right, but again, there are three options, one would be creating a custom audience as we've just seen, the other is using a recommended audience, and last, using a template where you can identify, you know, create audience on the basis of demographic aspects, technology, or acquisition as we saw, right, right, we discussed creating custom audiences, click on audience, new audience, create a custom audience, and then as you add conditions, you can add an add condition or an or condition to add or exclude certain, you know, types of certain audience characteristics from your audience. Okay, so that leads us to once you've created this audience, whether it's a custom audience, whether it's a template that you've modified or a suggested audience, you now have an audience, and you can use this audience to enhance the effectiveness of linked Google Ads campaigns by retargeting people who have previously engaged with your site by adding the audience to the Google campaign, and you could do this on the basis of remarketing audiences, such as people who visited your site, you want to remarket to those folks, purchases, people who have purchased from your website, you want to remarket to those individuals, collected leads, people who have already given a lead on your website, you want to market to them, empty cart, you know, people who are, you know, who have not a non-empty cart, right, or people who have physically completed a specific action on your site that might have made a custom audience of everyone who viewed a video on your site. So those are all examples of potential remarketing audiences.

So how do you, so how do we do this? You go to the Google Analytics page, right, right, so you would, again, have a Google Analytics account, be running campaigns, and if so, you would go to tools, kind of hide this, so just pay close attention, tools, click on shared library, and then audience manager, and now you will see the various audiences that are associated with this account, right, now I've already been added and being used in ad campaigns. Now if I want to include a new audience, I can create audience, so basically once I've created, let me explain this a little better, once I've created an audience on Google Analytics, it will show up here, and I would just simply say I want to include this audience, and then what campaign I want to add that audience to. So it says I clicked on this, then it says add to, and I can either add it to a campaign or to an ad group.

If I click on campaigns or list my campaigns, I would simply click that campaign, and then that audience will be added to that campaign. Similarly, I can add it to an ad group, just as a quick overview, on Google Ads, you have a marketing campaign, and within each marketing campaign, you can have multiple ad groups with targeting different audiences, using different keywords, using different sets of ads, so you can do it on a campaign level, or you can do it on an ad group level, add your audience to it. It's as simple as that, but the first step is to create it first on Google Analytics, as we would create audiences.

Okay, this concludes section six of audiences, but if you want to, as an exercise, you can create an audience for your website or the Google demo account, which we are going to be exploring in a little bit, the Google Merch Store demo account, and base it on a business as a scenario of your choice, you know, you want to remarket customers who have visited your website, or made a purchase on your website, or people who have come to your website and not made a purchase, and just write a short explanation of how you would use this audience in your marketing campaigns.