Every salesperson will tell you that knowing your customers is half of the job. If you look at their interests, their mannerism and their habits, you will be able to determine, with great accuracy, the best approach to make them want to buy something. This however becomes a little tricky if we are talking about an online store, since there is no face-to-face interaction with the customers. With that being said one must learn how to analyse and rely on the data gathered from their website in order to understand their customer or audience base better.
This might sound like a daunting task at first, but there are many tools and techniques that can help, chief of them being Google Analytics. By using Google Analytics one can not only find out who has visited their web store and what they bought (if anything), but also how long they spent “browsing”, which products they looked at, how long they spent looking at them and even if they placed a certain product in the online shopping cart, but decided not to buy it in the end.
Now, that last part is arguably the most important one, since customers who have arrived that close to ordering are the most likely ones to return and actually complete the purchase at a later date. To make sure that they DO return, one can employ tools like Google AdWords which will serve them promotional material about our services or product, which will in turn likely remind them of the potential good deal that they missed out on.
Types of Audiences to Consider for Remarketing
There are several different types of groups that customers can be separated by. These groups can overlap and are used to determine which customers are the most likely to buy from the website under certain conditions. Said groups should be given extra attention and marketing resources if we want to achieve the best return on investments.
Types of Customers by Abandonment
When talking about abandonment in this context, we mean the step of the purchasing process at which the person left the website. If we grade our audience by the step of abandonment, the most profitable would be those who left our website after adding the product or products into the shopping cart but before actually completing the purchase. These customers have the highest likelihood of returning at a later date and actually completing the purchase. On the other side of the spectrum are people who have left shortly after visiting the website. These people have most likely been redirected by mistake or are just “browsing” through our offers.
Types of Customers by Value
In this case we can categorise our audience in three different groups: the high-value audience, the average-value audience and the low-value audience. The high-value audience consists of customers who frequently buy products or services from our website totalling more than the amount of average purchase. These customers are most likely to continue shopping from us and are the most profitable to remarket to. As stated before, there can be overlapping cases like a high-value customer leaving the shopping process before finishing the purchase. It is extremely important to take note of these cases as they are the most worthwhile ones when it comes to a remarketing campaign.
Types of Customers by Frequency of Purchase
This category also has three different groups of customers which are: returning customers, new customers and prospects. Returning customers are people who have completed more than two purchases. They comprise the most profitable audience for our remarketing campaign as they are the most likely to complete more purchases. Similarly, customers who fall under the “prospects” category are those who have not completed any purchases before leaving the webstore. They comprise the least profitable audience for remarketing, since they are more likely to have been redirected by mistake or are just browsing similar sites for information rather than intent of purchase.
Creating an Audience using Google Analytics
Now that we have determined which audiences are the most profitable for a remarketing campaign, it’s time to input them into our Google Analytics and start the campaign. This can also be done with Google AdWords itself, but Analytics gathers more data and is therefore more reliable for making audiences. To do this we obviously need a Google Analytics account which has Edit permission turned on in the property in which we want to create an audience.
1. The first step is logging into our Google Analytics account.
2. Click on the “Admin” and find the property in which you want to create an audience.
3. In the “Property” column, find “Audience Definitions” and click on it.
4. Click on the “Audiences”.
5. Click on the “+ New Audience”.
6. The data from our current reporting view will be used for our new audience. This can be changed by clicking “Edit”, selecting a different view and clicking “Next Step”.
7. Next we have to define our audience. There are predefined options already available to choose from. Alternatively, we can create a new audience definition or import a preexisting data segment.
- To create a new audience, click on the “Create New”.
- After filling in the necessary parameters, click “Apply”.
- If there is an “Exclude” condition defined, an additional checkbox will appear which will be used to determine whether certain users should be removed permanently or temporarily.
- When choosing a membership duration, which is the length of time a user will remain on the audience list if the do not revisit the site, the default value will be set to 30 days. It is advised that this duration be changed according to the length of the relevance of the ad, as we do not want to show ads that are outdated to our audiences.
- Furthermore, for those wanting more customizability there are “Rules”, a set of additional conditions that need to be fulfilled in order for a user to be eligible for a remarketing campaign (e.g. visited a specific part of the website or got referred from…).
8. After this, we will be prompted to choose a name for the audience. After choosing a name, click “Next Step”.
9. Next we will have to choose Audience Destination. By clicking “+ Add Destination” we will be given possible destinations to choose from like: Google AdWords, AdWords Display, Google Optimize and Analytics. Take note that once the choice has been made and the audience saved the process will be irreversible.
10. Click “OK” and after that click “Publish” and the audience will be created and saved.
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