Whenever you see the same ad for a shopping site you just visited pop up across the web, chances are that’s not a coincidence but a remarketing effort by that site. These sites often offer users who abandon their shopping carts, for example, a discount to lure them back. The only way to get a hold of them once they have left the site, however, is to target ads to them on other properties around the web. Starting today, setting up these remarketing campaigns is going to get a bit easier for advertisers who use Google Analytics. Google just announced that it is bringing its Google Analytics and Google Display Network closer together to give advertisers an easier to use option to remarket to very specific audiences who have previously visited their websites. This new service, says Google, simplifies the remarketing process and gives its advertisers more flexibility and “new ways to connect with [their] target audience.”
Until now, website owners had to use at least two different tags on their sites to enable remarketing and weren’t able to use the same detailed stats that Google Analytics offers to segment their audiences. Now, with its new Remarketing for Google Analytics feature, Google is making this service significantly easier for advertisers, which will likely mean that you will also soon see significantly more retargeted ads as you browse the web.
By combining data from Analytics with their remarketing campaigns, advertisers will also be able to very easily fine-tune their efforts by crafting very specific messages for users who, for example, are regular visitors to their site or who browsed a certain sub-set of pages. Besides tracking them across their own sites, advertisers can also use criteria like their users’ visit duration, the browser and operating system they used and their location (down to the city they live in) to try to re-engage them. These last options weren’t previously available to advertisers on Google’s Display Network.
Advertisers love remarketing, but this isn’t exactly a feature that users necessarily feel comfortable with. Thankfully, Google now makes it relatively easy to opt out of these efforts through its recently introduced “Mute This Ad” feature, as well as the Ads Preferences Manager, and the Google Analytics Opt-out.