Boosting sales online and improving conversion rates into your sales funnel through well-planned, paid digital marketing campaigns is an absolute must in the increasingly competitive online retail space.
But how do you reach the right people – those who have visited your site before but haven’t yet converted into paying customers?
With machine learning already helping digital marketers continuously tweak and improve campaigns, there are a number of tools that can be added into the mix to drive even better results.
One of these facilities is Smart Lists – Remarketing Audience lists created via Analytics to help refine, target and convert specific audiences to maximize digital marketing efficacy.
How Smart Lists work
Based on your Google Analytics data relating specifically to conversions (from visitor to paying customer), machine learning algorithms use a number of markers including location, device, browser, traffic source, page depth and more to profile users most likely to complete the sales funnel journey.
Analytics is then able to generate a Smart List from this data to give you a highly-refined target audience of people who fit the correct profile – those who’ve visited your site before but not converted through the sales funnel – to whom you can direct digital marketing campaigns.
How Smart Lists are created
How you would be able to generate a Smart List is based on the amount of traffic your site gets and how many online purchase transactions are made monthly.
If your site has 10 000 or more daily page views and 500 or more monthly ecommerce transactions, your Smart List will be based on digital markers (in your Analytics) related specifically to your audience data.
If your site does less traffic than this, and fewer transactions, then your Smart List will be created based on data gathered for businesses similar to yours.
Who should consider using Smart Lists?
There are numerous people for whom Smart Lists can be really useful, including:
- Digital Marketers who are looking for innovative ways to access refined audiences to remarket to
- Digital Marketers who may be short on time and looking for a quick turnaround and improved conversion rate in digital marketing campaigns
- Those who are new to digital marketing and remarketing, and are looking for simple ways to get going
Where do you start?
- Go to your Admin panel in your Google Analytics account and scroll down on the Property column to ‘Remarketing’, and click on Audiences.
- Click on ‘New Audience’
- Select your website view and AdWords account
- You’ll see Smart List at the top of the recommended audiences
- Select your membership and name it
- The next time you’re in Adwords setting up digital campaign, you should see your Smart List there as an option for your audience to remarket to
Where can you place ads using your Google Smart List?
Currently you can only create campaigns on the Google Display Network, but given that the reach is massive – around 2 million websites reaching over 90% of internet users worldwide – you should achieve excellent results!