How to Retarget People on Google Analytics

Almost every website visitor leaves without making a purchase, signing up, or filling out a form. Bringing those users back is one of the most effective ways to boost your conversions, and retargeting is how you do it. This guide will walk you through setting up powerful retargeting audiences in Google Analytics and activating them in your Google Ads campaigns to re-engage your most valuable prospects.

Understanding Retargeting in Google Analytics

Retargeting, which Google calls "remarketing," is the practice of showing targeted ads to people who have already visited your website or app. Instead of advertising to a cold audience that has never heard of you, you're re-engaging "warm" traffic that has already shown interest in what you offer.

Think about the last time you browsed a product online, left the site, and then began seeing ads for that exact product on other websites and social media platforms. That's retargeting in action.

Why is it so effective?

• It works with warm leads: These users already know your brand. They are leaps and bounds closer to purchasing than someone who has never heard of you.
• It boosts conversion rates: It often takes multiple "touchpoints" before a customer is ready to buy. Retargeting keeps your brand top-of-mind and gives users a simple path back to your site when they are ready.
• It generates higher ROI: Because you're targeting a highly relevant audience, your ad spend is more efficient. You're not wasting money showing ads to people who have zero interest in your products or services.

Google Analytics is the perfect hub for this activity. It collects detailed behavioral data about your site visitors, allowing you to build highly specific audiences based on actions they took - or didn't take - on your site.

Getting Started: Connecting Google Analytics and Google Ads

Before you can build any audiences, your Google Analytics property and Google Ads account must be linked. This is what allows GA4 to share its audience lists directly with Google Ads so you can use them for campaign targeting. You must have Administrator-level access to both accounts to do this.

Step 1: Link Your Accounts

First, you need to tell Analytics and Ads that they can talk to each other. You can start the process from either platform, but we'll begin in Google Analytics.

1. Navigate to the Admin section of your GA4 property by clicking the gear icon in the bottom-left corner.
2. Under the Property column, look for Product Links and select Google Ads Links.
3. Click the blue Link button in the top right.
4. Click Choose Google Ads accounts and select the Ads account you want to link. Click Confirm.
5. On the next screen, leave "Enable Personalized Advertising" toggled on. This is the setting that allows your GA4 audiences to be used for retargeting.
6. Review the settings and click Submit. Your accounts are now linked.

Step 2: Enable Google Signals

For your retargeting audiences to be as effective as possible, you need to enable Google Signals. This is a crucial feature that collects anonymized data from users who have turned on Ads Personalization in their Google accounts. It allows for cross-device tracking, meaning you can show retargeting ads to someone on their phone even if they originally visited your site on their desktop.

• In the GA4 Admin panel, navigate to Data Settings > Data Collection.
• Find the section for Google signals data collection and click the Get started button if it's not already active.
• Follow the prompts to activate it. You'll need to acknowledge the user data policies as well.

Building Your Retargeting Audiences in Google Analytics 4

With your accounts linked and Signals enabled, you're ready to start building audiences. An "audience" is simply a group of users you define based on specific behaviors, demographics, or events. Here are some of the most effective audiences you can build for retargeting.

To start, go to Admin > Property > Audiences and then click New audience.

1. The "All Visitors" Audience: Your Foundation

This is the broadest retargeting audience and the easiest to create. It groups together every user who has visited your site within a specified time frame. It’s perfect for general brand awareness campaigns designed to keep you top-of-mind.

• Under the Start from scratch section of the audience builder, click Create a custom audience.
• Give your audience a descriptive name, like "All Visitors - Last 30 Days."
• Under Include users when, add a condition that will include everyone. The simplest is searching for the event session_start which every user triggers when they begin a session.
• On the right side, you'll see a panel for Membership duration. This determines how long a user stays in this audience after they last visited. A 30-day window is a common starting point.
• Click Save.

2. The "Engaged Users" Audience

Not all website visitors are equal. Some people bounce after three seconds, while others browse multiple pages, watch videos, and spend minutes on your site. This latter group is far more valuable. You can create an audience of these "engaged" users to target them with more specific offers.

• Create another custom audience and name it something like "Engaged Users - Viewed 3+ Pages".
• Add this condition: Include users when the session_start event count is > 2. This automatically targets users with three or more sessions.
• Alternatively, you could target users based on time. Use the condition user_engagement and filter by the parameter engagement_time_msec with a value greater than a threshold you set (e.g., > 120000 for users who were engaged for more than 2 minutes).
• Set your membership duration and save.

3. The "Product Viewers" Audience

This is for users who have shown interest in a specific product or service but haven't taken the next step. It’s a classic mid-funnel audience with strong commercial intent. By retargeting them, you can remind them of the item they viewed and nudge them toward their cart.

• Start a new custom audience. Name it based on the product category, for example, "Viewed Running Shoes".
• Configure the condition: Include users when the event named view_item occurs.
• To narrow this down to a specific category, add a parameter. Click Add parameter and look for item_category. Set its value to the category you want to target (e.g., "Running Shoes"). This requires that you have e-commerce event tracking set up correctly.
• If you don't use e-commerce tracking, you can use the URL instead. Create a condition based on the page_view event where the parameter page_location contains a unique part of that product category's URL (like /running-shoes/).
• Save the audience.

4. The "Cart Abandoners" Audience

This is one of the most profitable retargeting audiences you can create. These are users who were just one step away from buying. They added a product to their cart but left before completing the purchase. Bringing them back often just requires a small reminder, a sense of urgency, or perhaps a special offer.

• Create a new audience called "Cart Abandoners - 7 Days". A shorter membership duration like 7 or 14 days is effective here, as you want to catch them while the purchase is still fresh in their mind.
• For the Include users when condition, select the event add_to_cart or begin_checkout.
• This next part is crucial: You must also exclude anyone who completed the purchase. Click Add group to exclude and set a condition to temporarily exclude users who have triggered the purchase event.
• Save the audience.

Using Your GA4 Audiences in Google Ads Campaigns

After you create an audience in Google Analytics, it can take 24-48 hours for it to become available and populated with users in your Google Ads account. Once it's ready, you can find it by going to Tools & Settings > Shared Library > Audience manager.

Here’s how to apply it to a retargeting campaign (typically a Display or a Performance Max campaign):

1. In Google Ads, select the campaign or ad group where you want to apply your new audience.
2. Navigate to the Audiences tab on the left-hand menu.
3. Click Edit audience segments (or Add Audience Segments).
4. You'll likely want the Targeting option, which ensures your ads are only shown to people in your selected audience.
5. Click Browse, then navigate to Your data segments (or "How they have interacted with your business") > Website visitors. Here, you'll see the audiences you created in Google Analytics.
6. Select the audience you want to target (e.g., "Cart Abandoners - 7 Days").
7. Click Save.

Your ad group is now configured to show ads exclusively to that specific group of users from your website.

Best Practices for Effective Retargeting

Building audiences is only half the battle. To run a successful campaign, keep these principles in mind:

Create Exclusion Lists

Just as important as who you target is who you exclude. You don't want to waste money showing ads for a jacket to someone who just bought that exact jacket. Create an audience in GA4 for "Recent Purchasers" (based on the purchase event) and add it as an exclusion at the campaign or ad group level in Google Ads.

Set Frequency Caps

Nobody likes being followed around the internet by the same ad over and over again. This can lead to banner blindness or even negative brand sentiment. Within your Google Ads campaign settings, set a frequency cap to limit how many times a single person can see your ads per day or week. A cap of 3-5 impressions per day is a good starting point.

Tailor Your Ad Creative to the Audience

Don’t show a generic brand ad to your high-intent "Cart Abandoners" audience. For this group, your ad creative should be specific. Remind them what they left behind, perhaps with an image of the product. Consider offering a small discount ("Come back and get 10% off!") to seal the deal. For a broader audience like "All Visitors," a general brand awareness message is more appropriate.

Test Membership Durations

The "right" membership duration depends on your sales cycle. For inexpensive consumer goods with short decision-making timelines, a 7 or 14-day retargeting window is often best. For high-ticket B2B services with a longer sales cycle, you might want to retarget users for 90 days or more. Don't be afraid to create two versions of the same audience (e.g., "Engaged Visitors - 30 Days" and "Engaged Visitors - 90 Days") to see which performs better.

Final Thoughts

Using Google Analytics to retarget website visitors is a fundamental marketing strategy that turns passive data collection into proactive, revenue-generating action. By building segmented audiences based on user behavior, you can deliver highly relevant ads that re-engage valuable prospects and significantly improve the return on your ad spend.

Manually connecting dots between Google Analytics behaviors, Google Ads campaign performance, and Shopify sales data can quickly become a time-consuming grind. At Graphed, we created a way to connect all your marketing and sales data so you get a complete view instantly. Imagine asking, "What's the ROI from our cart abandoner retargeting campaign?" in plain English and getting a real-time dashboard in seconds. We automate the busy work of reporting, freeing you up to focus on strategy and growth.