Google Analytics Gets Smart Lists

Episode Highlights

New Remarketing Audience
Machine learning applied to your GA data analyzing dozens of signals which are indicative of higher conversion probabilities. Devices, referrer, session duration, etc.

Requirements:

10k pageviews plus 500 transactions: Your smart list is based on your data
Less than that: Your smart list is based on similar business data
What to do with your list: Add it to Google Ads!

Transcript

Rick: Good afternoon and welcome to the Learn Digital Advertising Daily Newscast. Today’s loosely organized news is brought to you by LearnDigitalAdvertising.com, the greatest place to learn digital advertising.

Juan: Yes it is and we have our special sponsor today. The Sky-

Rick: The Sky.

Juan: Is sponsoring us.

Rick: That’s right. Keeping us sunny and dark at different times of day. Take care of The Sky.

Juan: All right. So, we’ve got a nice setup of news articles here for ya and we’re starting off with Google Analytics and they’re introducing Smart Lists. This is really interesting. I think Rick you got a little bit more-

Rick: Yeah. So, Smart List is a new feature in Google Analytics that is basically Google’s attempt to analyze all your traffic and help to highlight segments that are more likely to convert. So, they use machine learning to look at things such as time on site and number of pages viewed and device and refer and those sorts of things to basically create these smart audiences, which on the surface actually seem a lot smarter than their previous effort at smart goals. So, this is interesting. For those of us who do manage Google Ads pretty heavily, you’re probably used to creating segments, maybe a segment for users who spend twice as much as the average user or users who visit the site for twice as long and you may hook a lot of these segments then into your Google Ads to try to bid differently and this is sort of Google’s attempt to try to get a little bit deeper with that and make that less of a manual process and have their own smart audiences. Now with this, the devil’s in the details, what are the details Juan on this?

Juan: We’ve got some requirements here. You need at least 10,000 page views per month and 500 eCommerce transactions per month. So, the Smart List is going to be based on those two factors there and also based on similar data from other businesses.

Rick: So yeah, if you’re under that threshold, basically Google’s going to look at similar businesses and use that data to help you with your Smart List. So, I think what that actually means is, “Hey, we got this great feature. It’s not really quite ready yet. If you’re super high volume, you can use it. Everyone else, we’re going to tell you this is a Smart List, but the data is going to be a lot looser.” So, I think if you’re super high volume, I think you got something good to start with. For the rest of us, we’ll just have to wait till the product gets better, but that’s it for that.