Remarketing campaigns show advertisements to people who visited your online store but are now on other websites. Bloomreach Engagement allows you to create marketing automation scenarios that reach out to these customers and present personalized messages to them.

This guide will help you create a remarketing scenario that creates a remarketing audience from your website's customer list and uploads their details to Google Ads.

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Warning

Google Analytics link is an experimental feature with some limitations to consider. The data imports feature in Google Analytics integration only allows the creation of audiences for customers who visited the website in the last 30 days AND have consented to ads & retargeting. Furthermore, our tests have shown that many clients lose a significant portion of cookies during the matching process. We have contacted Google regarding this issue but could not pinpoint the exact root cause.

Until this is resolved, we recommend using the native Google Ads integration for creating Customer Match audiences in Google Ads. It is newer and more reliable, providing some new possibilities, such as targeting the Display network, User ID audiences, integration with DV360, etc. Google has also recommended using this approach instead of data imports.

There are two possible ways of integrating Bloomreach Engagement with Google Ads audiences:

1. Connect your Google Ads account with Bloomreach Engagement and use Google’s Customer Match feature to create custom audiences based on the customer’s email address or mobile ID if you want to retarget your mobile application users. Note: Using this option, you can only target customers through Search, Gmail, and YouTube.

2. Connect your Google Analytics account with Bloomreach Engagement and create a Google Analytics audience based on the Google Analytics cookie. Then import this Google Analytics audience to Google Ads. Note that this is an experimental feature that is still under development. However, it allows you to target customers through the Google Display Network, which is not possible through Google Ads Customer Match integration.

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This article will explain how to create a Google Analytics audience and use that for retargeting. To learn how to achieve this through Google Ads Customer Match instead, click here.

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Tips & Tricks

Refer to our documentation to learn more about:

• Why you should run ads with Bloomreach Engagement
• How you can combine Ad Audiences with AI Predictions
• Relevant Use Cases for your business
• Best Practices for Ad Audience Management

Retargeting through Google Analytics

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Requirements for this implementation

• Edit rights for your Google Analytics account
• Edit rights for your Google Ads account
• Publish access to Google Tag Manager container
• Google Analytics property linked to Google Ads account
• Your website uses the latest Google Analytics tracking library. The legacy ga.js library is currently not supported by Bloomreach Engagement SDK

Step 1: Integrate your Google Ads, and Google Analytics accounts with your Bloomreach Engagement project

Go to integrations and connect your Bloomreach Engagement project to your Google Ads account.

Then do the same with your Google Analytics account.

In case you encounter an error "This app is blocked" or similar, please contact our Support. Note that Google requires your Bloomreach Engagement instance to get verified by Google prior to integrating since Bloomreach Engagement processes sensitive customer data. Our Support will engage in the verification process once contacted.

Step 2: Set up and check Google Analytics cookie tracking in Bloomreach Engagement.

Step 3: Create two custom dimensions in Google Analytics that will be used to store the data needed to create custom audience segments.

• “Client ID tracked online” dimension, User Scope - this will be used to store information about Client ID for a particular customer in Google Analytics. This is needed because Google Analytics can create audiences based only on User ID or other parameters such as custom dimensions, but not based on a Client ID.

• “Custom User Dimension: Attribute 1” dimension, User Scope - this will be used to store the name of the audience segment for retargeting.

Step 4: Set up the tracking of Client ID into the newly created Google Analytics custom dimension

function() {
  try {
    var trackers = ga.getAll();
    var i, len;
    for (i = 0, len = trackers.length; i < len; i += 1) {
      if (trackers[i].get('trackingId') === {{GA Property tracking ID}}) {
        return trackers[i].get('clientId');
      }
    }
  } catch(e) {}  
  return 'false';
}

Step 5: Configure import data set in Google Analytics

In this step, the data structure will be set up in which Bloomreach Engagement will be sending data to Google Analytics.

Step 6: Configure the Retargeting node in Bloomreach Engagement scenario builder

Step 7: Create a custom audience in Google Analytics and link this audience to Google Ads Account

Step 8: Create scenario logic in Bloomreach Engagement and launch the scenario.

You can create any simple or advanced scenario logic to be used for triggering the retargeting node. You may find a simple example below, which imports all customers with email addresses into the Google Ads audience.

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Remember that sending customers’ private information from Bloomreach Engagement to advertising platforms is not something your customers might expect, so make sure to do this only after considering and implementing all the necessary legal and regulatory requirements.

Wait a few days and monitor the audience size in Google Analytics Property settings (Audiences). Depending on your website traffic, it might take 1-3 weeks to populate your Analytics audience based on Bloomreach Engagement data.

Step 9: Configure and launch the campaign in Ads to use your custom audience created by Bloomreach Engagement.