A New Kind of Marketing Battery: Google's New Smart Lists

Marketing Batteries: These are powerful online devices that can actually store attention. Marketing batteries get charged up on the attention that you pay for by running ads, by investing in SEO, by doing press releases, by blogging, by creating webinars.
All you have to do is tap into them after they are charged.
Customer Batteries contain the energy of those who bought from you.
Subscriber Batteries contain then energy of those who have subscribed to your lists.
Then there are Social Batteries, that store the energy of those who have like, followed, connected, plussed or pinned you. These batteries are easy to charge, but hard to get a current out of.
There has always been a gap between reliable Subscriber Batteries and skittish Social Batteries. Until now.
You can now build and charge a Visitor Battery. This is done using a technique called “Remarketing” or “Retargeting.”

Google defines remarketing as “a feature that lets you reach people who have previously visited your site, and show them relevant ads across the web or when they search on Google.”

Google defines remarketing as “a feature that lets you reach people who have previously visited your site, and show them relevant ads across the web or when they search on Google.”
Google (and other ad networks) can keep track of those who have visited your site, but didn’t buy, subscribe, or like you. When a visitor comes to your site, a cookie is set in their browser. Then Google keeps a list of these visitors, and watches for that cookie when someone comes to another site. When Google sees that a person has been to your site, they can run one of your ads.
It works, and retargeted ads perform quite well compared to regular text and banner ads.
Not everyone who comes to your site is qualified to buy your product or service. Some came there on accident. Others were looking for something else.
Google smart lists seeks to identify those visitors who are more likely to be actually interested in your product.
Last week, the tech savvy site announced the launch of a new type of remarketing list in Google Analytics called Smart Lists.  Simply stated, Smart Lists predict which users are most likely to convert during a later visit.

These are built using machine learning across websites that have opted to share conversion data, and make use of a plethora of signals, including:

    
• visit duration

    

• page depth

    

• location

    

• device

    

• referrer

    

• browser

Based on their on-site actions, Analytics is able to regulate your remarketing campaigns to align with each user’s value, according to the specific company.  Now when creating a new remarketing list, you’ll have the option to have Analytics manage your list for you – automatically.
According to Google, “for best results, make sure your Google Analytics goals and transactions are being imported into AdWords, then combine your Smart List with Conversion Optimizer

Remarketing Newbies

Smart List is a great way to get started with solid performance results.  As you get comfortable with remarketing, you can modify your ads and apply a variety of remarketing best practices.

Remarketing Connoisseurs

You are most likely employing a sophisticated list strategy already. Google is aware of this and  gearing up to extend this signal directly for your current lists as an optimization signal used in AdWords bidding.
According to Google, they will be continuing to iterate on these models in order to help users better understand and act on their data. They are also working on surfacing these signals elsewhere in your reports and in the product so you can dive into what factors help predict whether a user will likely convert.
We have a new kind of Marketing Battery: The Visitor Battery. Simplify the decision making process of creating remarketing lists with “Smart Lists with Google Analytics”. For more information on Remarketing with Google Analytics, visit here.