Well, that’s frustrating.
We have a client with whom we have been discussing RLSA – remarketing lists for search ads. For those who have not yet tried RLSA, we have found it very effective for some clients – being able to catch previous site visitors (people on our remarketing lists) if they initiate a new search on Google. Let’s face it – we know they are, on the one hand, still in the market and on the other, presumably, given the fact that time has passed since their first visit, they are also more motivated to complete their conversion (purchase, sign up, contact request) than they were the first time around.
So we like RLSA.
We also listen to the recommendations from Google.
For some time now they have been encouraging us to move our clients from the old classic remarketing to the new Universal Analytics. In semantic terms, Classic is good – but Universal must be better, right?
Well, maybe not quite…
One of the big advantages of UA is that you can build your remarketing lists directly within GA and then import them back into Adwords. Use the power of segmentation that GA offers and then in a single click turn that segment into a remarketing list. we have used this function and it does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s powerful – and a great time saver.
But back to RLSA.
Before you can launch an RLSA campaign, your remarketing list must have 1,000 visitors. Depending upon the volume of traffic this can take a little time. With our client it took a while – but we recently tipped the 1,000 visitor mark. So why is the list still not available for RLSA and display advertising?
The answer…. remarketing lists generated in Google Analytics are not compatible with RLSA. Just go back and read that sentence again…..
So any lists that you have developed using your Google Analytics tag cannot be used for RLSA campaigns. Instead we now have to implement an adWords remarketing tag and wait again until 1,000 more visitors pass through the site.
