I would suggest you read this article first (if you have not already) to get the most out of the current article. I won’t be explaining the very basics of dynamic remarketing in the present article.
The whole process of setting up dynamic remarketing is quite complicated. It is probably the second most difficult tracking implementation in GA. The number one is, of course, enhanced ecommerce tracking set up.
There is no one switch available which I can show you, that you can just turn on, and boom dynamic remarketing is all set up and ready to go.
In order to make this whole process of setting up dynamic remarketing easier to understand, I have broken down the implementation process into the following 15 stages:
You can retarget the people: who abandoned the checkout, who abandoned the basket and/or who abandoned any other shopping activity. You can also retarget audiences for other important events based on your website objectives (non-ecommerce events such as lead form submitted or sign up) or any conversion events for your website.
You can retarget repeat customers, new customers or prospects. Among repeat customers, you can individually re-target high value and low-value repeat customers. Likewise among new customers, you can individually re-target high value and low-value new customers.
Identifying a remarketing audience is important as dynamic remarketing setup varies from audience to audience.
So, before you set up dynamic remarketing (which is basically a dynamic version of remarketing), you need to clearly define your most important remarketing audiences.
Users who abandoned the checkout will always be one of your most important remarketing audience because of their highest propensity of making a purchase in subsequent sessions (if correctly remarketed)
#2 Identify your industry vertical and industry attributes
Identify the industry vertical (like travel, finance, education, etc) that best describe the products/services you offer. Identifying industry vertical is important as dynamic remarketing setup varies from industry to industry.
Available industry verticals are as below.
Retail vertical – retail refers to the activity of selling goods or services directly to consumers or end-users.
Education vertical – education refers to the institutions which facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, morals, beliefs, and habits. Educational methods include teaching, training, storytelling, discussion and directed research.
Flights vertical – all website which facilities online flight booking services
Hotels and rentals vertical – hotel booking websites.
Jobs vertical – job listing websites.
Local vertical – websites which provide local services.
Real estate vertical – websites which provide services related to real estate e.g. sale or rental of properties.
Travel vertical – websites which provide travel-related services.
Custom vertical – if your website doesn’t come under any of the verticals mentioned above, you can create your own custom vertical.
Once you have identified your industry vertical, you then need to identify your industry attributes.
For example, if you work in the retail industry then the attributes for your industry (in the context of Dynamic Remarketing) would be product ID, product category page, product detail page, product price, etc.
Similarly, if you work in the Real estate industry then the attributes for your industry (in the context of Dynamic Remarketing) would be listing ID, listing page type, etc.
To get the list of required and optional attributes for your industry vertical follow the steps below:
Step-1: Visit this page: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3455600?hl=en
Step-2: Scroll down and click on the relevant drop-down menu in the section ‘Add Attributes for your Vertical’:
Here, ecomm_prodid, ecomm_pagetype and ecomm_totalvalue are attributes of the products viewed on your ecommerce website.
ecomm_prodid – represents product id. You can send more than one product ID to Google Analytics.
ecomm_pagetype – represents type of page visited by a user: home page, search result page, product category page, product detail page, shopping cart page, checkout page etc
ecomm_totalvalue – represents value of the viewed product(s).
The list of verticals and the list of attributes listed in the Google documentation are just examples.
You can implement dynamic remarketing for any type of business or industry vertical, whether or not the industry vertical is listed in the Google documentation. Likewise, you can use attributes for your industry vertical in addition to the one listed in the Google documentation.
In fact, there are two categories of remarketing attributes:
#1 Standard remarketing attributes like ecomm_prodid, ecomm_pagetype and ecomm_totalvalue
#2 Non-Standard remarketing attributes which are additional attributes you want to pass to Google Analytics like: loggedIn_users, members, nonMembers, highValue_customers etc.
The number and type of attributes that you use will depend upon your re-marketing audience and website navigation structure.
Note: I have written this article under the assumption that your industry is retail. I picked up this industry as it is one of the most common industry vertical. But my article is equally valid for any other industry.
#3 Identify all the data points for dynamic remarketing
Identify all the web pages and web page elements to which you are going to add the data layer code for dynamic remarketing.
The web pages for dynamic remarketing could be:
Product detail pages
Shopping cart page
Checkout page
Funnel step pages
Note: home page, product category pages and search result pages are not a good candidate for dynamic remarketing as you can’t do precise retargeting with dynamic remarketing ads.
The web page elements for dynamic remarketing could be:
Add to cart button
Checkout button
Remove from cart button
Calculate shipping button
Apply coupon code button
Proceed to next checkout step buttons
Identifying all the web pages and web page elements in advance for dynamic remarketing will help you in understanding the scope of the work.
#4 Enable Remarketing in Google Analytics
To enable remarketing and advertising reporting features in Google Analytics you need to include Demographics and Interest Reports, remarketing with Google Analytics, and also carry out the steps below:
Step-1: Login to your Google Tag Manager account and click on the ‘Variables Tab’
Step-2: Under ‘User-defined variables’ select your Google Analytics settings variable.
Step-3: Click on the pencil icon to edit the variable configuration.
Step-4: Click on ‘More settings’.
A list will populate with additional settings.
Step-5: Now Click on ‘Advertising’.
Step-6: Select the checkbox named ‘Enable Display Advertising Features’.
Step-7: Click on ‘Save’.
Step-8: Now navigate to the ‘Tags’ tab in GTM and select the tag which uses the settings variable to deploy Google Analytics tracking code on your website.
Step-9: Now click on the ‘Enable overriding settings in this tag’ checkbox and then click on ‘More settings’.
Step-10: Click on ‘Advertising’.
Step-11: Select ‘Inherit from settings variable’.
And then click on ‘Save’ to save the configuration.
Alternatively, if you have done a lot of customization in your Google Analytics Tracking code like me and you use a custom HTML tag to deploy Google Analytics tracking code on your website then you need to add the following line of code to your Google Analytics tracking code:
Linking your Google Analytics account to your Google Ads account is pretty straightforward. Follow the below steps to start the linking.
Step-1: Sign in to your Google Analytics property and click on ‘Admin’.
Step-2: Under the ‘Property’ column, click on ‘Google Ads Linking’.
Step-3: Click on ‘+New Link Group’.
Step-4: It will automatically fetch your Google Ads account (with the same Google ID). Select the account and click on ‘Continue’.
Step-5: Now under ‘Linking configuration’, provide a name in the input box ‘Link group title’ and then switch the toggle button to ‘On’ for all web site data and then click on ‘Link Accounts’.
Congratulations! Your accounts are now linked.
It is important that you link the two accounts so that later you can use dynamic remarketing audiences of Google Analytics in Google Ads.
Google uses a product data feed from your Merchant account to create dynamic remarketing ads. So it is critical that you have got a Google Merchant Center account with a live product data feed.
Product data feed is a text or XML file which stores all of the information about your products.
Without Google Merchant Center account and live product data feed, you can’t set up and run dynamic remarketing.
Following steps are involved in publishing a product data feed:
Link your Google Merchant Center Account to your Google Ads account. More details about such integration can be found here: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6159060?hl=en
This integration is required so that Google Ads can use the product data feed from the Merchant account to create dynamic ads.
#9 Push attributes of viewed products into the data layer
In dynamic remarketing, we retarget users with ads of the product(s) they viewed on your website.
Now in order to accomplish this task, we need to capture attributes (like product ID, product price) of viewed products from your website.
There are two ways of capturing viewed products’ attributes:
#1 Push the attributes of viewed products into data layer
#2 Use Google Tag Manager to capture the attributes via custom JavaScript variables.
Using custom JavaScript variables to capture the attributes of viewed products is a shaky implementation.
This is because when you use custom JavaScript variables, your tracking depends upon the HTML DOM. Any change in the DOM structure can easily break your tracking.
Therefore, we are going to use data layers to capture attributes of viewed products.
Depending upon the size of your website and level of customization your CMS offer (through templates), you may have to create and hardcode a lot of data layers to your web pages and web page elements for dynamic remarketing setup.
Add the following data layers to all the webpages which list the products you want to retarget via dynamic remarketing:
#10 Pull attributes of viewed products from data layer into Google Tag Manager
In order to pull attributes of viewed products from data layers, you need to create one data layer variable for each attribute of a viewed product you want to capture.
For example, if you are capturing the 3 standard attributes (ecomm_prodid, ecomm_pagetype and ecomm_totalvalue) of viewed products then you need to create the following three data layer variables in Google Tag Manager:
#11 Send attributes of viewed products from GTM to Google Analytics
In order to send attributes of viewed products from Google Tag Manager to Google Analytics, you need to create one custom dimension for each attribute of a viewed product you want to capture.
For example, if you are capturing the three standard attributes (ecomm_prodid, ecomm_pagetype and ecomm_totalvalue) of viewed products then you need to create three custom dimensions.
There are two steps involved in creating custom dimensions:
Create custom dimensions in your Google Analytics property.
Modify your Google Analytics tracking code.
Create the following three custom dimensions in Google Analytics via the admin section:
You can learn more about creating custom dimensions in Google Analytics from this article: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2709829#set_up_custom_dimensions
Now, login to your Google Tag Manager account and edit the tag you used to deploy Google Analytics tracking code on your website.
Add the following three custom dimensions to the tag:
Your final configuration should look like the one below:
You can learn more about creating custom dimensions in Google Tag Manager from this article: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6164990?hl=en
#12 Create dynamic remarketing audiences in Google Analytics
You need to create dynamic remarketing audiences in Google Analytics so that later you can use them while creating dynamic remarketing campaigns in Google Ads.
Import the following four dynamic remarketing audiences for retail vertical in Google Analytics: ‘Cart viewers’, ‘General Visitors’, ‘Product Viewers’ and ‘Purchasers’:
#13 Send attributes of viewed products from Google Analytics to Google Ads
You need to create Dynamic Attributes in Google Analytics in order to send the attributes of the viewed products to Google Ads. Create one dynamic attribute for each attribute of the viewed product you want to capture.
So if you are capturing the three standard attributes of viewed products then you need to create the following three dynamic attributes in Google Analytics:
#14 Create and run Dynamic Remarketing campaigns in Google Ads
Step-1: Login to your Google Ads account and create a new ‘Display Network Only’ campaign of type ‘Remarketing’
Step-2: Under ‘Targeting’, select ‘Manual targeting’.
Step-3: Select your remarketing audience (website visitors, product viewers, etc.)
Step-4: Click on the checkbox named ‘ Use dynamic ads feed for personalised ads ‘, set business type to ‘Retail’.
That’s how you can set up dynamic remarketing in Google Analytics and Google Ads via Google Tag Manager.
Setting up Dynamic Remarketing using Google Ads Remarketing Tag (optional)
In Google documentation on setting up dynamic remarketing via GTM, you will see Google Ads remarketing tag being used.
The data layer variables for each attribute of the viewed products are sent from GTM to Google Ads via custom parameters:
Though this method is easier to implement, I did not use this method because I use dynamic remarketing audiences from Google Analytics for creating dynamic remarketing campaigns in Google Ads as they are based on the GA data.
Also, in this way, I can reuse dynamic remarketing audiences for other purposes.
However, if you want to use your Google Ads Remarketing Tag for setting up dynamic remarketing then check out this article: https://support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/6106009
Register for the FREE TRAINING...
"How to use Digital Analytics to generate floods of new Sales and Customers without spending years figuring everything out on your own."
Here’s what we’re going to cover in this training…
#1 Why digital analytics is the key to online business success.
#2 The number 1 reason why most marketers are not able to scale their advertising and maximize sales.
#3 Why Google and Facebook ads don’t work for most businesses & how to make them work.
#4 Why you won’t get any competitive advantage in the marketplace just by knowing Google Analytics.
#5 The number 1 reason why conversion optimization is not working for your business.
#6 How to advertise on any marketing platform for FREE with an unlimited budget.
#7 How to learn and master digital analytics and conversion optimization in record time.
My best selling books on Digital Analytics and Conversion Optimization
Maths and Stats for Web Analytics and Conversion Optimization
This expert guide will teach you how to leverage the knowledge of maths and statistics in order to accurately interpret data and take actions, which can quickly improve the bottom-line of your online business.
Master the Essentials of Email Marketing Analytics
This book focuses solely on the ‘analytics’ that power your email marketing optimization program and will help you dramatically reduce your cost per acquisition and increase marketing ROI by tracking the performance of the various KPIs and metrics used for email marketing.
Attribution Modelling in Google Analytics and BeyondSECOND EDITION OUT NOW!
Attribution modelling is the process of determining the most effective marketing channels for investment. This book has been written to help you implement attribution modelling. It will teach you how to leverage the knowledge of attribution modelling in order to allocate marketing budget and understand buying behaviour.
Attribution Modelling in Google Ads and Facebook
This book has been written to help you implement attribution modelling in Google Ads (Google AdWords) and Facebook. It will teach you, how to leverage the knowledge of attribution modelling in order to understand the customer purchasing journey and determine the most effective marketing channels for investment.
About the Author
Himanshu Sharma
Founder, OptimizeSmart.com
Over 15 years of experience in digital analytics and marketing
Author of four best-selling books on digital analytics and conversion optimization
Nominated for Digital Analytics Association Awards for Excellence
Runs one of the most popular blogs in the world on digital analytics
Consultant to countless small and big businesses over the decade
Get My Step-By-Step Blueprint For Finding The Best KPIs (32 pages ebook)
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously.
Cookie
Duration
Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional
11 months
The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy
11 months
The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.