How to Use Custom Combinations in Your Retargeting Efforts

So you're looking through Google Analytics and notice that you're losing some remarketing visitors on the shopping cart page. Or maybe you rarely or never have repeat customers and don't want to serve ads to people who already purchased. How can you tailor your remarketing strategy keeping those issues in mind? Custom combinations allow marketers to combine remarketing lists to reach a more targeted audience.

Here are three scenarios where using e-commerce custom combinations could be effective:

• A consumer shopped in the regular products section but didn't reach the holiday gift guide.
• Remarketing the product image to users who reached the shopping cart but didn't purchase.
• Remarketing keyboard ads to users who bought a computer but didn't visit any keyboard pages.

Setting Up Custom Combinations
Follow these four steps to take advantage of custom combinations in your retargeting efforts:

1. Set up remarketing audiences. Before specifying the custom combinations, you'll need to set up remarketing lists.

2. Create custom combinations. This is done in the shared library as well, located under "All Online Campaigns" on the left navigation bar. In the new audience drop-down, select custom combination instead of remarketing list. There are three relationship options when setting up custom combinations:

• "And": Includes all remarketing audiences selected. For example, visitors who reached your homepage and products page. Keep in mind, however, that using "And" can limit audience size because it will include all pages that you list.
• "Or": Include at least one/any of the audiences listed. For example, a user who reached either your homepage or products page
• "None": This doesn't include the audiences listed. For example, none of the users who reached the email sign up page and purchase confirmation.

You can build on top of audiences within the actual custom combination. For example, one custom combination may be users who reached one or more of your high-volume website pages but didn't reach the shopping cart. Find out more about how to set this up below.

3. Specify custom combination.

• Combination name: As with remarketing, name the custom combination. Using the example above, if you're targeting users who reached high-volume pages but didn't reach the shopping cart, you could name the custom combination "High-Volume Pages, No Shopping Cart."
• Description (optional): List the remarketing audiences that you're including in the combination.
• Users included or interested in: Select which relationship you want the remarketing lists to have in the first drop-down menu (listed above And, Or, None). In the second drop-down menu, select the actual audiences. Using the same example above, in the first drop-down you would select "One or More of These Audiences" and then select your top volume page audiences in the second drop-down. Then right below the first drop-down you'll see "AND, Add another." This is where you can select visitors who didn't reach the shopping cart.

4. Assign the custom combination to the appropriate ad group. There are many ways to craft custom combinations by user intent and product. As always, monitor your new audiences until you find the best combinations possible.

Morgan Talasnik is a pay-per-click account manager at SEER Interactive, a search marketing firm.