How to Create a Remarketing Audience in Google Analytics 4

Showing ads to people who have already visited your website is a cornerstone of effective digital marketing, and Google Analytics 4 is mission control for creating these powerful audiences. With remarketing, you can bring back indecisive shoppers, re-engage interested leads, and get more value from your ad budget. This article will guide you, step-by-step, through creating and using remarketing audiences in GA4 for your Google Ads campaigns.

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What Exactly Is a Remarketing Audience?

A remarketing audience (sometimes called a retargeting list) is a group of users you define based on their past actions on your website or app. Instead of targeting generic demographics or interests, you're targeting people who have already signaled their interest by engaging with your brand.

Why is this so powerful?

• Higher Relevance: You're advertising to a warm audience, not cold prospects. Someone who recently browsed your hiking boots page is far more likely to respond to an ad for hiking boots than a random user.
• Improved Conversion Rates: These users are further down the funnel. A gentle reminder – perhaps with a special offer – can be just the push they need to complete a purchase or fill out a form.
• Better Ad Spend Efficiency: Focusing your budget on users who have shown intent means less waste on clicks that lead nowhere. You get a better return on your ad spend (ROAS) because you're fishing in a well-stocked pond.

If you're used to Universal Analytics, you'll find that GA4's audience builder is more flexible and event-driven, giving you far more granular control over who you want to reach.

Before You Begin: Key Prerequisites

Before you can build your first audience, you need to have a few things squared away in your Google Analytics 4 property. Getting these settings right will prevent headaches later on.

1. Enable Google Signals

Google Signals is essential for remarketing. It uses data from users who are signed in to their Google accounts and have Ads Personalization turned on. This allows Google to associate a user's activity on your site across different devices, giving you a more complete picture and enabling cross-device remarketing.

To enable it:

1. Go to your GA4 Admin panel (the gear icon on the bottom left).
2. Under Data Collection and Modification, click on Data Collection.
3. Find the "Google Signals data collection" section and click Get started. Follow the prompts to activate it.

Note: You must have administrator rights for the property to enable Google Signals.

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2. Link Your Google Ads and Google Analytics 4 Accounts

Your GA4 audience needs somewhere to go. Linking your Google Ads account allows GA4 to send the audience lists directly to your ad platform so you can use them in your campaigns.

To link your accounts:

1. In the GA4 Admin panel, look under the Product Links section for Google Ads Links.
2. Click the blue Link button in the top right.
3. Click Choose Google Ads accounts and select the account you want to link. Click Confirm.
4. On the next screen, ensure the Enable Personalized Advertising toggle is switched ON. This is the setting that officially allows audience data to be shared for remarketing purposes.
5. Click through the final steps to complete the link.

Step-by-Step: How to Create a Remarketing Audience in GA4

With the setup work done, you're ready to build your first audience. We'll start with a few fundamental examples and build from there.

First, navigate to the audience builder in your GA4 property:

• In the left-hand navigation, click Configure, then select Audiences.
• Click the blue New audience button.

You'll now see an option to "Create a custom audience" or use pre-configured templates. We'll focus on custom audiences to show you the full power of the builder.

Example 1: The "Cart Abandoners" Audience

This is one of the most valuable remarketing audiences for any e-commerce business. The goal is to group users who added an item to their cart but left before completing the purchase.

1. Click Create a custom audience.
2. Start by building the "include" condition. Under "Include users when", click Add new condition.
3. In the search box, find and select the event named add_to_cart. This automatically includes anyone who has ever performed this action.
4. Now, we need to exclude the people who actually bought something. On the right, click Add group to exclude.
5. Under "Exclude users when", create a condition for the purchase event.

This simple logic — include people who added to cart AND exclude people who purchased — gives you a high-intent audience to target with ads that remind them what they left behind.

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Example 2: The "High-Value Blog Readers" Audience

Let's say you want to promote an e-book or webinar to users who have seriously engaged with your blog content but haven't signed up yet. You can define "engaged" however you like.

1. Again, start a new custom audience.
2. Create your first condition. This time, let's use a Dimension. Search for and select Page path and screen class.
3. Set the filter to "contains" and enter /blog/ (or whatever URL structure your blog uses). This targets anyone who has viewed any page in your blog section.
4. Now, let's layer on an engagement metric. Click AND to add another condition.
5. Search for the event session_start. This represents a new session.
6. Click Add parameter, select Event count. Set the condition to ">= (greater than or equal to)" and the value to 3.

Now you have an audience of users who have visited your blog across at least three different sessions. These aren't casual readers, they are highly engaged and perfect candidates for a lead magnet or content-driven offer.

Example 3: "Product Category Viewers"

If you sell a wide variety of items, you can create specific audiences for each category to show highly relevant ads.

1. Create a new custom audience.
2. Create your condition and select the view_item_list event (this event typically fires on category pages).
3. Click on Add parameter and find and select item_list_name (this dimension usually contains the name of the product category viewed).
4. Set the filter to "contains" and enter the name of your category, like "Mens Running Shoes".
5. Just like with our cart abandoners, you should then add a group to exclude anyone who has completed a purchase.

Targeting this group with ads for men's running shoes will be far more effective than a generic ad for your entire store.

Important Audience Settings

Before saving your audience, there are a couple of other important settings to configure.

Membership Duration

At the top of the audience builder, you'll see "Membership duration". This determines how long a user will stay in your audience after they last met the criteria. The maximum is 540 days.

• For timely offers like cart abandonment, a shorter duration (e.g., 14-30 days) is best.
• For general remarketing or brand awareness, a longer duration (e.g., 90 days) works well.
• Consider your sales cycle. If customers typically take a month to decide, make sure your duration is at least that long.

Set this to a length that makes sense for your business goal. Let's set it to 30 days for our cart abandoners because the purchasing intent is fresh.

Audience Trigger

This is a powerful (and optional) feature. An Audience trigger lets you create a new custom event that fires only when a user joins this specific audience. For example, if you create an audience of "Big Spenders," you could create an audience trigger that fires an event called became_big_spender_audience. You can then use this new event as a conversion goal in GA4 and Google Ads.

Finally, give your audience a descriptive name, like "Abandoned Carts - Last 30 Days," and click Save.

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Putting Your Audience to Work in Google Ads

Once your accounts are linked and your first audience has been saved for at least 24-48 hours (it takes a bit of time to populate), it will automatically become available in Google Ads.

Here’s how to use it:

1. Log in to your Google Ads account.
2. Navigate to Tools & Settings > Shared Library > Audience manager.
3. You should see your newly created GA4 audience in the list. Wait until it shows a "servable" list size before using it.
4. When setting up a new campaign (or editing an existing one), go to the Audiences section of your ad group settings.
5. You can browse for your audience under Remarketing and similar audiences. Find your G4 audience and add it.

You can choose to use the audience for Targeting (solely show ads to this group) or Observation (show ads to your regular audience, but apply bid adjustments to people in this group). For most remarketing campaigns, you'll want to use Targeting.

Final Thoughts

Creating tailored remarketing audiences in GA4 is a fundamental skill for any marketer looking to maximize their advertising impact. By moving beyond generic "all visitor" lists and segmenting users based on specific actions like abandoning a cart or reading your blog, you create a more relevant and effective path back to your website, ultimately boosting conversions and revenue.

While fine-tuning audiences in GA4 is critical for campaign targeting, seeing the complete story of your customer — from ad platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads, to your website engagement, to the final sale in your e-commerce platform — often means juggling multiple analytics tools. At Graphed, we connect all those dots for you. Instead of manually correlating campaign settings with GA4 data and sales reports, you can simply ask questions in plain English, like "What was my ROAS from the cart abandonment remarketing campaign last week?" and get an instant, live dashboard built for you.