Creating audiences to target through GA4

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has many capabilities that overshadow its analytics predecessor and it is easy to become distracted with new shiny/clever information but audiences are very quickly overlooked.

What is a GA4 audience?

An audience is a pool of people you want to segment and target using dimensions, metrics, and events within GA4. These groups/subsets of website visitors you can then analyze and/or advertise to.

These are the most important personas/ users you want to engage with for your business.

What are the benefits of creating Ga4 audiences?

Using audiences, you can define your reporting within GA4.

As well as, this “audience” is a powerful tool to help segment and target relevant prospects/visitors through paid-for means such as remarketing.

How to create an audience

There are three main types of audiences you can target and analyze through the use of GA4.

Readily predefined by Google

GA4 has two pre-configured audiences ready to use: All Users and Purchasers. They’re not particularly useful, but they’re a good starting point for understanding how an audience could work for you.

Suggested by Google

There is a range of audiences that Google suggests you use. Some come fully configured and solve common issues, like Recently active users and Non-purchasers, whereas others are a little more comprehensive.

Pre-warning, some of the “predictive” suggested audiences that look to use machine learning to predict future audience members, will only work if they meet the following requirements (from Google’s information hub):

1. At least 1,000 returning users must have triggered the relevant predictive condition (purchase or churn) and at least 1,000 returning users must not.

2. Model quality must be sustained over some time to be eligible.

3. To be eligible for both the purchase probability and predicted revenue metrics, a property has to send the purchase (recommended for collection) and/or in_app_purchase (collected automatically) events. When you collect the purchase event, you need also to collect the value and currency parameters for that event. Learn more

Please click here if you want a full list of GA4 suggested audiences.

Custom audience members

If you want something you can’t get “out of the box”, you can create your own from scratch!

This comes with some complexity, and we recommend you familiarise yourself with audiences by playing with the suggested/pre-defined audiences before venturing into the custom audience area.

If you would like to learn more about GA4 please do contact a member of our team.