A Match Made in Heaven
In this post I will walk you through how to set up Google Analytics as well as Google Remarketing on your website, because the two pair as nicely as chardonnay and lobster. With these two tools at your disposal, you will gain new insights about visits to your website, and you keep those visitors engaged after they leave.
But first a quick primer in case either of these terms are unfamiliar to you.
Google Analytics is the dominant web analytics platform, and it is completely free to use. It lets you track and quantify almost everything that happens on your website – from visits to clicks to time spent and more.
Remarketing is a Google Ads product, and it is the dominant tool for displaying ads to people who have already visited your website. The generic term for this strategy is called “retargeting”, and it is a no-brainer for industries in which clicks are expensive, as retargeting ads tend to be dirt cheap compared to search ads. You spent a fortune getting people to your website, so don’t let them forget it so easily.
Neither is very difficult to set up if you have even rudimentary experience with html, but it is important to set them up correctly in order for them to function properly. Just follow this guide and you will be good to go!
Step One: Accounts
Get an Analytics and a Google Ads account. They’re both free. It’s best if you use the same email address to sign up for both of them. That way, they can sync much easier.
Step Two: Get The Codes
Google Analytics
- Navigate to the Tracking Codes
- Save the ID and the Code onto a Notepad file for Windows or a TextEdit for Mac. This will preserve the special text characters and formatting.
Google Ads Remarketing
- Navigate to the Tracking Codes in the Audience Manager within Google Ads.
- Save this code also. You’ll see these options:
The Tag Manager option will give you the ID to put into your Tag Manager template, the Download option will give you a TXT file for manual installation, and the email instructions will send the code and detailed instructions to whoever you want to receive that.
Step Three: Installation
If you haven’t already set up Tag Manager, see our article on How To Understand & Configure Google Tag Manager. With Tag Manager, you can follow the easy-to use templates that walk you through installing the code.
If you’re not using a Tag Manager, you need to place these codes into the template of your site so that they are on every page. I can’t give instructions on that since every website builder is different. For this reason, I can’t recommend Tag Manager enough.
