[MUSIC PLAYING]
MATT WALTER: Hey, everyone.
My name is Matt Walter, and I'm a product manager
on Google Analytics.
And, today, I'm going to talk to you about the Audience
Builder in Google Analytics 4.
This video is part of a larger training series where
product managers share step-by-step instructions
on different features within Google Analytics 4.
Now let's go ahead and jump into the agenda.
First, I'm going to give an introduction
to what audiences are.
Then I'll be covering some key features
of the Audience Builder in GA4.
Next, we'll talk about audiences and how they can be exported
out of Google Analytics.
And then, lastly, I'll give a product
demo of how to use audiences in GA4.
So, first, what are audiences, and what are some common use
cases for audiences?
Audiences in GA4 properties let you segment your users
in the ways that are important to your business.
You can segment by dimensions, metrics, and events
to include practically any subset of your users.
As Analytics gets new data about users,
their audience memberships are re-evaluated to ensure
that they still meet the audience criteria.
Now let's talk a little bit about some of the use cases
in the Audience Builder.
There are many ways that you can use audiences.
First, you can use audiences for reporting purposes
in Analytics.
You could use audiences as a dimension
and add that to a report and filter by that.
Next, you can trigger events when
users match the definition of an audience and become members.
You can then use those triggered events for bidding,
for example, in Google Ads.
And, lastly, you can use audiences within Firebase.
One example would be in Cloud messaging
or in the Remote Config product.
Now let's talk more about what the Audience Builder is
and how you can use it.
There are three options for defining and creating
audiences in GA4.
You can use a template.
You can use a suggested audience or you can create
a new audience from scratch.
Let's start by talking about how to use the template.
Audience templates are partially configured audiences
that already identify a set of dimensions or metrics
that you might care about.
For example, the demographics template
includes the age, gender, language, interest,
and location dimensions that you can
use to define a particular audience in which you're
interested.
Next, you can use a suggested audience.
Analytics provides a number of fully configured audiences
that you can use out of the box as is or modify if necessary.
For example, the Recently active users audience
is defined as to include users when the user engagement
event is present.
You can use the audience as is or you
can add conditions or sequences or change
the membership duration as necessary if you'd like.
We also have verticalized suggested audiences.
For example, for e-commerce, you can
use a Cart Abandoners audience or a Checkout Starters
audience.
And these are tailored to your specific vertical
that you care about.
And the last option is to create a brand new audience
from scratch.
Now let's talk through some of the fundamentals
of the Audience Builder when you're creating an audience
from scratch.
First, you're going to want to use inclusion and exclusion
clauses to build your audience.
For example, if I want to know who made purchases
and include users who made purchases in my audience,
I could use the purchase event and an include clause
as you see in the picture here.
When using an exclusion clause, one thing to note
is you can choose between temporary and permanent
conditions.
Select Temporarily Exclude Users When
to exclude users from the audience
during periods when they meet the condition.
And, conversely, select Permanently Exclude Users
When to exclude users from the audience
if they've ever met the condition.
Next, you can choose the scope of when
the conditions in an audience must be met.
You can choose from the options of across all sessions,
in a single session, or in a single event.
You can also set the membership duration in your audience.
Membership duration allows you to specify the number of days
that users remain in the audience.
Each time a user engages in behavior
that meets the criteria for being included in the audience,
that user's membership duration is
reset to the full value of this option.
The max membership duration you can set
is 540 days or 18 months from the time the user is
added to the audience last.
Another feature you can use in the Audience Builder
is sequences.
Sequences allow you to create audiences
based on users who have completed
a series of conditions.
The condition can occur at the user level, the session level,
or the event level.
For an e-commerce use case, you could define your first step
as a user who has used a coupon and looked
at a specific product.
And then maybe in a second step after that,
you can focus on users who have made a purchase.
For the gaming use case, for the first step,
you might want to look at users who
have achieved a certain level such as wizard
and maybe have also defeated a character such as the dragon.
And then subsequently for the second step,
you might want to look at users who have made
a purchase, such as a power up.
And the value of that purchase needs to be greater than $5.
Next, as you define your audience,
the summary card updates with the number
of users who have met your criteria during the last 30
days so you have an idea of potential audience size.
When you create an audience, Analytics
adds any users who have met the audience criteria
during the last 30 days, assuming you
have at least 30 days of data.
Next, audience triggers let you trigger or create events
when users match the definition of an audience
and become members.
You can analyze these events in your reports.
And you can enable them as conversions
as with any other events.
You can create up to 20 audience trigger events per property.
Here are some use cases for audience triggers.
Maybe you want to trigger a conversion event
when a user enters your loyal users audience.
That could be defined as, for example,
users who booked a hotel three times in the last 90 days.
Or maybe you want to trigger an event when users cross
a threshold of lifetime value.
Another example is you could harness the power of machine
learning by using predicted pairs audiences once GA4 has
collected enough historical data or you can use your own custom
criteria to create whatever audience
you like and then create audience triggers off
of that custom audience.
Lastly, I want to talk a little bit about predictive audiences.
Google Analytics has predictive metrics
that apply Google's machine learning
to unlock the predictive power in your historical business
data.
In particular, there's three predictive metrics
that you can use.
Purchase probability is the probability
that a user who was active in the last 28 days
will log a specific conversion event within the next seven
days.
Churn probability helps you anticipate
which users are likely to churn when they disengage
with your website or app.
And then, lastly, the revenue prediction metric
helps you assess the revenue expected from all purchase
conversions within the next 28 days from active users.
You can use predictive metrics in a couple of different ways.
For example, you can build an audience
with these predictive conditions in it
and then use that for targeting in an Ads campaign.
Or you could, on top of that, use an audience trigger
to fire conversion events when new users join
that predictive audience.
Now let's talk about audience export.
You can export Google Analytics audiences to Google Ads, DV360,
and SA360.
In order to do so, you need to make sure
that you do the following.
The Google Analytics 4 property that you're using
must be linked to a Google Ads account or an SA or DV360
advertiser.
Second, the Enable Personalized Advertised setting
must be set to Enables during the linking process.
And finally, Google Signals must be enabled on the GA4 property.
This is required for remarketing.
Now I'm going to do a demo to show how the Audience Builder
works in Google Analytics 4.
So here we are in the Google Merchandise Store demo
account in the Admin section.
We're going to go to the Audiences section.
And from here, we'll click on New Audience.
As I discussed previously, here is
where you can use a template to create an audience.
For example, here in the Technology section,
I might want to pick a device category.
For this example, I'll take Mobile.
And then maybe you want to also filter by the brand.
So in this case, I'll pick Apple.
And, here, now you can see a summary
of how many users would be included in this audience
if you were to save it.
Next, let's go ahead and look at the verticalized suggested
audiences like we discussed previously.
So, here, if we look at the Cart Abandoners suggested audience,
this is users that added items to their cart
without purchasing.
So, here, we can see the Add to Cart
item in the include clause.
But then we can also see that we're
excluding users who have completed e-commerce purchases.
And then, lastly, if you want to create an audience
from scratch, you click up here on Create a Custom Audience.
Up here at the top is where we can give our audience a name.
And then, additionally, we can add a description here
if we like.
And then, here, in our included clause,
here is where we can set a dimension, metric, or event
to start to define our audience.
I've selected the Purchase Event to include only users who have
completed a purchase event.
Next, we can go ahead and select the condition scoping.
I'm going to leave mine set as Across All Sessions,
but you can see the other options available here.
And next, you can set a specific membership duration.
I'll go ahead and change mine to 60 days.
Additionally, if you want to, you
can go ahead and create an audience trigger.
This would fire or create an event every time
a user completed a purchase and joined this audience.
So for the event name, I might call this Triggered Purpose
Event.
And then I can go ahead and save that.
Next, if we like, we can add an exclusion condition group.
For example, maybe I want to exclude users from California.
So I can go ahead and set region and then
add a filter to Contains California, which will now
exclude users who have completed a purchase from California.
Down here, I can see in the summary
card what the expected audience size would be.
And this is an estimate based on the last 30 days.
And if everything looks good to me from here,
I can go ahead and save that audience.
And now that audience will be included here
in my audience table.
Now, in order to be able to export your Google Analytics
audience to an Ads destination, for example,
you are going to want to make sure
that your account is linked.
So in the product link section, for example,
If you come to the Google Ad link section,
if you click the link button here,
if you follow the quick three-step process,
this is how you can link an account
to start exporting your Google Analytics audiences over
to Google Ads, for example.
So now we've seen how we can create an audience in Google
Analytics 4 and how to share that audience with a Google Ads
account.
Now I'm going to hop back over to the slides
so we can get to the key takeaways.
To summarize, audiences are groups
of your users who share the same attributes
and can be segmented by dimensions, metrics, and events
that are important to your business.
You can create new audiences using
either a template, a suggested audience,
or you can start from scratch.
We also talked about audience triggers,
which is a useful feature that allows
you to create an event when an audience criteria is met.
And then, lastly, we showed how you can export Google Analytics
audiences to a Google Ads account,
for example, to be used for marketing purposes.
Thank you so much for joining me for today's session.
Just as a reminder, this is part of a larger training
series with more videos to come in the future, so stay tuned.
In the meantime, if you have any questions,
feel free to go to the Google Analytics Help Center online.
Or if you're a 360 customer, feel
free to reach out to your account representative.
Thank you.