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Google Remarketing Audiences not populating
Hi guys,
I’ve been working as a Marketing Manager for an apparel brand and we have recently seen a big increase in traffic – around 25,000 visitors per month. While most of the Google campaigns (Shopping and Search) have been doing great, I decided it’s finally time to expand onto remarketing campaigns with the GDN.
I have experience with this and it worked smoothly in the past. I used to create audiences by importing audience segments from a linked Google Analytics accounts, as well as creating Remarketing audiences directly from the Google Ads Audiences tab.
Before you ask, I’ve verified that the tags are correctly implemented in Shopify (within the theme.liquid code and the additional scripts in the checkout settings).
What confuses me the most is that Google Analytics shows the correct number of people in each segment and the numbers in the Audiences Sources in Google Ads show the correct number of hits. However, every time I try to import a segment from Google Analytics or create a new remarketing audience from Google Ads, the audience list in Google Ads doesn’t populate and it’s impossible to serve the ads on the GDN or YouTube. I’ve given it more than a week for it to start working, thinking it might need more time now, but after so much time, it’s obvious that something is off. I’ve tried all sorts of segments, as well as all users’ audience, but nothing seems to populate.
Can someone give me any direction on how to troubleshoot this? I’m not a newcomer to all of this, and this is usually a problem I can solve by myself, but this time I just can’t wrap my head around the root of the issue.
Any help is welcomed. Thank you guys!
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2 Replies
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Assuming that on the admin side GA and Ads are linked back and forth, may have something to do with the new “G” ID tracking in Analytics vs the old “U” universal property? As in shopify tracking the new id type and GA being set up before Oct 2020.
Just a thought. may be something, may be nothing.
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I’ve dealt with this exact. same. issue. Today, in fact. Here’s a checklist to make sure GA & Ads are passing audience info back and forth:
* In Ads, check in Audiences – Audience sources and make sure you have connections for both Google Ads and GA (UA). (Also check for any errors here.)
* In GA, I’m sure you have the Ads account linked under Property Settings – Google Ads, but check under Tracking Info – Tracking Code and make sure the correct Ads tag is populated under Connected Site Tags – it doesn’t always transfer / get detected thru Shopify.
* Make sure to also check under Audience Definitions – Audiences and see if you’ve got audiences properly defined, and if any are connected to both Ads & GA.We also cleaned up some additional superfluous tracking code that was still hanging around from previous installations / connections that seemed to be causing conflicts.
As an aside, you didn’t specifically mention if it was *Smart* Shopping campaigns that you were running, but if so, keep in mind Smart Shopping ads use dynamic retargeting already, and will likely drown out any display campaigns you’d run concurrently.
EDIT: I’m assuming your call for assistance was towards a colloquial “guys”. 🙂
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