How to Seamlessly Integrate Google Analytics 4 Audiences with Google Ads

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google’s web analytics platform, which offers a new way of measuring and understanding user behavior across devices and platforms. GA4 also introduces a new feature called audiences, which allows you to create and manage segments of users based on their characteristics, actions, and interests.

Audiences are powerful tools that can help you tailor your marketing campaigns to the right people at the right time. By integrating GA4 audiences with Google Ads, you can leverage the rich data and insights from GA4 to target and optimize your ads across Google’s network. This can help you improve your ad performance, reach, and return on investment (ROI).

Before Connecting GA4 to Google ads, let’s create an audience in GA4, It is very easy to create an audience which is mainly done for retargeting such as if someone purchases some product from your website and you want to target those people again with some other deal than you can retarget them with this audience.

Currently 01/2024 you can only create up to 100 different audiences in GA4

In Google Analytics 4

In the beginning, we need to go to Google Analytics to create the Audience from the existing data set that you have collected from your website. To capture the data you need to connect your website with Google Analytics 4 or use Google Tag Manager to send the data from your website to Google Analytics.

Creating Audience

Now We will create an audience in Google Analytics 4;

• Go to Admin
• Click on Audience
• Then under Include user when you can add a new condition to your audience or which user to target.
• Such as: Purchase

• Now you can add filters to your data such as which data you want to target

• If you do not want to filter then you don’t need to use the filter option.
  *if you want to add multiple values in the filer then you can use the ‘|’ key which is ‘OR’ *
• Than Click Apply

Now if you want to add more users to your audience then you can click the And button and you can add more events in the same Audience.

While adding multiple users there can be some data clash because while some users have clicked a certain product the same user comes back in a different session and submits a form, so we need to make both users in the same audience so we will then use the option will allow the audience to be in the same session

Change it to Within the same session, It should decrease the number of sessions.

Now Give the audience a name and click on Save

IMPORTANT
Now your audience will only collect the data from the day you create the audience, not the day before.

Now after you have created your audience you cannot change the condition of your audience, you can only change the name and the trigger of your audience

Creating a Trigger

Now you can create a Trigger in the audience which allows the event to trigger when the audience goes through the condition that you created such as buying a product or submitting a form

Now you need to create a trigger,

• You need to go to the audience
• Click on the three dots of your Audience
• See the Create Trigger on the right side of the screen and click on Creating Trigger

The important thing is to give the trigger a new name, which needs to be made properly because you need to know which audience is this trigger belongs to.

IMPORTANT
This trigger is not related to the Google Tag Manager Trigger and does not send similar data. You can compare this audience on your Home page and clicking on Compare and selecting your audience as a dimension

Linking GA4 to Google Ads

Now we will link Google ads with GA4 where we can use this audience to retarget. To link Google ads and analytics,

• Go to Admin
• Under the Property Section click on Google Ads Linking
• Now select the Google ads account that you want to link

• Choose the account that you want to link
• Click Next
• Keep all the settings as it is
• Click Create

Before going to the Google ads, we need to enable the Data Signals setting in the analytics

• Go to Admin
• Click on Data Collection

And from there enable the Data signals (read all carefully)

In Google ads

Now in Google ads, we will check if the audience that you created is showing or not

• Go to tools and settings
• Click on Shared Library and Audience Manager

Now you need to wait for 24 to 48 hours for your data to be visible in both GA4 and Google ads.

Integrating GA4 audiences with Google Ads can help you create more effective and personalized ad campaigns that match your business goals and user needs. You can use GA4 audiences to target and optimize your ads based on various criteria, such as user behavior, engagement, conversion, and retention. You can also measure and analyze the impact of your ads on your GA4 audiences, and adjust your strategy accordingly.