95+ Ideas for Google Ads Remarketing Lists

Michelle Morgan — November 10, 2019

I’ve been speaking a lot recently on the benefits of using audiences to their full extent, especially by customizing pixels to create new audiences for users on your website. The biggest benefit is that you can segment audiences into more niche groups and market to them accordingly—as in, based on more than just a site visit in the last 30 days.

After all of that, one of the most common follow up questions I get is some version of this: “That’s great, but what do I DO with this? What audiences should I be making with all this fancy stuff?” To be honest, I can’t tell you which audiences your specific business would benefit from. Every business is so different that to really create a custom strategy, you’d want seek out an individual consultant or account manager to do a deep dive into your business and your online marketing.

But just because I can’t speak to your specific business doesn’t mean I can’t help. I can tell you possible remarketing lists that you should consider to give you SOME direction. In fact, I can share 95 possible remarketing lists that you can use. So let’s go through some high level categories you should be thinking about when building lists, and I’ll give you those examples for each group.

Remarketing lists based on page views

These are the most common remarketing lists being used today. It’s the source of all the lists that look like this:

From here, you can do all sorts of things based on the pages of your website people visit. The biggest mistake advertise make is not spending nearly enough time thinking through the value in each page of their website and the different user intent that each page visit signals.

For instance, a user who visits four pages on your site including a pricing page is likely much more interested in making a purchase than someone who only visits your homepage and then leaves. And they have a different motivation than, say, someone who visits your careers page—who you might want to exclude from your advertising to avoid wasting spend.

Here are some lists to think about making for page visits, both for potential targeting and exclusion:

Homepage
Pricing Page
Thank You Pages
Jobs/Careers Pages
Features Pages
Category Pages
Product Pages
Reviews Pages
Returns Policy
Blog
FAQs
Contact Us
Find Store Pages
Privacy Policy
Legal Terms
Support Section
About Us
Plans Pages
Company Culture Page
Materials Sourcing
Work Showcase Pages
Case Studies
Resources Pages
Product/Company Brochure
Personalized Tool/Calculator
Make an Appointment Page
Partner Companies

Remarketing lists based on site engagement

Visits to a page are one thing, but what about the actual actions users take on those pages? If users engage with a tool or click into a photo gallery, they’re more engaged than a user who only views the page.

Think about your website. What actions can a user take on that page that don’t then direct them to another web page where you would be able to make a URL rule like those above? Do you have any? If you don’t, that’s not a problem and this section might not be immediately useful to you, but if you do, this is something you should think about when building out lists.

A user who clicks through these pages of options, for instance, might be more likely to convert and buy some little chocolate creatures.

Although a little trickier to set up than traditional page URL lists, these audiences aren’t too tough to create if you’re willing to spend a little time setting up custom events and custom triggers in the channels and Google Tag Manager.

Here are some examples of lists that leverage user engagement rather than a simple page view:

Click to Call
Video View
Tool/Calculator Use
Scroll Depth
Time on Site
Number of Pages Visited
Engage with Photo Gallery
Open Lightbox/iFrame
Download PDF
Outbound Link Clicks
Form Submission
View of Page Element
Chat Messenger Engagement
Expand Hidden Text
Page Errors

Remarketing lists based on social engagement

Just because a user doesn’t visit your site doesn’t mean they’re not interacting with you. Nearly all businesses have some sort of social media presence online (or you likely should) and engagements with those channels can often be just as good or better than a web page visit.

These engagement audiences can be found in the audience manager of each social platform, and they are usually segmented away from typical website audiences:

Here are some lists you can create based on how users are engaging with your social media profiles rather than your website:

Facebook Page Likes
Facebook Post Likes
Facebook Post Saved
Facebook Message Sent
Facebook Call to Action Click
Lead Form Open
Lead Form Submission
% of Video View
Complete Video View
3-10+ Second Video View
Instagram Profile Visit
Instagram Post Engagement
Instagram Message Sent
Instagram Post Saved
Pin Click
Pin Comment
Pin Save
Pin Closeup
Event Responses
Event Engagements
Instant Experience Engagement
Link Clicks in Instant Experiences

Remarketing lists based on customer uploads

These are likely the “easiest” list of users to put together as you simply take the user information (name, email, phone, etc.), add it to a file, upload to the platform and boom, you have a static list of users to retarget to. But there can be nuances in customer uploads just as there are with URL visitors.

Here are some list segmentation ideas to think of when creating your customer uploads for retargeting:

All Customers
Open Opportunities
Open SQLs
Open MQLs
Good Quality Leads
Bad Quality Leads
One Time Buyers
Customers w/ 2+ Purchases
High ROI Purchasers
Low ROI Purchasers
Enterprise Clients
Small Business Clients
Job Title Segmentation
Gift Buyers
Purchasers for Self
Parents
Decision Makers
Purchase Influencers
Monthly Subscribers
Annual Plans
Cancelled Subscriptions
Newsletter Subscribers
Returned a Purchase
Made an Exchange
Single Brand Purchasers
Cross-Brand Purchasers
Multi-Year Clients
Referrers of New Business
Used Coupon Code

Remarketing lists based on time constraints

Another key factor to think about is the length of time in your audiences. Each of the ad platforms has its own length of time you can continue to retarget someone from a cookie. The longest at the moment is 540 days on Google Ads. Most others are 180 days.

But just because you can target someone for that long, doesn’t mean you should.

Not every audience needs to be for the maximum amount of time the pixels/channels allow. At some point, they’ll get sick of you and/or become completely unprofitable.

Instead, you should start to craft what I call time funnels for your audiences. Take some time to understand the value of someone in the first seven days, then the next seven days, then maybe the next 14 days, and so on. How do they differ in performance and value to you? At what point does someone become unprofitable?

Take those results and craft remarketing audiences with the same parameters we’ve discussed above, but for different cookie lengths for additional optimization opportunities.

Test out your remarketing lists for better results

This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the retargeting audiences you can make, but hopefully it’s gotten you thinking about what might be valuable to your company and how you can start to segment users for better marketing. Spend some time thinking about your business and analyzing the data and understand what works best for you, but also, what your customers respond to best as well. It’ll be a win-win.

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