Google Analytics Adds “Smart Lists” To Automate Remarketing List Optimization

Earlier this week, the Google Analytics team announced the release of Smart Lists, a new remarketing list type that automates list creation and management in Google Analytics. Smart Lists are primarily powered by all that anonymized conversion data that comes from the millions of Google Analytics-enabled sites opted-in to share data with the company.

Smart Lists make use of signals like visit duration, page depth, location, device, referrer and browser. Applying machine learning to the conversion data, the lists predict which users are most likely to convert when they come back to a site.

According to the company, Analytics then automatically manages the remarketing campaigns in AdWords to focus on those high potential users. Google says the model of users most likely to convert is usually updated daily based on the most recent data, and users are automatically added to or removed from a Smart List based on the model.

For sites that use e-commerce conversion tracking in Analytics and have at least 500 monthly e-commerce transactions and 10,000 daily pageviews, the Smart List will automatically be “upgraded” to rely on the sites’ own data rather than that of similar businesses. The list appears as [My Smart List] in the list builder.

The team says they are working on other ways to use these conversion data signals in other reporting and capabilities to help marketers learn which factors help predict whether a user is likely to convert.