[UA] Enable Remarketing and Advertising Reporting Features in Analytics [Legacy]

You are viewing a legacy article about Universal Analytics. Learn more about Google Analytics 4 replacing Universal Analytics.

If you activate Google signals, the controls to enable Remarketing and Advertising Reporting Features are replaced by the Google-signals control.

This article explains how to configure Analytics so you can create remarketing audiences and share them with your advertising accounts. For example, you can create an audience of users who left items in their shopping carts but didn't complete their purchases, and then share that audience with Google Ads so you can reengage those users with follow-up ads.

Learn more about remarketing audiences in Analytics

In this article:

Prerequisites
Limits
Enable Remarketing and Advertising Reporting Features for a web property
Enable Remarketing and Advertising Reporting Features for an app
Related resources

Prerequisites

To take advantage of Remarketing with Analytics and Remarketing Lists for Search Ads with Analytics:

Enable Remarketing and Advertising Reporting Features.

When you enable those features, you also see data in the Demographics and Interests reports, see GDN Impression data in the Multi-Channel Funnel reports, and can take advantage of Google Marketing Platform integrations.

To enable Remarketing and enable Advertising Reporting Features for a web property, you need to have the Editor role for that property. The Editor role is also required to create and edit audiences.
Adhere to the Policy requirements for Analytics Advertising Features.
Agree to the Analytics Terms of Service (please review them as they may have changed since you last viewed them)
Have at least one active Google Ads or Display & Video 360 account that is linked to your Analytics property
If you're using your audiences in Google Ads, add them to an ad group.

Limits

Keep in mind that there is limit of 2000 Remarketing Audiences per Analytics account.

The In-Market Segments dimension is not available for Remarketing Audiences.

The Days Since Last Visit metric is not available for Remarketing Audiences.

Enable Remarketing and Advertising Reporting Features for a web property

When you enable Remarketing for a web property, you can create remarketing audiences from your Analytics data, and share those audiences with your linked advertising accounts (e.g., Google Ads and Display & Video 360) and with Optimize.

When you enable Advertising Reporting Features for a web property, Analytics collects the information it normally does, as well as Google advertising cookies when those cookies are present.

You can enable Remarketing and Advertising Reporting Features for a web property by using one of the following methods:

Modifying your property settings
Modifying your tracking code
Selecting the option to use existing tracking code when you're creating a Google Ads remarketing campaign

Modify your property settings

This method applies only to web properties, and to pages on which you're using gtag.js, analytics.js, or AMP tagging.

Modifying your property settings is also the only method by which you can use the Analytics tag to create remarketing lists for search ads.

When you modify your property settings to support Remarketing and/or Data Collection for Advertising Features, then traffic to all your pages is subject to this type of data collection. If you want to implement these features for only portions of your site, then you need to modify the tracking code for each relevant page, and leave these property settings off.

To update your property settings:

Sign in to your Analytics account.
Click Admin, and navigate to the property for which you want to enable these features.
In the Property column, click Tracking Info, then click Data Collection.
Under Data Collection for Advertising Features:
- To enable Remarketing, set Remarketing and Advertising Reporting Features to ON.
- To enable only the Advertising Reporting Features, set only Advertising Reporting Features to ON.

If you have previously enabled Remarketing and the Advertising Reporting Features by updating your tracking code, you can still implement these property settings and not incur any conflicts. This applies to Remarketing only on the Google Display Network.

Keep in mind that this method is only effective for enabling these features as they relate to your website users. If you want to enable these features as they relate to your app users, then you need to update your app-tracking code per the methods outlined for Android and iOS.

If you do not want to collect data for Advertising Features, then make sure that both of these options are set to OFF, and that your tracking code is not configured to collect this data.

You also have the option to activate Google signals to enhance Remarketing and reporting. If you activate Google signals, then those controls replace the ones for Remarketing and Advertising Reporting Features.

Alternative: Modify your tracking code

The preferred method of enabling Remarketing and Advertising Reporting Features is to modify your property settings as described above, though you can enable these features by modifying your tracking code.

If you want to enable Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, you need to use the property settings described above.

If you choose to enable Display Remarketing and the Advertising Reporting Features by updating your tracking code, you need to make only a simple, one-line change to your code as described in the following sections. This modification does not impact any customizations you have previously made to your code.

If you want to manually disable Advertising Reporting Features, you can modify your tracking code as described in the relevant sections below.

To enable these features for Universal Analytics, insert the bold line into your existing tracking code between the 'create' and 'send' commands, as in this example:

<script>

(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){

(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),

m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)

})(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');

ga('create', 'UA-XXXXXX-XX', 'example.com');

ga('require', 'displayfeatures');

ga('send', 'pageview');

</script>

To revert the change, simply remove the line ga('require', 'displayfeatures');

To override the displayfeatures plugin and the property settings to turn off Advertising Reporting Features, add
ga('set', 'allowAdFeatures', false); //to re-enable, set allowAdFeatures to true
after the create command, and before the hit is sent.

If you're using Google Tag Manager, follow these instructions to edit the Analytics tag.

If you're still using the ga.js tracking code, you can find instructions for modifying that code here.

Alternative: Select the option to use existing tracking code when you're creating Google Ads remarketing campaign

When you're creating a remarketing campaign in Google Ads, if you're account is linked to an Analytics account, then you have an option to use the tracking code that’s already on your website rather than have Google Ads generate a remarketing tag for you. If you use this option, then Remarketing is automatically enabled in Analytics. Learn more about creating remarketing campaigns in Google Ads.

Enable/disable Remarketing and Advertising Reporting Features for an app

When you enable these features for an app, then Analytics collects the information it normally does, as well as information associated with mobile-advertising IDs.

To enable/disable these features for an app, you need to modify the Analytics tracking code that you have included in your app code. The examples below explain how to modify the tracking code for Android and iOS apps.

App-tracking code change for Android

App-tracking code change for iOS