Audience Sharing with GA4 and Google Ads
Currently, audiences within the Google Marketing Suite ecosystem can't be shared between GA4 and Google Ads via server-side tracking. However, it is possible to enable this with JENTIS. This article will explain how to configure your Google products and your tracking at JENTIS to effectively share audiences between GA4 and Google Ads.
About Audiences in GA4
In Google Analytics, an audience refers to a group of users from your site or app who share common characteristics, such as similar behavioral patterns, demographic traits, or acquisition sources (e.g., same age group, gender, or marketing campaign). It is possible to create audiences based on any data you collect and customize them to be as broad or specific as needed.
Audiences serve various purposes, one of which is advertising. When integrated with Google's advertising products, your audiences allow you to target specific users with tailored ads. For instance, if your audience is "All users who purchased product A", you can use a Display campaign to show your ads to these users whenever they visit a site or app within the Google Ads network. This approach helps you optimize your ad spend by focusing on users most likely to engage with your ads.
Two ways of using audiences in Google Ads are:
Remarketing Lists: a remarketing list includes users who have previously interacted with your site or app and whom you want to re-engage through targeted campaigns. For example, you could target users who browsed a specific category (e.g., hiking gear) but didn’t add anything to their cart or users who downloaded a free trial of your software but didn’t upgrade to the premium version.
Audience Segments: in Google Ads, you can combine multiple audience segments to create new, refined audiences. For instance, you could merge an audience of "Users who made purchases above $500" with another segment of "Users who visited the outdoor furniture section of your site." This combination lets you focus your campaigns on high-value users interested in specific product categories.
Read more about Audiences: [GA4] Introduction to audiences in Google Analytics | [GA4] Share audiences in Google Analytics with your linked advertising products
However, with pure server-side or wrongly configured hybrid tracking, retargeting is limited or not possible.
The reason is Google Ads uses advertising cookies (often third-party) to match users across platforms and deliver personalized ads. So, even with server-side tracking, these cookies are still essential for audience sharing and remarketing.
While server-side tracking offers significant advantages in terms of privacy compliance and data control, it cannot completely replace client-side tracking when it comes to sharing GA4 audiences with Google Ads.
Combining both methods is necessary to leverage GA4’s audience-sharing capabilities effectively.
Share audiences between GA4 and Google Ads with JENTIS
To share audiences between GA4 and Google Ads when tracking with JENTIS, follow the next steps:
Configure your Google products
1. Link your GA4 property to Google Ads
Go to the Admin section in your GA4 account;
Under the Property column, select Product Links;
Click Google Ads Links, then click the Link button;
Choose the Google Ads account you want to link and click Confirm;
In the link setup, configure settings such as enabling personalized advertising, which is required for audience sharing;
Review and submit your configurations.
2. Enable Google Signals
To use GA4 audiences in Google Ads, you must enable Google Signals:
On GA4, in the Admin section, go to Data Collection under Data Settings;
Enable Google Signals, which allows enhanced audience features like cross-device tracking.
3. Create Audiences in GA4
Navigate to the Admin section, go to Property, then Audiences;
Click on New Audience and use the Audience Builder to define criteria such as user behavior, demographics, or events.
Once your GA4 property is linked to Google Ads, any new audience created in GA4 will automatically be shared with linked Google Ads accounts that have “ads personalization” enabled. This eliminates the need for manual sharing.
4. Use Audiences in Google Ads Campaigns
In your Google Ads account, go to the Audience Manager under the Tools menu.
Select the shared GA4 audiences under Your data segments and add them to campaigns or ad groups as remarketing lists or audience segments.
Configure your tracking with JENTIS
Before following the next steps, ensure the Google-related configuration is completed according to the previous steps above.
If your tracking setup already has a client-side GA4 configured in combination with client-side OR server-side Google Ads, there’s no need for additional configuration in the JENTIS Platform. You can create audiences in GA4, connect them to a Google Ads account, and share the desired audiences.
If your tracking setup has a server-side GA4 and server-side Google Ads configured, follow these steps:
Create a new GA4 property;
Log in to your Google Analytics account.
Navigate to the Admin panel > Click on Create > Select Property:
Follow the prompts to complete the creation process
Link it to an existing Google Ads account;
Navigate to Admin panel > Property settings > Product links > Google Ads links > Click on Link;
Follow the prompts to complete the linking process
Enable Personalized Advertising, as this allows audience sharing between GA4 and Google Ads.
Share desired audience(s) to Google Ads from the new GA4 property;
Navigate to Admin panel > Data display > Audiences > Share existing or Create new audience to share with your linked Google Ads account;
In the JENTIS Platform, add a new GA4 client-side tool configuration instance.
Add at least the Global Site Tag (Automatically collected events) with the new GA4 client-side tool instance.
Test, preview, and publish the setup. During the testing, you will find the Google Tag executed in your browser, and you can use it according to Google tools (ie. Browser Extensions) that will display the correct work of that Google Tag.
With this setup, the Client ID tracked for the newly created GA4 property will be different from the server-side tracked Client IDs by default.
The additional property is helpful for data privacy and reporting reasons. With the secondary GA4 property (client-side), your original reports (user and session counts) will not be affected. Using the same GA4 property client-side and server-side will create redundant data that can not be matched and deduplicated effectively.
If you have any questions or suggestions, contact us through our Helpdesk.