How to Create Audiences in GA4 for Remarketing

Audiences in Google Analytics 4 let you split users into segments that match your business needs. You can segment by metrics, dimensions and events. GA4 evaluates incoming user data in the background and assigns each user to an audience based on the conditions you define. One user can belong to several audiences at once if they meet the rules of each.

How to create an audience in GA4

As an example, we will build a remarketing audience: people who added a product to the cart and started checkout, but never purchased.

1. Open your Google Analytics 4 property, go to Admin, then Property → Audiences.

You will see a list of all existing audiences.

2. Click New audience.

3. Click Create a custom audience. The configuration panel opens.

4. Name the audience by clicking the Untitled audience field.
For a remarketing audience, something like Remarketing audience works fine.

5. Add a short description of the audience that captures the behavior you want to measure: “Users who…”

6. Set the Membership duration for the audience. The Membership duration controls how long a user stays in the audience after meeting the conditions.

7. If you want users to stay in the audience for as long as possible, check Set to maximum limit.

8. Click the trash icon to remove the default condition block, so you can build a new event sequence with different settings.

9. Click Add sequence.

A new configuration panel appears:

10. To define the audience scope, click the users icon and a list of options opens.

Across all sessions adds the user to the audience if the sequence is true across all of their previous sessions.

Within the same session adds the user to the audience if the sequence is true within a single session.

For remarketing we will choose Within the same session.

11. Click Add new condition and choose the data that defines your custom audience.

In our case we will choose Events.

12. Pick an event from the list that appears.

In our case we will choose add_to_cart.

The view should look similar to this:

13. Optionally, click Add parameter to filter the audience more precisely. A list opens where you can pick the parameter you want to add.

For example, to include only people who added a product worth more than $100 to the cart, we would add the ‘value’ parameter (in the example screenshots the event count parameter is shown, but the logic is the same)…

…click the dropdown under Conditions and pick ‘>’ (greater than)…

…then type 100 in the Number field and click Apply.

The currency depends on what you set in the Admin section of the property.

14. You can also add further rules using AND or OR logic.

15. Click Add step.

A new section appears below. Choose when the next step should happen.

Is indirectly followed by: the step can happen at any time after the previous step
Is directly followed by: the step happens right after the previous step, or within a set time window

In our case we will choose Is directly followed by, check the time constraint and set it to Within 40 Minutes.

16. Click Add new condition in the second step you just created and pick a condition.

For example, we choose the begin_checkout event (the user started the checkout process).

You can add an extra parameter here if needed.

17. To add an exclusion condition, click + ADD GROUP TO EXCLUDE.

A new section appears below. Choose one of the following options:

Temporarily exclude users when: excludes users who did not trigger the purchase event during the current membership period, scoped to the current session.

Permanently exclude users when: excludes users who never purchased anywhere along their full user journey, scoped to all sessions.

In our case we will choose Permanently exclude users when:, which removes anyone who has ever made a purchase.

Click the users icon and, in our case, choose Across all sessions.

If you chose Temporarily exclude users when:, pick Within the same session here instead; that only excludes people who did not purchase within the same session.

18. Click Add new condition and pick a condition.

In our case we will choose purchase.

Our configuration now looks like this:

19. Once the audience is set up, click Save in the top right corner.

Your custom audience is now created.

You will find it under the Audiences tab.

After 24 to 48 hours it will also appear in your linked Google Ads account under Audience manager.

GA4 audiences are only as good as the data they are built on. If some of your conversions never reach Google Ads, your remarketing lists will be incomplete and the campaign will learn from partial data. That gap is exactly what server-side tracking closes.