[GA4] Why your audiences may not be populating in Google Ads

If the audiences you're exporting to Google Ads are not populating, try some of the following diagnostic methods to uncover problems.

Verify that you have enabled Google Ads remarketing

Learn more about how to Enable remarketing with Google Analytics data.

Note: Activating Google Signals is a requirement for all Web Remarketing and all App Remarketing.

Check the audience-source card in Google Ads

In Google Ads > Audience Manager > Audience Sources, check the card for Google Analytics (GA4) and Firebase to make sure that the users you've identified for your audience are triggering events on your site or app. If users who fit the definition of your audience are not triggering events, then they won't be added to the audience in Google Ads.

Check the Audiences report in Analytics

Sign in to Google Analytics.
From the left menu, click Reports.
Under User, click User Attributes > Audiences.

If you are an administrator or an editor and don't see the report, you can add the report. You can click the name of an audience in the report to open a more detailed report about the audience.

Review the audience definition in Analytics

If you've defined your audience too narrowly, you might not be getting the numbers of users you want. For example, if you've defined the audience to include only users whose In-market interest ID = Media & Entertainment/Books, you might revise that to the broader ID Media & Entertainment. Or you could expand the geographic parameters from City ID = City A to City ID = City A or City B.

Check whether you've excluded events or user properties from ads personalization

If you've excluded events or user properties from ads personalization, then audiences based on that data won't be exported from Analytics to your ad platforms, including Google Ads.

Check whether you've excluded geographic regions from ads personalization

If you've disabled ads personalization for a specific region, then users from that region who would be added to your audience in Analytics will not be added to your remarketing lists in the ad platforms to which you export audiences, including Google Ads.

If you're using Google Marketing Platform ad products on your site, make sure your webpages are setting the remarketing cookie

If your audience is configured to use demographics and interests data, your webpage needs to set the DoubleClick cookie so Analytics can retrieve that data about users.

To verify that the page is setting the cookie, use your browser's developer tools to make sure the page is making network calls to https://stats.g.doubleclick.net. The following example shows you how to use the Chrome developer tools.

In Chrome, open the webpage (e.g., example.com).
Open the Chrome developer tools (click > More Tools > Developer Tools).
Open the Network tab, and select Preserve log so you can capture the network calls.
Refresh the webpage.
In the Network tab, search for instances of network calls to https://stats.g.doubleclick.net/g/collect?v=2&tid=ignoredXXXXXXX&cid=XXXXXXXX.XXXXXXX and check that at least one of the necessary cookies (NID, SNID, ANID, ID, IDE, and DSID, depending on the situation) is present in the request header. If these calls are present, your audience should be populating as expected.

Learn How Google Marketing Platform advertising products and Google Ad Manager use cookies..

If you create extraordinarily complex audiences, for example, audiences with unusually complex conditions or large sets of complex conditions, you run the risk of exceeding your per-property storage limit for audience definitions. If you try to create an audience that would cause you to exceed the storage limit, the audience creation will fail. To avoid this problem, you can remove existing audiences that have extraordinarily complex definitions.

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