7 strategies you probably don’t know about Google Ads audiences

One of the areas most overlooked by many marketing managers on Google Ads is audience segmentation. With each passing year, Google offers new audience targeting and ways of reaching potential customers, so it’s normal not to always be on top of all the new features. However, the incorrect use of audience segmentation could affect the result of the campaign, as you      would be wasting money with users who are not interested in the product, increasing the final cost of the CPC.

To improve the ROI of your SEM strategy, it’s critical to know the different techniques you can try through implementing audiences, so we’ll explain several tactics that you could apply:

1.Related audiences to increase brand awareness

Every good marketing strategy must have distinct objectives that cover all the stages that the user goes through, from the recognition of the need to purchase to the final sale, the famous phases of the sales funnel. Google Ads is no different from other marketing channels, and it’s also convenient to structure your campaigns according to the state of the sales funnel you want to achieve.

While many companies want to get conversions directly, the reality is that a user often takes longer to trust you before buying what you offer (especially if you are trying to sell a high-cost product). Therefore, the first step would be to create brand recognition campaigns and promote your company. You can use related target audiences for that kind of customer because you could work with lists that include users who, from their browsing history, have similar interests to the products you offer.

For example, if you are a travel agency, it would be relevant to create a campaign with the related audiences of “Travel Enthusiasts,” “Beach Travelers,” “Family Travelers,” “Luxury Travelers” etc. These lists don’t include users who want to travel today but who search for information on traveling; So for a travel agency, it would be interesting to promote their business, creating a strategy to attract these users and convince them to advance through the sales funnel so, when they want to travel, they will take their brand into consideration.

2. Audience with purchase intent, for users ready to convert

On the other hand, we have purchase intent audiences, which are lists of users who are actively seeking to purchase a specific type of product or service. Therefore, it is convenient to take advantage of these audiences in your conversion-focused campaign as it helps you to reach a more targeted audience, get more qualified clicks, and reduce costs.

For example, let’s say your company sells televisions; There is an audience with purchase intention called “TVs” gathers users who, due to information collected by search engines, intend to buy a new TV set. Therefore, you can target reach very efficiently and contribute to higher conversion rates as you would be showing the ad to someone who wants to buy the product.

3. Campaign with audiences under observation or segmented according to your goals

Many SEM experts overlook the difference between these two options, as the information Google provides about it can be somewhat ambiguous and confusing. However, it is essential to know the difference  because depending on how the audience was chosen, the results can be very different.

Depending on how your campaign was set up, the investment will increase when users belonging to created lists search for terms relevant to your business, but users that don’t belong to that list are not ignored. On the other hand, with targeting mode, any users who don’t belong to the audience lists you have implemented will be excluded.

The mode you use depends a lot on your goals: if you want a high volume of clicks, observation is the best option; On the other hand, if you want to have more qualified traffic and reduce costs, it would  be better to work with targeting.

4. Remarketing campaigns in targeting mode

As we just explained, the targeting mode allows us to focus on the message we want to convey to a specific group of people. When creating campaigns with remarketing lists in targeting mode, we may target our ads to people who have already shown an interest in the product or service we offer; that allows us to use more eye-catching calls to action, including more focused descriptions, or implement the keywords belonging to the bottom of the sales funnel. It is also convenient to add exclusion lists with users who have already converted, as we want to reach only those who have shown interest but have not completed a purchase.

Before implementing this strategy, you should keep in mind that to activate remarketing lists, you need at least 1000 active users, so it’s a type of campaign that is usually created when your Google Ads account has been getting traffic for several months. You can create different remarketing lists and shape the tone of your ads according to the status of each user in the sales funnel (abandoned cart, free demo subscriptions, more than X minutes on the landing page, etc.).

5. Customized target audiences in display and video

One of the most undiscovered displays and video features is custom audiences. The little use given to them is a shame, as they allow you to include a wide range of parameters and variables to define a new audience that could be relevant to your business. You can add interests, URLs, websites, and apps, although you don’t need to include all the parameters to activate this configuration.

When working with custom audiences, you’ll be able to target the reach of those users who meet more than one condition that makes them relevant to what you offer. In other words, it’s a good way to apply various filters that ensure qualified traffic and investment efficiency, which will mean a positive ROI.

In addition to that, Google presents us with various data based on the parameters we have included so that we can better understand the user profile that we are going to reach, such as audience size, demographics, or topics of interest.

6. Access your buyer persona profile

There are so many options in Google Ads that many accounts overlook the most basic one: reach your buyer persona. To know the profile of your ideal buyer, you would have to work with market research and even talk to employees who have more direct contact with the customer to get different opinions.

Also, if you have organic traffic to your site, you can use Analytics to gather information about your customers’ age, gender, purchasing power, and other demographics. In this way, you can define groups for these attributes in Google Ads and reach users who meet the characteristics of your buyer persona.

7. Group Adjustments based on business logic and performance

Once you’ve implemented your audience strategy based on business and market logic, we can’t ignore them. The next step is to tune the group based on performance and KPIs.

For example, if your current goal is to increase sales for a particular product, you might increase bids from audiences who have conversions and lose search impressions by rank; and on the other side, lower offers from audiences that cost more money and don’t convert. This is the same logic as keyword bid adjustments. Still, many account managers forget about target audiences. Actually, they  don’t work with them as often as keywords, which is a big mistake as Google is increasingly giving more importance to audiences than keywords.

Definitely

As we can see, there are many strategies we can apply using target audiences in Google Ads. In this article, we’ve shown some examples, but the combinations of lists you can create are unlimited.

To summarize, these are the points we covered:

• Related audiences to promote your business’ brand.
• Target audience with purchase intent to promote your products or services to potential customers who want to convert.
• Observation mode or targeting/segmentation according to the range you want to obtain.
• Remarketing campaigns to refine your ads based on user experience with your business.
• Customized display and video audiences with parameters relevant to your business.
• Define your buyer persona in Google Ads.
• Increase and lower audience bids based on desired KPIs.

Translated by Micheli.