Seven of twelve articles in the CXL Minidegree In writing an overview about Audiences. This week we learn how to:
- Find & refine your target audience(s) — so you never spend a dime of your ad budget on the wrong people
- Structure your campaigns and ad groups to maximize audience performance — not to mention you’ll make it much easier to navigate your ads accounts
- Layer & shape your campaigns to avoid audience overlap — while ensuring you still reach the
- Use your audiences to prove success in other channels — thus squeezing every ounce of value out of your ad spend
When managing a Pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, it is easy to get lost in the sauce of keywords and match types as your vehicle for getting in front of your ideal customer. You may not even consider the other targeting options you have available. Here are five targeting methods you can use to identify your perfect PPC target audience.
A target audience is the group of people you want to reach with your marketing message, because they may be likely to take action as a result of seeing it.
Where do I start?
Keywords have long been the most important tool advertisers use for paid search ad targeting. “Google Adwords” referred specifically to the role keyword-targeting played in advertising success. That said, audiences have always been an important aspect of what kind of keywords businesses add to their lists. To choose the most valuable keywords to target, you must understand the people (audiences) that use them as search queries.?
Audience intent is the driving force behind what kind of phrases users put into the search engines. Yet there can be significant variation in why different people type the same keywords into a search engine. That’s where audience targeting helps a great deal.
Google Ads offers more audience targeting options than most marketers are prepared to keep up with. They include:?
- Affinity Audiences: reach users based on what they're passionate about and their habits and interests. Custom segments: Depending on your campaign goal, reach users based on what they're passionate about, their habits and interests.
- Custom Affinity Audiences: allow you to create your own Affinity Audience, specifically tailored by interest keywords, URLs, and apps that you input. ... This allows you to see if your audience is large enough to target and on what type of placements your ad will show.
- In-Market Audiences: In-market audiences is a way to connect with consumers who are actively researching or comparing products and services across Google Display Network publisher and partner sites and YouTube. In-market audiences is a targeting feature that reaches potential customers while they’re actively browsing content related to your product/services. It’s incredibly valuable to reach people who are actively browsing, researching, or comparing different products online. Most people turn to search engines to get quick information so they can make purchase decisions. Targeting audiences after they’ve gone through this critical search phase often leads to your ads reaching them after they’ve already bought.
- Custom Intent Audiences: is a Google product that allows marketers to target people currently researching specific topics, products, and solutions on the web, using display or YouTube video ad campaigns.
- Similar Audiences: there looks at data about your existing remarketing audiences and finds new and qualified consumers who have shared interests with that audience. It's a powerful - but simple - way to reach a much larger audience and drive clicks and conversions among new prospects.
There are other audiences to target, for example: youtube, site visitors, etc.
Parameters for Defining Your Target Audience on Facebook
People in your target audience will have certain characteristics in common. These characteristics fall into three broad categories:
Types of audiences
- Primary: Your primary target audience will typically get most of your attention, since you expect them to become your most valuable group of customers.
- Secondary: Your secondary target audiences are other groups of people with common characteristics who may be interested in your products or services but are unlikely to become your most valuable customers. Secondary target audiences can help you structure your marketing efforts. Especially if you sell more than one product or service, or if you feel your products or services may appeal to distinctly different groups of people.
Facebook Lookalike Audiences
Facebook Lookalike Audiences can be used to reach people who are similar to your current customers. They increase the probability of generating high-quality leads and offer more value on ad spend.
Lookalike Audiences are formed based on source audiences. You can create a source audience (also known as a seed audience) using data from:
Customer Information. A newsletter subscription list or a customer file list. You can either upload a .txt or .csv file, or copy and paste your information.
- Website Visitors. To create a custom audience based on website visitors, you need to have Facebook pixel installed. With pixel, you create an audience of people who have visited your website, looked at a product page, completed a purchase, etc.
- App activity. With active Facebook SDK event tracking, app administrators can collect data on the people who have installed your app. There are 14 pre-defined events that can be tracked such as, “added to the basket” for retails apps, or “level achieved” for game apps.
- Engagement. An engagement audience is comprised of people who engaged with your content on Facebook or Instagram. Engagement events include: video, lead form, canvas and collection, Facebook page, Instagram business profile, and event.
- Offline activity. You can create a list of people who interacted with your business in person, by phone, or another offline channel.
Finally, remarketing audiences from prior Ad campaigns?
There are many ways to build remarketing audiences for your advertising campaigns. One option is to use UTM tracking codes. UTM tagging allows you to effectively market to your audiences across channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google. Prospects are much more likely to convert if they are exposed to your brand on more than one advertising platform. And it’s possible to use UTM tagging from social media advertising to target audiences on Google search.?
