It is difficult to understate the impact that audience targeting has had on the way PPC campaigns are run.
Audience targeting relies on grouping potential consumers by criteria like age, geographic location, and interests. In its simplest use, you can select criteria to narrow the potential audience your ads will reach, making your campaigns more targeted and increasing the return on investment of your PPC campaigns.
Using Audience Targeting Effectively
The breadth of options available can make audience targeting seem like a daunting task. Fortunately, there are some simple ideas that can help you make effective use of this tool.
1. Remarketing Lists
The most basic use of audiences is to use them in conjunction with your existing targeting strategy.
As users on your remarketing lists continue to search for your designated keywords, you can place targeted ads in front of them. This can be useful for retaining profitable customers and converting more of the potential customers who are still on their paths to purchase.
To do remarketing on the search network, you can set the audience(s) as the targeting. Such lists which are eligible to be targeted with the search ads are called Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA). You can also set up a separate campaign specifically for remarketed customers. It allows you to bid on competitor terms and serve ads to these customers as they search.
Remarketing on the display network is very important known to every advertiser today. The strategies however for remarketing customers on display network varies from the business to business. You can have audience lists with different membership durations and browsing behaviours on the site.
Another effective method of using remarketing lists is to add different audience lists as observation targeting and modify bids on them based on the stage audiences are on the conversion funnel.
2. Use Remarketing Lists with Dynamic Search Ads
Dynamic search ads extend your campaigns beyond your selected keyword set. Based on a website’s content, they use Google’s web crawling technology to target other search queries that may be relevant to a user’s interests.
When combined with remarketing lists, a dynamic search campaign can target customers that have visited your site, are searching for terms relevant to, but are nevertheless not hitting any of your designated keywords.
Doing so helps you to stay on the top of your customer’s mind as they go about their research.
3. Use Social Audiences
With a user-base of over 1.5 billion users, Facebook offers the opportunity to be incredibly precise with your targeting.
Facebook has the benefit of coming with tons of data on what its users are interested in. Facebook campaigns can also be tagged with UTM tags, allowing clicks from these ads to be recorded into a Google analytics campaign.
Doing so will later allow you to create different audience lists and target these users when they search Google using your keywords.
It is called Cross-Platform Remarketing.
4. Take Advantage of Audience Exclusions
In certain businesses, who you exclude is more important than who you target.
If the goal of your campaign is to gain clients rather than to sell goods, then you have no need to continuously pay for that customer to see repeats of the same ad.
What you might do then, is set up your campaign to exclude visitors after they have completed a conversion action, like providing personal information or making an inquiry.
This action immediately makes your PPC campaigns more efficient by ensuring that your ads only reach potential new clients.
Keep Experimenting
These suggestions only scratch the surface of what you can do with audience targeting. There is a multitude of ways to use audiences in different campaigns.
Most of them don’t require much effort, though they do rely heavily on remarketing lists, so be sure to take care of that part of your account.
You should also look at your AdWords CTR to ensure that your keywords are allowing your ads to reach your audience.
