What Is Google Ads Audience Targeting and Tactics For Refining Your PPC Targeting

What Is Google Ads Audience Targeting and Tactics For Refining Your PPC Targeting

Audience targeting in Google Ads Search campaigns

Google Ads Audience Targeting allows businesses to reach specific groups of people based on their interests, habits, and demographics. This method of targeting is utilized within the Google Ads platform, which is a popular online advertising platform developed by Google. Businesses to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, video content, and generate mobile application installs within the Google ad network to web users.

This method of targeting can significantly improve the return on investment (ROI) of advertising campaigns by increasing the likelihood of reaching potential customers who are interested in the products or services being advertised.

Google Ads Audience Targeting is based on a variety of factors, including users’ search history, browsing behavior, and demographic information. These factors are used to create specific audience segments, which can then be targeted with relevant ads. This approach allows businesses to create more personalized and relevant advertising campaigns, which can lead to higher engagement rates and better conversion rates.

Four advanced audience targeting tactics for refining your PPC targeting to leverage budget and maximize return on ad spend (ROAS), include :-

1. Smarter Use of Remarketing Lists For Search Ads (RLSAs)

Remarketing Lists For Search Ads (RLSAs) is a Google Ads feature that enable advertisers to tailor their search campaigns based on whether a user has previously visited their website (or app), and the pages that user viewed.

Targeting and displaying ads to users generates a high conversion value whenever they are searching for competitors on Google search, which ultimately aids in losing customers to your paid competitors. For instance, an online grocery retailer identifies shoppers who spend over their average order value each week.  

2. Combining Social Audiences With RLSAs

Facebook has the largest audience of any platform, with over 2.9 billion monthly active users. While Facebook targeting can be beneficial to reach the masses, another main benefit Facebook offers lies in the potential granularity with which you can target Facebook’s users. Further, a recent case study from Facebook showed that the brand Bombas saw a 27-point lift in ad recall for evergreen campaigns when utilizing Custom Audience targeting.

It is strongly recommended that if the strategy is exhausted, the current demand on Google search in your industry, then it enables you to effectively create search demand by reaching new users and promoting consideration of your product or service. You can also use the same strategy by the use of Microsoft Ads for maximizing your reach.

3. Using Custom Affinity Audiences

Custom affinity audiences are giving advertisers more granular control over audience targeting options on the display network, tackling the issues with regular Google Ads affinity audiences in that there isn’t a predefined affinity audience suitable for every business.

Custom affinity audience targeting can be set up by navigating to a Display campaign in Google Ads, clicking Targeting > Audience Segments > Your Custom Audience Segments > New Custom Audience.

4. Combining In-Market Segments With Remarketing

In-market audiences enable you to set up your campaigns to reach to people who are further down the funnel and more ready to make a purchase. Google accurately categorizes users sp you can target those most interested in their offerings.

Google stated that you can distinguish interest from the purchaser’s intent by using real-time data and a powerful classification system based on demonstrated in-market behavior. In market audiences aids in driving incremental conversions, and help you to connect with consumers as the last step before they make a purchase decision.

To target an in-market audience segment, you would need to navigate to Targeting > In-market and life events > In-market segments. Here you will see a list of almost 500 available in-market audiences, with the option to further granulate the high-level categories.

Key Points To Consider

There is a need to get creative to drive new demand growth if your marketing budget doesn’t increase to keep up with the shift in paid search keyword costs. Further, advertisers are shifting huge chunks of the budget over to other platforms like Facebook, owing to superior audience targeting options and reduced CPCs.

An increased use of automation in Google Ads, along with the continuous addition of its option of audience targeting in a privacy-centric way. The PPC landscape is changing, and ensure to be on top of the latest features and testing tips to check whether they are delivering improved paid media results for your business.