Targeting the audience is much like cooking, with the right ingredients, a few adjustments and sprinkles of few features, the advertisers could create something very hearty and tempting. Below are mentioned few details and options the advertisers have for building an excellent mixture of audience-enabled advertising campaigns.
Insights on audience targeting
Audiences are buckets of Advertiser’s users or customers, audiences are grouped based on the preferences of an advertiser. As an advertiser, one could create these buckets across every publisher where they sell their ads (Google Ads, Bing, Yandex, Facebook, etc.)
Once they have built the audiences, they could utilize them in different ways:
1. Reporting: This allows the advertisers to understand consumer behaviors in a better manner, e.g., which web page is driving the most traffic/revenue.
2. Bidding: Based on the data the advertisers have gathered, they could adjust their CPCs for advanced bidding.
3. Prospecting: The advertisers could create similar audiences based on their existing lists to target new users.
However, one could use this audience approach across all search publishers. The main difference usually lies in the naming convention across Google Ads, Bing, Yandex, etc.
RLSAs
There might be certain advertisers, who might have never worked with audiences before, the best way to start is to create Remarketing Lists of Search Ads (RLSAs) and add them to all the top campaigns in observation mode. This would allow the advertisers to gather data about their audiences, while keeping reach open for everyone performing a search query on the advertiser’s keyword.
The advertisers could also set up RLSAs for specific pages of their website and based on rules, for example, a customer added items to the shopping cart, but didn’t complete the transaction in the last seven days. Generally, it’s a good practice to retarget the cart abandoners with a slightly higher bid, to remind them about their incomplete purchase.
Another good set of audiences are ones based on their top/desired web pages, for example:
New arrivals
Sales
Specific category / product line
Blog sections like “what to wear,” ”inspiration,” or “what’s trending this season”
The advertisers have to look to their website’s structure to determine the audiences to create.
Category audiences
If the advertisers don’t know about which page to target their audience on for their business, then the publishers have an option to utilize pre-created audiences based on user interests. These are called in-market audiences and they represent the people, who are interested in something specific, such as traveling, cars, a particular industry, etc.
There are also demographic audiences that allow the advertisers to focus upon the gender, age and various other ranges.
Customer match
If the business has been in the market for a while and the advertisers have their share of loyal customers that they want to retarget, all they need to do is to upload their CRM list to the publisher and apply these audiences to their search campaigns. For legal and confidentiality reasons, all publishers could encode user data upon upload.
Next approach
Once the advertisers have identified which audiences deliver the most revenue for their campaigns, they could:
1. Start using them in bidding: Based on the most successful conversion rates (CVR), the advertisers could add bid adjustments for these audiences proportionally in their campaigns/groups.
2. Create specific retargeting campaigns: The advertisers could also duplicate their existing campaigns, while adding top audiences to their campaigns and setting them in Targeting mode instead of Observation. This would restrict who sees these campaigns to people who fall into their audience buckets.
3. Create similar audiences: The publishers generate these audiences—they include people whose behavior is similar to the one identified in the advertisers existing audiences (RLSAs or CRM).
The advertisers could create and retarget their audiences based on the people who spend above their average order value. Or the advertisers could retarget search users, who interacted with their social campaigns. Yet, another option is combining the audiences with competitor’s campaigns, to drive them back to their website, when they enter a competitor’s search term.