Know Your Audience – Optimizing Your PPC Campaigns

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Who do you want to see your search ads? Sometimes businesses fall into the trap of trying to reach too broad of a target audience. When you do this, you typically end up with a lower CTR and conversion rate, which is not what you want. That’s why your digital marketing program depends on clearly identifying your target audience.

Finding Your Target Audience

What you do want is to reach your target market. But who is your target audience? First, you need to do some research. Collect demographic information, interests, behaviors, and more, to determine who is most likely to convert. Gather as much information as possible and look for common themes and trends in the data. Once you know who your target audience is, it’s time to use that information to optimize your PPC campaigns.

Using Audience Targeting

Audience targeting is becoming just as important as keyword targeting for PPC this year. That’s because, as we demonstrated above, who you reach is critical to your SEM. Although audience targeting isn’t necessarily new, it’s expanding in its use cases. While many people think it is specific to retargeting, display, and social marketing strategies, but now more than ever, it’s a key component of an effective PPC campaign.

There are multiple ways to use audience targeting, and in this post, we’re going to cover four use cases:

  • Using Audience as a Bid Modifier Layer – This encompasses your remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA). Go to the audience targeting tab on Google Ads, add your targeting and then adjust the setting to Observation. This will allow you to add the audience as an additional layer in the targeting rather than making it the sole targeting. Just like you can adjust bids for different geography, you can adjust bids for certain audiences.
  • Segmenting Campaigns – Another way to use your RLSA: If you have a few different target markets that you’re looking to hit, we suggest creating separate campaigns for each target audience. By doing so, you allow yourself to edit the creatives and the copy for the campaign depending on which audience you’re trying to reach. Segmented campaigns are typically much more effective than broad, generalized campaigns. Your target audience will be more likely to engage if the campaign is specifically for them. Make adjustments as needed to ensure that your segmented campaigns really are tailored to the target audience.
  • In-Market Audiences – This is a newer feature that Google rolled out in over the summer of 2018. With in-market audiences, you can target the users who are engaging in online activities that demonstrate they are ready to purchase. For instance, if you are creating a campaign for a new car, in-market audience looks at who is searching online for their past search and browsing history. Unlike using remarketing lists, in-market audiences can introduce your brand to people who may have never even heard of your brand, vastly extending your reach.
  • Audience Exclusions – Sometimes rather than selecting who you want to see your ads, you need to identify who shouldn’t see them. For instance, if you’re running a search campaign with an offer for first-time customers, you’d want to exclude your current customer list because the ad doesn’t apply to them. There’s no reason for your ad to reach your current customers in this case. We recommend creating separate audiences for different conversion actions. That way, you cane exclude users already converting on an action for an ad that is also driving the same action.

Get More Information from Skyrush Marketing

Skyrush Marketing, a full team of creative staff, programmers, marketers, and content develops, works to continuously optimize our clients’ search campaigns. Audience targeting is only one of the many ways to improve the outcomes of your campaigns, but it’s a good place to start. We can handle any project, big or small, and deliver rapid results by customizing your digital marketing strategy.

 

Contact us today for a free consultation.

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