Google has been adding a lot of features in Google Ads to help advertisers reach the right audience. One such feature is audience targeting in Google Ads search campaigns.
The way search campaigns work; they are already effective in reaching people who are interested in your product/service. Add audience targeting to it, and you can further refine your targeting.
So let’s talk about how you can use audience targeting to make your search campaigns better.
1. Identify Your Audiences:
Head over to Google Analytics and jump to Interests under Audience section.
You can see 3 types of audiences: Affinity, In-Market and Other Categories. Out of these, In-Market and Affinity audiences are available in Google Ads. From these lists, identify all the audiences that are relevant to your business and would potentially buy from you. If you have goals set up in Google Analytics, then you can see which audiences are already converting on your website.
In addition to this, identify all the audiences which are not relevant to your business so you can exclude them.
2. Add and Exclude Audiences:
The next step is to add the audiences (in your search campaigns) that you identified as relevant. You should add them under “Observation” mode as observation mode does not limit your reach.
You can also add them under “Targeting” mode however that will limit your reach by a lot as you will only be targeting a very small section of your whole audience. Targeting mode should be used when you only want to reach one particular section of your audience and have an exclusive offer for them.
Take a look at the below image to understand Observation Vs Targeting.
Once you have added these audiences, let the ads run for at least a few weeks (or preferably months) and gather some data.
3. Analyze and Improve
Once you have data for a few weeks and months, see which audiences are performing well in terms of CTR, number of conversions, CPA, and conversion rate. You can then increase the bids for those audiences.
On the other hand, you can reduce bids or even exclude the audiences that have high CPA or don’t have any conversions for a long period of time.
If you think that some audiences should be targeted with a different message or a different offer, then it is better to target that audience in a different ad group with custom ads.