Google Ads: Build audience strategies to improve targeting and performance

Initially absent from Google Ads (formerly Adwords), the notion of audience targeting arrived in the ad network in 2010. The arrival of Facebook on the advertising market in 2007, with its promise of being able to target individuals via their profiles, prompted Google to follow suit. Until now, Adwords offered advertisers the option of targeting search terms on its search engine, or affinity-based locations on its AdSense and Display network inventories. In 2010, the first audience offered on Adwords was the advertiser's own website, enabling the advertiser to remarket to Google.

Almost 10 years later, Google Ads has developed new possibilities. How to exploit these audiences? How to analyze campaign performance using the notion of audience? What strategy should you adopt?

Let's find out what's at stake in search engine marketing (SEM) as part of a Google Ads audience strategy.

See all software Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

What is an audience?

An audience is a profile of users based on one or more criteria.

Every second, many users perform searches on the Internet or browse sites/applications. Building an audience means providing an answer to the question: " Who are they?

Google uses multiple sources of data to qualify the profile of its users, the main ones today being :

• Search history,
• Gmail e-mail,
• Browsing history (via Chrome or the Google Display Network),
• YouTube history,
• Google account activity.

Using audiences in Google Ads allows you to qualify the profiles of users who are likely to be exposed to your ads.

Group your audiences

The best practice is to classify users into 3 main clusters:

• Customers: Already users of your services, they present a potential and retention challenge.
• Hot" prospects: This is your "incubator", where we classify users who have interacted with your services, but who are not yet customers. This is also known as lead nurturing.
• Prospects: Users who represent a target for your services and who have never interacted with your brand.

Today, at JVWEB, an e-marketing agency specializing in SEO, we estimate that an advertiser misses out on 20-30% of its conversions if it doesn't use an audience strategy.

If we look at the subject from another angle, the AdWords account performance analysis tool Seiso shows that an advertiser can waste up to 45% of its budget on irrelevant audiences (and therefore exclude them from its campaigns).

The different audience typologies

Audiences are determined on the basis of different data: Google data or advertiser data.

Audiences derived from Google data

• Demographic/geographic: Allows you to reach or exclude people most likely to be in the same age, gender, parental status or income bracket.

• Affinity: Reach or exclude people actively seeking products and services like yours.

• In-Market: Reach or exclude people interested in products or services like yours.

• Similar: Find new users identical to those in your remarketing lists (- 29% average cost per acquisition observed - source: JVWEB) or similar to interests, or (and this is where it gets really powerful) a Customer Match list.

Audiences derived from advertiser data

• Visitors: Reach people who have already visited your website. This is known as remarketing or retargeting.
  
  Average acquisition cost for this audience in RLSA (Remarketing List For Search Ads): - 44% (source: JVWEB).
  
• CRM: Reach people from your CRM database, using the qualification elements it can provide. This is what we call Customer Match.
  💡 NB: we strongly advise you to provide Google Ads with an encrypted data file (hashed in SHA 256 format), especially if you use a third party (consultant, agency...) to manage your campaigns.
  
  Average acquisition cost for this Customer Match audience: -57% (source: JVWEB).

How to exploit audiences?

Audience types available for each type of campaign

Personalized audiences: your audience, created by you

You know better than anyone which users are likely to be inspired by your brand. This is where your business expertise should enable you to control the tool's automations.

The method:

1. Identify your core target,
2. Reach them with a minimum of waste,
3. Measure your performance with these audiences.

Think of your audience approach in terms of your prospects' level of engagement.

Here's a diagram describing how to use different audiences to reach a broad target while staying on the mass most likely to engage with your brand:

Maximize your traffic conversion

Use retargeting in Search and Shopping

To this must be added the behavioral dimension: you need to take into account the depth of the conversion tunnel and the level of engagement of the user you're going to target.

💡 NB: The conversion rate for retargeting via the Shopping + Search network is 20% higher than for standard prospecting (source: JVWEB).

So you can create 3 different lists with distinct bidding strategies to target users according to their level of engagement in the conversion path.

We advise you to start your campaigns by setting fairly high bids to improve your learning curve and reduce the time between you and the optimization phase.

Here's a good model to get you started:

Using similar audiences

Similar audiences are added automatically by Google Ads based on your own audiences.

Leverage your CRM data

Segment your database to export as many contact lists as possible.

Then integrate them as Customer Match audience lists in the Google Ads interface.

Audience optimization strategy

Prerequisites and best practices before optimizing

Before you start, make sure everything you need is in place:

1. A Google Ads remarketing tag is present on all the pages of your site.
2. You have authorized the collection of remarketing data in Google Analytics, and your Google Analytics account is linked to your Google Ads account.
3. Your audience lists have been created with a satisfactory level of granularity, while maintaining a minimum size for each list (minimum 100 contacts per list).
4. All your audiences are added to your campaigns in " Observation" mode.

We also recommend that you :

1. Use Audience Insights to identify the profile types of your audience.

Use the audience statistics tool in your Google Ads account:

2. Create duplicate audiences with Google Ads and Google Analytics to maximize the size of your lists.

3. allow time and observe performance when volumes are significant before making decisions (2 weeks to 3 months depending on the level of account activity).

Optimization method

A Google Ads Seiso report allows you to immediately identify the best-performing and most problematic demographic audiences, at the account level as a whole, but also for the most important campaigns.

Here are a few examples:

On this basis, you can plan optimizations:

1. Adjust your bids up or down according to the performance of your audiences (based on ROI or cost per acquisition).
2. Exclude non-performing audiences.
3. Offer personalized messages.
4. Use Smart Bidding and feed your data into the Google algorithm.

Finally, consider personalizing your messages within the same ad using the "if" function. This will enable you to refine your communication or push tailored offers (e.g. first-time buyer discount voucher for prospects, free delivery for customers...).

From a business point of view, it may be important to integrate the notion of lifetime value into your audience strategy.

Indeed, depending on your business model, a customer may only be profitable after several conversions.

You'll find a customer value report in Google Analytics. Customer value data is available in all Analytics accounts. No modification of the tracking code is required:

1. Connect to Google Analytics,
2. Access your view,
3. Open the Reports section,
4. Select Audience then Customer Value.

Google uses a classic RFM (Recency Frequency Amount) to calculate a relative customer value over a maximum of 90 days (for the time being).

With this cross-referenced data, Google will generate different audiences which will be imported into your Google Ads account and which you can remarket with different bidding strategies (we generally recommend a Target CPA or Target ROAS strategy).

It seems that this ratio is really effective from 1000 conversions/week upwards.

New audiences to come

It's fair to say that on some accounts we can find audiences with little or no data.

For example, the Google Ads audience for household income:

The Google Ads teams have announced that major progress will be made on these reports to provide advertisers with maximum Data for their optimizations.

The new audiences:

• Parental status : currently limited to a simple yes/no, the user's parental status will be enriched with data concerning children: number, age and school level.
• Marital status : this new audience will show whether the user is single, married or in a relationship (out of wedlock).
• Level of education: user's level of education - Baccalaureate and Master's.
• Housing: Does the user own or rent their home?

See all software Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

The importance of audience strategies in a context of automation

Google Ads is moving towards greater automation of campaign management (Smart Bidding, Smart Shopping...). To remain in control of their actions and their machines, advertisers will need to be less technical, and more strategic.

Audience strategies are therefore essential to master in this context: they will enable you to optimize costs by excluding unprofitable segments, and maximize volumes on high value-added audiences.

Sponsored article. Expert contributors are authors independent of the appvizer editorial team. Their comments and positions are their own.