Audience Targeting

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is audience targeting?

Audience targeting lets you take your full audience of prospective customers and segment them into groups based on different criteria. You can use your analytics tool to learn about your website visitors and prospective customers, and to categorize them into target audiences. You can then tailor your content and ads to each audience.

With audience targeting, you can show ads to people based on their interests, demographics, or traits. Essentially, this means that you are showing ads based on characteristics of the people who see them.

How to use audience targeting

You can target your ads based on your audiences in the following ways:

• Affinity segments: With affinity segments, you can reach people based on your understanding of their lifestyles, passions, and interests.
• In-market segments: These users, based on their recent search and browsing history, are more likely to purchase a specific product or service.
• Life events: You can target audiences based on some of the common milestones in life, such as graduating from college, moving to a new home, or getting married.
• Custom segments: You can create specific targeting segments based on a series of keywords, URLs, or apps your audience is likely to use.
• Custom intent segments: Google will auto-create specific audiences, based on your landing pages and website, to target a specific audience.
• Demographic targeting: This type of targeting allows you to reach people who are within the age, gender, parental status, and income bracket of your choosing.
• Re-marketing: Re-marketing allows you to target users who previously visited your site or provided their email address to you.

Demographic targeting and “unknowns”

Demographic targeting allows you to narrow your targeting. It prevents people outside of your chosen demographics from seeing your ads and helps you reach a specific set of potential customers, such as those that belong to a specific age range or gender.

The default setting in Google Ads is to target all demographics. You can change this setting and exclude certain demographics, but this can severely limit your campaign reach.

Of course, it’s impossible to infer the demographics of all website users. An ‘unknown’ in Google Ads refers to people whose age, gender, parental status, or household income haven’t been identified. With display advertising, most people fall into the ‘unknown’ category. You shouldn’t exclude people who fall into this category from your targeting, as they often represent large numbers of users, and you might want some of them to see your ads. Only exclude the ‘unknowns’ if you’re sure you want to restrict your campaign to a narrow audience.

The system can only target demographic information when this information is known. It can discover demographic information if, for example, someone using Chrome is logged into their Google account while browsing, or if they’re signed into a YouTube account where they’ve already given this information. Otherwise, the system will do a ‘best guess’ based on the user’s browsing behavior.

Affinity segments

You can select an affinity segment to reach users who have specific hobbies and interests or who are passionate about a particular topic. This segment targets people who have shown an affinity for your product or service during their online behavior. It’s the broadest audience targeting type available.

Affinity audiences are great for brand awareness. This targeting type reaches people who are at the beginning of their buying journey.

In-market segments

On the other hand, you can use in-market audience segments to reach people who are in the middle to end of their buying cycle. With these, you’re targeting people who are actively shopping, researching, comparing products across the Google Display Network, or searching for your specific product or service – and in many cases, they’re ready to purchase. These people are further down the purchase funnel, and you can set up your display campaign to reach them.

In-market segments are based on users’ recent purchase intent. Google factors in different metrics to determine a user’s purchase intent. These include:

• Content of sites browsed
• Proximity and frequency of visits
• Clicks on related ads
• Subsequent conversions

Google can use this information to classify and target users who are most interested in an advertiser’s offering.