Targeting the Right Audience

One of the main advantages of digital marketing over physical channels is the ability to target a particular audience who you know are receptive to your advertising. A billboard may be seen by many, but it is also seen by everyone, and many of those people might not be your target audience, causing the money you spend on them to be wasted. AdWords gives us many tools to target our advertising, and in a recent live stream Google discussed additions to one of the most powerful, remarketing lists.

Remarketing lists are simply a list of users in Analytics, who you can target in your digital marketing. This blog will be about the new lists that Google has announced will be coming to search campaigns in the near future. For the new YouTube and Gmail releases you can expect a blog post from us soon, but in brief here Google aims to target people beyond simple demographics such as age or gender. You will now be able to target people who have experienced an important life event, or who have shown to have certain purchasing habits.

In Search campaigns, two recent additions to the remarketing list family have been moved from testing to full release, and are now available to use. If you have linked your YouTube and AdWords accounts, you can now make use of YouTube remarketing lists in your search campaigns. The image below shows the targeting options available. This is a great tool to use if you run any YouTube advertising, and is also a big step forwards in connecting all of Google’s marketing channels. You could also layer different levels of YouTube audiences for even greater effect. Upbidding on people who visit your channel is a good start, but those people who subscribe to the channel are obviously demonstrating a higher engagement with your content, and should be targeted with a higher bid still.

Google has left us spoiled for choice with the number of actions we can target using this new list.

The other new addition is Similar Audiences, a feature that has been available in display campaigns previously. To use similar audiences, you must provide Google with one of your audience lists. Google will then search for users who have a similar search behaviour to that of the users in your list and provide them to you in a new list. This is a great way to expand the reach of your campaigns, without having to reduce the quality of the audience you are advertising to.

The system for similar audiences, as described by Google

A good example of where these lists may be useful is as a way to promote lesser known brands. Creating a remarketing list of users who search for your brand regularly, and providing this list to Google, will result in you receiving a list of people who may not know your brand, but have similar search habits to the people who engage with it regularly. You can then bid higher on these users, or target them exclusively with a specialised ad copy. These lists update with new users every 24 hours, and you must have a remarketing list containing at least 1000 users to be able to utilise similar audiences.

The new feature soon to be implemented in search is arguably the most exciting (it is for me at least!). In-market Audiences have existed in display campaigns for a while, and they have been a great tool to use when targeting your audiences. They work by analysing user’s search terms to determine if they are looking to buy a product. For example, a user with search terms of “buy car insurance” and “cheap car insurance” is looking to buy car insurance, and would be added to the in-market car insurance list. These lists are based off intent, not interest, and so contain only those people who have shown actual intent to buy a product, rather than just interest in it. This is a focussed list of high intent users you can advertise your product to, who may not even have heard of your product before!

These new targeting options seem interesting when considered individually, but together the possibilities are exciting. Imagine being a wedding dress company, and being able to advertise to young women who are getting married, with similar search behaviour to your existing customers and whose search terms show that she is in the market for a wedding dress! That’s definitely better than a billboard.

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