Better Performance With Audience Intelligence

It’s always important to know your customer. In financial circles, that would mean understanding the sources of funds of your depositors. Knowing your customers in the marketing world is quite different. It is about understanding why they are making their purchases.

In the olden days, marketers weren’t able to drill down to as specific of audiences as we are today in the digital space. TV, newspaper, billboard and others were always so broad that you may get a lot of who you want to target but you certainly get others you did not intend. With everyone on their devices, it is easier to understand what each person is looking to buy yet it is still not completely clear cut on paid search.

If a brand were selling dog food, then it would be the easiest thing to just target those who are in-market for pets or who have an affinity for pets. However, doing so would preclude that advertiser from reaching a lot of other people looking to buy their product. Now that really begs the question - what are audience lists for on paid search?

Audience Insights

Take a look at the dynamically created ‘All Converters’ list in the Google Ads audience manager. This will tell you which lists index high as purchasers to the brand/s supported in that account. It’s important to pay attention to this list to get to know your customers. 

As an example, a brand selling dog food will likely have customers who are constantly in market or have a strong affinity to home related activity. While this is not absolutely necessary on paid search as keyword targeting takes priority, it does help inform the types of keywords and ad copy that will resonate well with your target market.

Bid Strategies

Automated bidding was rolled out to create time for digital marketers to implement more strategic and value-added initiatives. Finding the right audiences and applying them to campaigns is one of the highest value added strategies in today’s bid strategy technology. There’s very little control left that paid search professionals have over the speed of campaign spend but there is still a huge amount left when it comes to where the budget is spent. Layered audiences not only provide insight to practitioners but also to algorithms to gain better insight into groups of users that have a higher propensity to convert.

When thinking about campaign targeting and automated bidding, always understand who your customer is to better reach them and serve them the right messaging. Google will continue to take away manual levers and push for automated solutions, which means knowing the levers that remain and having a strategy around using them will be crucial to the survival of any paid search program.

Stay tuned for more thoughts around the changing landscape of digital marketing.