If you’re unhappy with your Google Ads campaign performance, it’s time to review your targeting strategy.
A successful targeting strategy goes beyond identifying buyer personas. Google comes equipped with several tools to help drill down your overall ideal audience to a set of targeted identifying factors that, when implemented, are the most likely to yield results.
By using the following Google Ads targeting tools, you can create a campaign built on specificity, not guesswork, and set yourself up for success.
Best Practice Reminders
We’re sure this isn’t your first rodeo with Google Ads. But just in case, here’s a quick run-down of best practices to implement before moving forward with more advanced targeting:
- Analyze Your Competition: A thriving paid advertising campaign doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It depends not only on your strategy but how your competitors are choosing to advertise. Here, we cover 5 key types of competitor research.
- Build a Strong Keyword List: Arguably the most important factor of your campaign, it’s crucial to carefully choose keywords to catch your audience’s eye. Keywords that are chosen deliberately and backed by research are going to be the most likely to land in front of your target audience. You can find our tips on getting started with keyword research
- Utilize Tracking Tools: Google Ads has robust reporting abilities on whatever kind of ads you’re using (display, search, phone, apps, etc.) You can also customize your conversion tracking depending on your goals (form submissions, website visits, purchases, phone calls, etc.) But outside of Google Ads, it’s important to cover other tracking bases. Include Google Tags on the website and landing pages you’re using for your campaign, and make sure they’re connected to Google Analytics, which can offer even deeper insight on your ad performance.
And if you’re looking for free tools to kick off your campaign building, Google Search Console, SEMrush and Google’s Keyword Planner can generate keywords, check search visibility and give insight into your competitors’ ad strategy.
Audience Segments
Here’s where it’s crucial to get specific. Over the last few years, Google has expanded from solely focusing on keywords to combining this strategy with specific audience targeting. Your ad campaign’s performance will largely be determined by how well you’re able to set up your ad audience. That means starting with questions like:
- Who is your target audience?
- Can you compartmentalize your target audience into a few key phrases, demographics or interests?
- What do the members of your target audience have in common with each other?
Luckily, Google has several options for finding the right people, even if you’re creating an audience from scratch.
In-Market Segments:
In-Market audiences are Google’s built-in feature filled with categories covering products and interests that your ideal audience may relate to. These are designed to help you find the people who have recently been searching for products or services within your industry.
For example, if a marketing agency was targeting leads in the manufacturing or technology sector, they would choose In-Market Segments that are relevant to those fields.
You can use the “Search” feature to find the right In-Market Segments.
Demographic Segments:
Here, you can go beyond interests and dig into more specific demographics you’re targeting, including:
- Who your ideal target is (ex. age, gender, marital status)
- What their interests and habits are (ex. technology, travel, sports)
- What they are actively researching or planning (ex. buying a house, building a startup)
- How they have interacted with your business in past campaigns (if applicable)
You can use the “Browse” feature to target demographics for your ideal audience. For example, if a marketing agency was advertising their services, it would be smart to target company decision-makers and marketing leads.
Combined Segments:
You also have the option to combine both in-market and demographic segments. Together, they help build more fleshed-out “personas.” A persona can encompass traits from both types of segments – they can include interests (like technology or manufacturing) and demographics (like age, job title or industry), which means the likelihood of finding your ideal audience is even higher.
You can combine segments by choosing in-market and demographic segments, going to the “Browse” tab and clicking on “Your combined audience segments.”
Customer Segments and Customer Match:
You don’t have to rely on the above two features to build your audience. Google allows you to piece together audience segments based on your data within the Google Audience Manager.
Here, you can save and store all your past segmented audiences to use again in the future, along with their overall performance, and you can also upload customer lists for a hyper-targeted campaign audience.
Another feature within the Audience Manager is Customer Match. When you upload your list of customer data, Google will attempt to locate those customers specifically and target those users (and ones similar to them). Learn more about Customer Matching here.
Targeting for Display Network
With ads that will be shown within the Display Network, you can implement additional targeting strategies to catch the eye of your ideal audience.
Topic Targeting:
With Topic Targeting, Google will push your ads to a variety of pages that it believes fall in line with your audience’s interests. With this feature, your content will be pushed to places that include content relevant to your campaign’s topics. For example, if you’re selling televisions, you could select topics surrounding technology and electronics.
Placement Targeting:
Beyond Topic Targeting, Google also offers Placement Targeting. With Placement Targeting, you can choose specific websites, videos and applications where you’d most like your ads to pop up. For example, if your audience is most likely to be found on a certain YouTube channel, you can add that URL to target.
Location Targeting:
You’re also able to specify where you’d like your ads to be shown, down to specific cities, with Location Targeting (Geotargeting). Yes, many people may just choose the country where their business is located by default. But, especially for smaller businesses looking to drum up local interest, this is a great feature to drill down further than country or state.
For example, if a marketing agency wanted to advertise its services locally, they could specify that their ads only show up only within the radius of Chicago and the Chicago suburbs.
Retargeting and Similar Audiences
If you’ve already launched your Google Ad campaign and you’re not seeing the results you hoped for, retargeting should be your next step.
Retargeting means you’re going after potential leads that fell off somewhere during your desired customer path. Perhaps they went to your website but did not complete a purchase or sign up for your newsletter or visit multiple pages. Now, you’ll be re-targeting those people, with the hopes of persuading them to convert.
This method can also be used hand-in-hand with Similar Audiences (also referred to as “lookalike audiences”). Google creates similar audiences by finding the shared characteristics within the people you add to your audience lists.
The Similar Audiences method is designed to take the data you have on the audiences you’re retargeting and expand your possible pool with a new batch of qualified potential customers. With a stronger, more in-depth pool to retarget, you’re much more likely to achieve higher click rates and more conversions.
If you’ve already launched your Google Ad campaign and you’re not seeing the results you hoped for, retargeting should be your next step.
Zero in on Your Google Ads Targets
As you can see, several intertwined factors can determine how successful you are in targeting the right leads in Google Ads. Using these tools and strategies will help you get specific about your ideal audience, dial in on their needs and frequently visited places and be more likely to grab their attention.
We understand that this process is not only a financial investment but a major time investment as well. That’s why our team at Simple Machines Marketing is prepared to help you build, launch and optimize a paid Google Ads campaign that achieves results. Contact us today to get started.
