Reach the right people with audience targeting

In Google Ads, there are several different ways to work with targeting, and today we’ll focus on audience targeting.

Let’s work with different customer groups to show the differences and strategies you can use. We’ll use fictional names and a fictional company to illustrate how you can work strategically.

You run a company that sells consumer electronics and want to focus on selling gaming consoles, dishwashers, and the most exclusive range of hand mixers.

You have already created customer groups for these products, which look like this:

Sixten, 18 years old, likes to play video games and often hangs out on online forums where he gets the latest news from the gaming world.

Marika, 35 years old. She bakes a lot and is a big fan of cooking shows on TV where she picks up the best tips to make the ultimate cake. She also runs her own blog where she shares recipes.

The couple Åsa and Tony, 20–40 years old, have just bought a new house and are looking for a dishwasher. They are searching intensively but need to have a dishwasher installed as soon as possible.

To understand how it all fits together, here’s a quick explanation of the different audience segments available. First, we’ll explain the different audiences, and then we can go into how to work with them strategically.

Observation & Targeting
When setting up audiences in a campaign, you can choose whether to use Targeting or Observation.

Targeting means that only the audience you set up will be able to see your ads. This often entails a big limitation but can be useful when, for example, you have budget restrictions. Targeting is also often used in Display campaigns when we only want to show our ads to the audiences we have selected.

Observation means the audience is added as an additional layer in the campaign. If you choose not to make a bid adjustment, this audience will simply show which users have searched for your keywords within those segments. If you choose to make a bid adjustment, users in the audience can receive a higher bid, which allows your ad to appear in a higher position than usual. You can also work with negative adjustments, which means you can lower bids for certain audiences.

Bid adjustments work differently if you’ve chosen an automated bidding strategy.

Detailed Demographics
Here you can set Parent Status, Marital Status, Homeownership, and Education. This is essentially an expansion of the standard Demographics category.

In-Market Audiences
These are people who intend to buy something. For example, think of someone who is searching a lot for cars over a short period of time. They likely fall into this group.

Life Events (only available in the Display Network)
Here you’ll find Home Purchase, Graduation, Marriage, Retirement, and more. You can target people who are newlyweds or about to get married, those who have just graduated or are about to graduate, and so on. This category is perfect if you offer products specifically for these groups, but it can also be useful when certain products are likely to be purchased more frequently during certain life stages.

Affinity Audiences
This group is about people with a long-term interest in something — for example, cooking.

Remarketing and Similar Audiences
In short, remarketing lists include people who have previously visited your site. Similar audiences are lists generated based on your remarketing list, where the included users have similar behavior — for example, those who have visited a competitor.

Custom Audiences (only available in the Display Network)
Here you can build your own audience based on either purchase intent or affinity. If you create a custom affinity audience, you could try targeting fans of a specific football club, for example.
If you instead create a custom intent audience, you might use specific keywords from your site and add URLs from your biggest competitors in the field.

Combined Audiences
Here you can create a combination of the previously mentioned groups. For example, you could target people with a long-term interest in interior design AND an intent to buy lampshades, and then add remarketing lists to ensure they’ve visited your site before. You can add “AND” or “OR,” which gives you many possibilities to experiment with to find the perfect audience combination.

Choosing an Audience

Let’s see how we would set up our campaigns using audiences to reach these people.

We’ll start with Sixten, where you could use the following audiences:

As a remarketing list, you could create a list of those who visited the video game page, since they are likely closer to making a purchase than those who just visited your site in general. However, it is often good to also include everyone who has visited your site when it comes to search ads, since users in the audience must be searching in order to see the ad.

In this case, it’s a good idea to work with different bid adjustments, where those who have previously visited the video game page can get a higher bid than those who have only browsed the site in general.

Now, moving on to Marika, you could set up audiences as follows:

Since the hand mixer is the latest model, it’s unlikely that many people are familiar with it yet. Therefore, you could create a Display campaign with images of the hand mixer to spark interest, and then also support it with search advertising. In the Display campaign, you can use Targeting as the setting to ensure that only the audiences you’ve selected see the ad.

If you want to create a custom audience, go to Tools & Settings → Shared Library → Audience Manager. In the left menu, you’ll find Audience Lists, and you can then click on Custom Audiences in the top menu next to Remarketing.

A custom affinity audience to reach Marika could look like this:

Audience Insights
Another feature in Audience Manager is Audience Insights. Here, you can get relevant information about your current site visitors and which audiences they belong to. All you need to do is select one of your remarketing lists to learn more about it. Then you can draw further conclusions about whether you’ve reached the people you intended, or if the audience looks completely different. It might turn out that the people in your remarketing list have a strong correlation with another segment.

Finally, one task remains: to design your own set of audiences to reach Åsa and Tony. Try searching for audiences in your account to see how you would go about reaching the couple.

How to add audience targeting to a campaign or ad group