Don’t overlook the benefits audience targeting can have for your PPC advertising. Following are some effective practices for improving your audience targeting. You cannot avoid audience targeting whether you are in charge of search, social, display, or native ad campaigns. Also with good reason. The way we write and serve ads has changed as a result of audience targeting. By using audience targeting, we were able to transform campaign creation from a largely intuitive guessing game to something that approaches a complex science. Due to the widespread usage of audience targeting throughout the advertising ecosystem, it is simple to ignore some tactics or best practices that would otherwise be followed. Let’s review some best practices and useful advice for improving your audience targeting game in light of this.
1. Think Outside the box
Setting up audience targeting with a too narrow a focus is a common mistake made by advertising. To be clear, I’m not advocating that you abandon best practices for granular targeting and go berserk. Instead, I strongly advise you to target your audience in unconventional ways. Here, creativity can take numerous forms, but let’s use in-market audiences as an illustration.
2. Plan a Time to Review Audience Performance and Make Adjustments
Appears obvious. But this one gets overlooked. A lot. As we just saw, there is a lot of benefit in using audience targeting with a 0% bid adjustment to track the data and determine what is effective. One of these qualities most significant advantages is that. We all forget things, though, because we are only human. We neglect to keep an eye on those audiences and then modify bids in response to the performance. Plan a time to review the results of your audience targeting strategy and make any necessary adjustments. The frequency that you set this reminder may vary based on the number of ad channels that you are using and the size/scope of your campaigns. My advice is, to begin with, a weekly program (you can change the frequency later!) and carry out the following activities at each session:
- Remarketing, In-Market, Similar, Custom, Customer Match, Custom Combinations, etc. are some examples of audience targeting types that are used.
- Examine the effectiveness of the applied audiences in your running campaigns and ad groups.
- Based on your performance objectives and KPIs, make positive (or negative) bid modifications.
- Note any changes that must be made to a campaign or ad group to isolate particular audiences or deliver special messaging for seasonality, etc.
3. Company is Popular With Audiences: Better Bundling
Your audience targeting options are a spark that can enhance (or restrict) the reach of your numerous campaign kinds, platforms, and digital advertising capabilities. Broad match + remarketing audiences (also known as “broaden”) has long been a successful combo that has raised the standard for feature-audience bundles. The same strategy can be applied to dynamic search ads (DSA). Shopping marketing and audiences work wonders together, particularly when Product Audiences are in play. Consider native Microsoft Audience Network advertisements or dynamic retargeting for search. Other than features and targeting options, audience categories can occasionally be stacked together successfully, such as LinkedIn Profile Targeting + Remarketing, etc. And for this reason, unique combinations have become popular. Utilizing the if-this-then-that logic with audiences can create the potential for extremely innovative targeting.
4. Message and Audience Matching
The notion of “the right message, at the right moment, for the right person” was one of audience targeting’s early advantages. Definitely strong stuff. By using audience targeting, we are able to identify our target audience and customize the message. We are aware of this, but, in my opinion (at least), it doesn’t occur as frequently as it ought to. I’m aware that it takes extra work to tailor your adverts to the audience. Increased CTR and conversion rates are often where the payoff is. When discussing RLSA (remarketing for search campaigns), the requirement for a separate campaign set to “Bid Only” (or “Target”) may be a deterrent.
5. Have No Fear of Granularity
When it comes to audience targeting, you should undoubtedly think outside the box, but you shouldn’t be afraid of granularity either. Advertisers apply audiences all too frequently using broad strokes logic, such as all visitors, all converts, etc. These generalizations are excellent beginning points, but they should only be used as such. Fine-grained audience targeting is used in sophisticated, high-performing marketing.
When I use the word “granular,” what do I mean?
- The audiences are segmented according to the categories, product/service types, and other factors that correspond to your website or organizational structure.
- Time is used to segment audiences (days since the visit, days since add-to-cart, months since the last touch, etc.).
That concludes our list of five useful suggestions for improving your audience targeting. Go ahead and use these suggestions now!