When considering search marketing targeting (as if you consider this whenever you get a spare moment, but go with me here), you likely immediately think of keywords; understandable given this was the key targeting method for a long time. One of the features of Ads accounts that I often find to be woefully underused is the Audiences function, which allows advertisers to target their ads to specific user segments above and beyond the user’s search query.
Firstly, we need to recognize a significant difference in the audience function between search ads and other channels, such as social platforms or display advertising: when it comes to Search, regardless of the manner of audience targeting, the user must still search a query related to your keywords in order to have your ad served to them. In Search, audiences are used to hone your audience to the most relevant users, whereas, in digital broadcast channels, the audience is the main factor in whether your ad is shown to a user or not.
Given the user still needs to type a query into the search engine, we don’t rely wholly on audiences for relevant search ad delivery; we use audience segments to add context to a user’s query or limit the delivery of our ads to certain user groups. If this concept has got your marketing juices flowing, here are some of the options available to adopt an audience strategy for your campaigns.
- Remarketing lists
Remarketing isn’t a new concept – you’re likely familiar with this tactic having been chased around the internet for months on end with ads promoting that same item you browsed for a few moments that one time. This is not a good example of remarketing, but unfortunately is the circumstance that most recognize.
Remarketing is as it sounds; the practice of re-engaging a user that has previously interacted with the brand – literally ‘marketing again’. Remarketing lists can be created by implementing the relevant piece of code onto your website (you’ll need a different code for each Ads platform you’re using as they have their own versions), and then configuring the audience within your Ads account. I know the word ‘configure’ makes things sound very techy and complicated; keep using the word in conversations with your boss whilst remaining safe in the knowledge that this is a pretty simple process. All you need to do is tell the relevant platform what criteria your website visitors need to meet in order to be put into a certain audience.
For example, let’s say you’re creating remarketing lists in your shiny new Microsoft Ads account. Once the remarketing tag is in place (known as UET or Universal Event Tag in Microsoft Ads), you’ll need to give your audience a name, and choose the URLs a user needs to visit, or actions they need to carry out in order to qualify as an audience member. Still unsure? Here are some examples of how remarketing can be used in practice:
| Tactic | Configuration | Benefit |
| Existing Customers | Users who have visited the ‘thank you for your purchase’ page or other URL that indicates a completed transaction | Use this audience for upselling/cross-selling purposes, or to exclude from acquisition campaigns for cost efficiency. If retention is a main aim of yours, then I’d recommend targeting a campaign to this audience to emphasize your brand’s value when the user is on the lookout for competitors or alternative providers (E.g. if a member of your gym starts searching for ‘local gyms’) |
| Valuable Prospects | Those who have visited key pages on your website and not converted (E.g. Add to Basket, Wish List, Create an Account) | These users represent ‘low hanging fruit’, and could be nudged to conversion if included within acquisition campaigns. Vouchers or coupon codes are often promoted to such audiences in order to entice a purchase. |
| Product Preference | Build lists for each core product or line of business with all relevant product URL visits captured by one audience (E.g. Create an audience including users who have visited all football-related pages on your sportswear site, another for visits to rugby-related pages, etc) | Presents a sub-set of website visitors who have an interest in a specific product or area of your business. Apply these lists to the relevant campaigns to promote specific product lines to users who have already shown an interest in a particular sport or item. |
- Custom Audiences
Custom audiences are created from your customers’ own data – usually phone numbers or email addresses. This audience type is extra-exciting as any segment will be bespoke to your own business (assuming you don’t routinely share your customer data with your competitors…) and users can be arranged into audiences however you like, or more to the point, in whichever way your CRM structure will allow.
By collecting an individual’s contact details and associating the user with certain attributes, this group of users can be segmented based on their behaviors, resulting in tidy, coherent custom audience segments. For example, let’s say that when a purchase takes place on-site, your jewelry brand collects and stores (in a GDPR-compliant manner, of course) the customer’s email address, the item the user purchased, and the basket value of the transaction. Using this information, you could build audiences based on which item each customer has historically bought, or build segments for high-value customers who often spend a larger-than-average amount in a single transaction. Transversely, if you only collect the customer’s email address, it will be difficult to segment your customer data in any strategic manner.
Custom audiences are becoming a common alternative to other methods which use soon-to-be-dead third-party cookies so there’s never been a better time to solidify your first-party data approach. If this is likely to be a focus for your business, here are some considerations for you:
- Custom audience functions work by matching the customer data you have stored with the data held by the marketing platform in question (Microsoft Ads, Google Ads, Facebook if we’re talking social – whatever you’re using). I don’t know about you but I definitely don’t sign in to Google with the same email address I use for my online banking, and I don’t use the same Facebook email address to make Doctor’s appointments. For this reason, email match rates can be fairly low for some businesses; this means that whilst you may have 50,000 customer email addresses, you may only be able to target 500 of these in your Ads account. This match rate tends to increase when businesses use phone numbers to identify their customers instead – personally, I have about eight email addresses, but only one phone number and this is fairly common (save for drug dealers, adulterers, or workaholics but we’re not here to judge).
- Depending on the situation, it’s either really difficult or impossible to retrospectively collect user data, although it does happen. (Ever wonder why so many brands make a big deal of your birthday? Yeah, it’s a nice touch for customer retention, but it also gives you a reason to tell the company how old you are which can really help a business to assess the makeup of its customer base.) If you think you may need certain bits of information in order to build effective custom audiences then ensure this data is captured.
- It’s one thing capturing the data, it’s quite another being able to extrapolate a particular consumer trait from a mangled and unruly data set. Upon data collection, ensure inputs are standardized where possible (free-typed inputs are sure to result in a thousand different variations of the same answer based on semantics, typos, and formatting – the drop-down box is your data collection friend). If it feels like you’re asking the user for a lot of information upfront, adopt a value exchange model such as a discount voucher to entice and thank the customer.
- In-Market Audiences
When discussing audience options, I’ve often been asked whether it’s possible to place a remarketing tag on a competitor’s website in order to gather a list of their customers. (Firstly, no – this is absolutely not possible and would be akin to installing cameras in someone else’s home. Secondly, read some more blog articles and maybe focus on your own marketing efforts rather than employing underhand marketing tactics). Whilst covert digital marketing reconnaissance isn’t possible (ethics, yo), we have something even better to hand.
In-Market audiences are pre-built segments that can be found within your Ads account and the process of applying them to your campaigns entails ticking a box (which I’m sure we’d all agree is fairly straightforward). These segments indicate users who are (yep, you guessed it) ‘in the market’ for a certain product or service, meaning they’re likely fairly close to purchasing.
In-Market segmentation is a great example of how platforms can use their wealth of data to benefit advertisers without illegally sharing user data (or giving the proverbial cow away for free when revenues are earned from metaphorical milk sales). In-Market audiences contain users whose recent online behaviors have indicated a high likelihood of an imminent purchase, which is what sets this option apart from other ‘interest-based audiences. An eight-year-old car fanatic who frequently searches for Ferrari and looks at lots of shiny car pictures is likely to be plopped into an ‘interest’ audience for sports cars; In-Market segments differ in that transactional interest has been demonstrated. Users who are ‘In Market’ for a Ferrari are more likely to have researched optional extras, insurance costs, different models and colors, and all sorts of other intricate details, thus signifying to the search engine that they’re about to treat themselves.
There are up to 900ish segments to choose from depending on the platform and your location (as many are region-specific), and these audiences require zero configuration from the advertiser. A top tip to get started with In-Market audiences is to apply relevant segments as ‘bid-only’ to your campaigns, allowing you to monitor the performance of the segment vs everyone else who sees your ads. Based on the resulting performance data, you may choose to direct users through different online journeys, tailor ad copy messaging, or allocate different budgets to various audience-led campaigns.
In an age where search behaviors are increasingly disparate, audience overlays are a perfect way of adding an extra layer of contextual targeting to your campaigns. Whether you’re borrowing segments from Ads platforms or building your own, ensure to consider the user beyond the search query, as there is much more to a person than what they choose to type into a search engine.
