The world of Google Ads is intricate and you will constantly be discovering new ways to reach the customers that are most suited to your business. Remarketing or targeting specific audiences are one of the most powerful ways to amplify your reach and exposure. Using audiences, you can dictate which specific users are shown your ads based on their own habits, interests, interactions with your business and what they are researching online.
We will explain below a step-by-step guide to adding an audience to your ad groups. It’s crucial you set up these campaigns correctly in order to benefit your business.
What is an audience?
Similar to a live performance, an audience is a group of people that you can speak directly to, perform for and target with your Google Ads campaigns. The people within your audience all meet certain conditions which then group the together. These conditions are set by you. For example, you may own an online pottery store and your top selling products are vases. You could create an audience based on users who have visited your category vases, and then these users are shown ads about your discount off vases this weekend. An audience that is targeted for interacting with your online store is generally part of a remarketing lists.
If you are using remarketing, you can use these audiences for:
You can then create and manage your audiences from the ‘Shared Library’ menu on the left-hand side of your Google Ads account.
So, what kind of audiences will you manage?
There are 5 types of audiences you can use when remarketing. We have broken down for you when to use these audiences and how they work.
You will notice when we get into the step-by-step guide of how to set these audiences up, that Google Ads talks to a “Membership” for your audiences. This simply means how long a user (technical term is cookie) will stay in your audience lists. This timing is set at 30 days to begin and by default and can only be extended to 180 days maximum for the Search Network and a further 540 days for the Google Display network. It’s important to remember, that every time a user visits your site this time “membership” is reset for them.
So how do you know what kind of “Membership” will be correct for your audience lists? This is something that has no general rule and is definitely what best suits your own business. Some pointers we can add however is to choose a duration that best reflects your buying cycle. This could depend what your product or service is. Some products are larger purchases and require more time to persuade the user to purchase, for example; a car or house remodel. If this were the case then a longer duration such as 90 days would be best.
If your product is easily converting then the default 30 days may be appropriate. In addition to this, if your website has high traffic to it and often the same traffic then a smaller membership will suit your business. If you have low traffic, then a longer duration will best help increase your audience size.
What’s up next?
Now that you are accustomed to the different types of audiences, the membership limitations and how you can target them, let’s get creating!
Repeating the above steps, you can create multiple remarketing lists. Once you have done this you can then add them to your campaigns and ad groups.
Wanting to know how to add these audiences to your campaigns and ad groups? Follow our below guide for an easy start:
- For a search campaign:
- Remarketing: Users that have previously interacted with your business
- For a display campaign, there are three options:
- Affinity: Users grouped together based on their buying habits, interests and lifestyle.
- Intent and life events: Users who are actively researching products or shifting purchase behaviour and brand preferences. Most often users who are changing for milestones like buying a house, pregnancy and so on.
- Remarketing
- For a video campaign
- Affinity
- Intent
- Remarketing
- Detailed demographics: users that share common traits, such as being students, homeowners, or new parents.
By creating audiences, you can retrieve a lot of otherwise lost conversions for your business. In addition to this, you will also discover new customers right before they may have purchased with your competitor. More often than not, a user requires a few pushes to take the leap and convert on your site. By creating audiences and being able to retarget and speak to these audiences again, you won’t miss out again.
