Title: Getting Started with Audience Targeting in PPC
1Getting Started with Audience Targeting in PPC
- PPC advertisers have had two weapons in their
arsenal search and social. Search is, by
definition, an expression of intent users are
telling you exactly what theyre looking for.
When search advertisers choose the right
keywords, they usually get great results from
search. - The problem with search, though, is two-fold. You
dont know anything about the searcher aside
from what they searched for. They could be a
potential customer, someone looking for a job,
or a kid doing research for a high school paper.
Also, the search universe is finite its
limited to people actively searching. - Social, on the other hand, has great reach.
People are on social media all day long, talking
about a variety of topics. And we tell the social
sites everything about ourselves where we work,
what we like, whether were married with kids,
etc. Its easy to get pinpoint audience
targeting with social. Whats missing is the
intent we have no idea whether our audience is
in the market for our products and services. - Remarketing emerged over the past few years as an
answer to the dilemmas posed by search and
social PPC. We already know something about the
people who visited our website. If they came
from social, we know a lot about them. Layering
that audience information on top of search data
is powerful. - So how do you get started with audience
targeting? - Put remarketing codes on your website
- Most PPC platforms now have a remarketing tag.
Install the tags for the platforms youre using
Google remarketing is done through Google
Analytics, although there is also a native
Adwords code you can use. - Bing Ads uses Universal Event Tracking, or UET.
audiences.
- Facebook and Twitter also have tags that can be
used to create remarketing - Start gathering data
Once the codes are installed on your site, youll
start to gather data that will be used to create
audiences. Every advertiser should create a
minimum of two audiences all website visitors
and converted visitors.
2- With remarketing, you can combine audiences to
create a custom combination, or you can exclude
audiences from targeting (also known as negative
audiences). For example, you can create an
audience of visitors who did not convert. This is
a prime target for remarketing and is the
simplest way to get started. - Go advanced
- Targeting non-converting visitors can be highly
effective if you have a simple product or offer.
But what if youre promoting multiple products
and services? It probably makes sense to create
an audience for each product or landing page, or
at least groups of products. - Youll also want to think about your customers
and what offers make the most sense. Here are
some potential ways to create granular offers - Show the user the product originally viewed, with
a discount or time-based offer. Creating urgency
is a great way to convince on-the-fence prospects
to buy. - Show the user a complimentary product or service.
Maybe the person chose not to buy the sunglasses
they were looking at, but they might be
interested in a nice hat. Incidentally, this
works for converted visitors, too its the
online version of would you like fries with
that? - Show the user a content asset related to the
product or service. For products with long or - complicated sales cycles, users often need
additional information. Offer that to them via
remarketing. - For ecommerce advertisers with large product
catalogs, Google offers dynamic remarketing,
which automatically creates ads based on your
product feed. Its a great way to scale your
remarketing efforts. - For B2B advertisers, time-based remarketing is
often highly effective. You can serve content to
users tailored to their buying cycle. Lets say
your buying cycle is 90 days long. You can
create 3 audiences with different durations 30
days, 45 days, and 60 days. For the 45 day
audience, exclude the 30 day audience, so youre
only reaching users whove been in the market
more than 30 days. For the 60 day audience,
exclude the 30 and 45 day audience. Each
audience can receive content that becomes
progressively more urgent in nature, coinciding
with the buying cycle. - For social PPC, custom audiences can be used in
countless different ways. Audiences can be
segmented based on demographic data, with content
specific to each group. Facebook also has
Lookalike Audiences, which algorithmically
matches similar users to your custom audience.
Lookalike audiences can be a great way to expand
your reach to a relevant group.