By Charlie Cummins – bbmm.ie
The breakfast briefing topic today at Google’s HQ was an introduction to audience advertising: how the data is used by Google and how advertisers can tap into this vast data resource and take advantage of it to make their audience targeting more effective for their AdWords/display online ads.
Overview
The presentation opened with an overview of the early stages of Google Advertising and how it used audience data in a limited fashion. It then went on to expand on what the presentation termed “the rise of the audience” and to explain how Google has refined its use of audience data over time to make today’s AdWords campaigns more relevant and appealing to users based on what they’re searching for and what their previous search history also reveals about them.
Audience Suites
The central core of the presentation was focused around what Google described as their audience suites/segments. The various segments were arranged in a funnel, starting with the broadest definition at the top and filtering down to the most focused segment, as this image shows:
Each stage of the funnel delivers a more tightly defined audience segment on which advertisers can build more focused campaigns. A brief explanation of each segment is as follows:
Affinity Segments: these are broad, lifestyle and interest segments based on peoples browsing habits. Marketers can tap into this to engage with precise audiences on a bigger scale.
In-Market Segment: this picks up on “signals” from users current browsing patterns, which would indicate that they are entering a mode to purchase products or services.
Similar Audience: this segment is based on looking at data from your own existing remarketing audience and finding similar sets of people who demonstrate the same patterns of behaviour.
Video Remarketing: using lists taken from your video channel.
Customer Match: this is a relatively new feature from Google, allowing an advertiser to upload their email address database to AdWords, who then use the email address data to match ad displays. (Note: email addresses are coded for privacy/security).
Display Remarketing: lets you show your display ad to people who have already visited your website when they are using other websites which are part of Google’s display network.
RLSA: remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) is a feature that lets you customize your search ads campaign for people who have previously visited your site, and tailor your bids and ads to these visitors when they’re searching on Google.
Most of the above audience segments can be attached to existing Google AdWords campaigns and should certainly be factored in as part of any new activity.
If you’d like to explore how the audience segments can help your AdWords activity, please email us at [email protected]
