Which Value Proposition Do Custom Intent Audiences Offer Advertisers?

Imagine asking a six-year-old to sit and watch an Oscar winner for best picture. It doesn’t matter that the movie is the best of the year, the six-year-old won’t be interested because they aren’t the right audience. They would rather watch Spongebob Squarepants.

Producing an effective marketing campaign hinges on your ability to properly target and segment audiences. Even if you have award-worthy content on your website and the most compelling ad copy and creatives, it doesn’t matter if you aren’t reaching the right people.

It’s a chief responsibility of a marketer to connect good offers to the right customers. When it comes to Google Ads and PPC marketing, there are a plethora of targeting options available. Google prides itself on allowing users to connect to the exact audiences they want.

However, this is easier on paper than in practice because the sheer number of targeting options available can be incredibly overwhelming. Not only do you need to have a deep understanding of your ideal audience, but you also have to understand each possible targeting option and what it can do for your campaigns.

In this guide, you’ll learn about which value proposition do custom intent audiences offer advertisers.

What Is A Custom Intent Audience? How Does A Custom Intent Audience Work?

Google defines this targeting option as follows:

Custom intent audiences allow you to reach the ideal audience for your business in your Display and Video campaigns by segmenting ad groups according to the specific keywords and landing pages you would like to target. You can use custom intent audiences with auto-created audience segments or you can define your own audiences by entering keywords, and apps related to your product or service. Google Ads will then show ads to people who are likely to be interested in these keywords on pages, apps, and videos.

Let’s break this down.

Google has lots of data on its search users. Not only do they know what is user intent in searching, but where they go after a search and even what steps lead to that search being made in the first place. This is all data that marketers don’t readily have access to, yet it holds incredibly valuable and actionable insights.

Essentially, Google can see the trends and patterns that occur when people search for things, including which results they choose and what sort of offers they ultimately pick. Through custom intent audiences, Google connects advertisers to relevant prospects by looking at their past search data.

This allows Google to find audiences that have recently exhibited an interest in similar products and services. Google uses search data to determine who is actively looking for your products or services.

In a way, it is a more restricted audience targeting method compared to Customer Affinity Audiences that aims to emphasize quality prospects over quantity.

The Role Of Keywords And CPC In Custom Intent Audiences

Keywords play an important role in custom intent audiences. Before this audience management option was introduced, advertisers would incorporate the same keywords in their ads that were present on their web pages with the hope that customers were searching for these terms and would then be targetable with the ads.

The Custom intent audiences feature aims to reverse this way of thinking. Instead of selecting keywords and hoping that they align with what prospective customers are searching at that moment, marketers can now target keywords that audiences are actually using with the intent to convert.

Typically, cost-per-click (CPC) values for high-end search terms are much lower on the Google Display Network compared to search ads. This means that creating display campaigns with wide keyword targeting is incredibly viable and won’t break your bank overnight. This carries a number of benefits beyond just saving you money on clicks.

First, it allows you to focus on getting the right keywords for your campaign, instead of fussing overbid amounts and costs. Plus, lower CPC amounts mean you can target those high-priority keywords that are extremely relevant to your business and website. With more ad relevance, you see higher clickthrough rates and more conversions, thereby boosting your overall campaign performance.

For example, imagine a pizza restaurant wants to target the keyword “order pizza now.” Obviously, this is a high-value keyword with lots of immediate purchasing intent. On the Google Search Network, CPC for this keyword was too high, which means the restaurant opted for less relevant keywords like “gourmet pizza.”

Thanks to custom intent audiences on the Display Network and lower CPC values, this business can afford to generate traffic and conversions from people that are actively searching to order a pizza.

Leveraging Your Competitors’ Data With Custom Intent Audience

With the custom intent audience option, even your competitors’ websites can help you increase your ad performance and grow your business. While you can’t put your Display Ads directly on a competitor’s website, you can indirectly approach their customers.

By conducting a competitive search and website traffic analysis of competitor websites, you can discover the most successful pages and keywords on these sites. Then, adding these keywords and URLs to your custom intent audience categories will allow you to target their shoppers with ads of your own.

This is a great way to shift away from brand-level ads towards ads that target the specific products and services that your business offers, thereby meeting customer and client needs and expectations as they happen.

If you’re an eCommerce business or operating in a tightly competitive space, this is a great strategy that will allow you to convert the competition’s prospects into customers of your own!

Network Availability And Custom Intent Audience Types

The customer intent audience option is only available for Display and Video Ads. That said, there are two options that Google Ads users have with regards to how audiences will be targeted:

1. Auto-created custom intent audiences
2. Self-built custom intent audiences

Each option has its advantages, depending on your situation and experience as a Google Ads marketer.

Auto-Created Custom Intent Audiences

If you opt for Google to auto-create your custom intent audiences, then you’re handing over control and responsibility of your audience targeting. This method relies on Google’s sophisticated machine learning algorithms.

The way it works is that Google analyzes your account, website, and existing campaigns to understand your business and its products and services. Then, it uses the data it already has on search user behaviors to automatically generate audience categories based on what products, services, and content are currently in demand.

This is a great option if you’re new to Google Ads. You may still lack the experience and know-how to effectively use the channel to generate valuable traffic. It’s an easy way to rely on Google’s intelligence to better guarantee results from your ad targeting.

Additionally, your Google Ads account may be too new to have accumulated the amount of advertising data necessary to drill into audience insights and build a proper profile of your online audience.

An auto-created custom intent audience also saves time. If you’re a busy marketer that worries about adding another task to your daily or weekly to-do list, opting for Google to handle your targeting can be a relief and a quick way to start reaching better audiences through Display Ads and Video Ads.

Self-Built Custom Intent Audiences

If you prefer to retain control of your ad targeting, you can self-create a custom intent audience. When you choose this option, you’re introduced to additional settings that allow you to enter keywords that relate to your business, as well as URLs of websites offering similar products and services. Aside from URLs and keywords, you can also select apps and YouTube content relevant to your business.

These are all of the stuff on the Internet that prospective customers are searching for and engaging with while searching for your products and services. Google will use your selections to make audience recommendations based on the user search data it collects.

Building your own custom intent audiences typically leads to better results and is even recommended by Google. However, it is best used by seasoned Google Ads users.

Custom Affinity Audiences Versus Custom Intent Audiences Versus In-Market Audiences

As mentioned earlier, Google offers a lot of audience segmentation options that are found under the Google Audience Manager. Each available option is useful, but it can be a touch difficult to know when to use each to your advantage.

This section will briefly touch on the differences between customer affinity audiences, customer intent audiences, and in-market audiences. You can think of these different audience options as three degrees of purchase intent.

Custom Affinity Audiences

Affinity audiences work like a TV audience. The audience is varied, comes from different demographics but ultimately carries a similar interest. Custom affinity audiences are a little deeper. So, you’re still working at a branding level, but you’re targeting more specific interests.

For example, instead of targeting everyone that likes to run (affinity audience), you’re specifically targeting audiences interested in marathon and long-distance running and trying to sell them your specialized products.

Custom affinity audiences then use search terms and websites, similar to custom intent audiences, to connect the right users with your ads.

Custom Intent Audiences

With custom intent audiences, you’re moving one step closer to the transaction. Instead of looking at general keywords related to a specific niche, you’re now looking to target keywords that are specific to people searching for products. These prospective customers aren’t quite ready to purchase yet, but they are interested in products related to their interests.

Custom intent audiences act as the bridge between affinity and in-market audiences. For this reason, custom intent audiences are arguably the most important because you are targeting a wide breadth of prospects, but with a more precise scope.

This audience option also provides the most control and selection. Audiences are built based on your website’s data, existing Display, and Video campaigns, and more. All of this data allows marketers to dig deep into the motivations and feelings behind customer actions.

In-Market Audiences

These audiences are the closest to making a purchasing decision. They are on the verge of buying a product or service like yours! This means that the sites and searches they make will change and so must your keyword and URL targeting.

You want to look for users that are comparing and contrasting similar products from other brands, watching YouTube videos on these items, and even visiting your competitors’ websites. It’s not just about interest or intent, but action!

How To Define Custom Intent Audiences In Google Ads

Step1: In your Google Ads account, click on Tools, and select Audience manager.

Step 2: On the top bar you will find CUSTOM AUDIENCES, click on it.

Step 3: Click on Plus button to and then select Custom Intent

Step 4: Here you will see a new screen, now you can provide the name of your custom-built audience, keep selecting In-market keywords, and in the last, you can put the list of intended keywords.

Step 5: As soon as you will put keywords, you will get more related keywords in the IDEAS section on the right side. You can select more keywords from there too.

You can further explore the AUDIENCE SIZE in the right section. Here you can further filter your audience based on countries, languages and restrict the audience to either display or video.

Moreover, It will give you an idea about the estimated audience of their age, gender, and parental status based on the intended keywords you selected. Once you are done just click on the CREATE button and your custom intent audience is ready.

Step 6: So you finally ready with your custom intent audience list.  Now you can select your audience and then click on above Add to ad groups to assign the list to your particular ad group in a specific campaign.

Case Study: Custom Intent Audiences At Work

Here is a simple scenario that will help you understand how custom intent audiences might work in an existing campaign on the Google Display Network. You may be able to apply the lessons in this example to your own Google Ads efforts!

 

Overview

Martin is a marketing manager of an outdoor footwear company that is gearing up for his upcoming fall campaign. He wants to use Display Ads to target customers that will be most interested in his products.

Step 1: Custom Affinity Audiences

Martin starts his campaign with Custom Affinity Audiences. With this method, the targets generic, broad keywords that will cover as much of his related audience as possible. These keywords include things like:

• Sports shoes
• Hiking shoes
• Running shoes
• Men’s running shoes
• Outdoor shoes for women
• Women’s running shoes

Martin is extra excited because some of these keywords are too expensive on the Google Search Network for his business. With lower CPC values on the Display Network, Martin is finally able to capitalize on highly relevant keywords!

He also chooses a number of popular websites that people interested in outdoor shoes may visit, such as websites of Nike, Urbanoutfitters, ASOS, etc.

This provides an excellent start to Martin’s fall campaign. With the broader custom affinity audiences, his ads and videos will display in front of a wide range of people that have interests related to his business. This causes a moderate boost in business for Martin. He attracts shoppers that are looking for new outdoor shoes; some even purchase a pair after browsing Martin’s website!

But, there is a tradeoff. The broad scope of his targeting also creates some irrelevant traffic. Martin also attracts people that are searching for shoe polish or laces, which his store doesn’t offer. He also draws clicks from outdoor enthusiasts that are looking for specific brands that Martin does not carry.

This means he needs to fine-tune some of the keywords and narrow the scope of his targeting to draw more relevant visitors. With these tweaks, Martin hopes to improve his clickthrough and conversion rates.

Step 2: Custom Intent Audiences

With the fall season beginning, Martin wants to adjust his campaign once more. It is time to narrow the focus of his targeting to reach actual buying prospects. To do so, he utilizes custom intent audiences to find customers with higher intent to purchase.

By analyzing the results of his campaigns using custom affinity audiences, Martin discovers the specific keywords and URLs that produced the best results for his business. With these insights, he has a better understanding of what searches customers use to connect with his website and products.

Next, Martin’s job is to target brand and product-specific keywords. This will greatly help him narrow his reach to those directly looking for the products he offers. Some of the keywords he adds to his display campaigns are:

• Nike Metcon 5
• Nike Flex TR9
• Salomon X Ultra 3
• Salomon Speedcross 4 GTX
• Adidas Terrex Free Hiker Hiking Shoes
• Adidas Alphaboost Shoes
• Mammut Approach Women’s Hiking Shoes
• Mammut Mountaineering Boots for Men

After adding these product-focused keywords, Martin decides that some of his URLs are too broadly focused on the outdoors and not specific enough to footwear. He removes these URLs and adds some additional websites to his targeting list that have more content related to outdoor footwear.

Step 3: Monitoring And Adjusting

With the use of the custom intent audience feature, Martin’s campaign starts to improve. There isn’t a huge, immediate change, but the daily growth that his campaigns experience helps increase Martin’s traffic and online sales.

By the middle of the fall season, Martin is practically swimming in new customers and sales!

Martin continues to optimize his audience and pays close attention to how his custom intent audience targeting affects key metrics like lowering bounce rate, increasing average session duration, and raising his conversion rates.

Feeling ambitious, Martin decides to also create custom intent audience categories for his top competitor’s brands. By paying attention to how the competition approaches their advertising efforts, Martin is able to adapt these insights to his own campaigns and audience configurations.

By selecting his three main competitors and using their brands in custom intent audience categories, Martin sees another boost in campaign performance. He increases his traffic, impressions, CTR, and more.

Summary

Martin has his strongest fall sales season on record and it is all thanks to Google’s custom intent audience feature. With the custom intent audiences, Martin is able to completely replace third-party audience data and insights.

Not only does this save him time, but he also guarantees that the data he uses is accurate because it is Google’s insights! Ultimately, this makes his Display and Video Ad campaigns exceedingly more profitable and eliminates his dependency on outside data and insights.

Important Tips For Using Custom Intent Audiences

Ready to utilize custom intent audience categories in your own campaigns? These tips will help you make better use of this feature and avoid potential pitfalls that will get in your way of achieving great results with custom intent audiences! Before you get started, consider the following items:

• Always keep the goal or objective of your campaign in mind when selecting keywords and URLs. This will keep them consistently on target for achieving the results your business needs.
• When choosing which keywords to target for your custom intent audience, don’t forget to use your keyword planner tool. Don’t have one? PPCexpo Keyword Planner is free for basic keyword insights.
• For the best results for your campaign, aim to include around 10 to 15 keywords but not more than 20.
• When adding competitor URLs, focus on product pages instead of their generic home page. This will ensure that you target their shoppers and not general visitors.
• It’s worth noting that the keywords you add to a custom intent audience will follow the rules of a broad match type. Remember, Google is focusing on customer intent, so it needs to be less restrictive with keyword matches.
• If you want to add competitor products and brands, be very specific and double-check the spelling, spacing, etc.
• Pay attention to how users are actually searching, as this can sometimes change. There may be alternate terms that your customers are using to browse for products and services like yours.
• You should have conversion tracking properly enabled before you begin your campaign. This will give you an accurate picture of how your performance changes each time you add or exclude a URL or keyword.
• Continuously adjust your keywords and URLs with the idea that each one should serve the common theme of your business and campaign. If people aren’t searching for a keyword or visiting a URL, exclude it.
• Use ad groups to organize audience keywords and URLs based on the products that you are selling.
• Leverage custom affinity audience, custom intent audience and in-market audience categories in a tiered approach, starting with custom affinity audience. Then, refine and narrow your targeting with a custom intent audience before grabbing shoppers on the verge of making a purchase with the in-market audience option.

Wrap up

The custom intent audience feature has a number of powerful advantages that can greatly improve the targeting of your Display and Video Ads. For one, it is a useful middle-ground between custom affinity audiences and in-market audiences that optimizes the middle of your sales funnel.

Not to mention, lower cost-per-click values make any keyword affordable. You can even target your competitor keywords!

Like any targeting option in Google Ads, effectively using a custom intent audience requires constant monitoring and frequent adjustments. The advantage, however, is that you can rely on Google’s deep understanding of your audiences, instead of third-party data insights.