Google Ads Audience Targeting: Combined Audience

In Google Ads, audience targeting can make or break your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. With a better understanding of your audience, it’s easier to create focused ads that strike a chord with people. And that makes it easier to persuade them to become paying customers, which does wonders for your return on investment (ROI).

In this article, we’ll explore a new type of Google Ads audience targeting, known as combined audience. Read on to find out answers to important questions, such as:

1. What is combined audience in Google Ads?
2. What is the purpose of using combined audience?
3. How does combine audience targeting work?
4. How does Google understand user intent?
5. What are the benefits of combined audience targeting?
6. How do you set up combined audience?
7. Will combined audience be the death of keywords?

Without further ado, let’s get started.

1. What is Combined Audience in Google Ads?

Combined Audience is a Google Ads audience targeting option that enables advertisers to refine their ads by combining information from multiple audience attributes. For instance, you could leverage data insights from consumer interests, demographics, and past purchasing behaviors.

To illustrate combined audiences at work, let’s imagine you have a rental car business. You target in-market audiences, as well as people that have an interest in travel. If you use normal targeting, your ads may display to people that like travel but they already have their own car. As a result, your PPC budget is wasted.

With combined audiences, you can hone in on consumers who are in the market for a rental car, and anyone who is not interested in renting a car will be excluded.

2. What is the purpose of using the Combined Audience option?

The best reason to use combined audience targeting in Google Ads is so you can reach people that have strong buying intent. Advertisers can layer several in-market audiences on top of one another to increase the level of niche targeting.

After you get a little bit of practice, it’s possible to increase your clickthrough rate (CTR) with this strategy.

3. How Does Google understand User Intent?

Across the Google network, there is a treasure trove of data that the search engine giant uses to learn more about consumers. This data tells Google about:

• Consumer preferences
• Buying behaviors and patterns
• What users search for
• What sites they visit
• What categories they look at
• What items they are interested in
• What type of emails they sign-up for and receive
• What places they look up on Google Maps

For example, if you spend time reading reviews of the best laptops, watching videos about laptops, and browsing e-commerce stores for laptop deals, Google will figure out that you have strong buying intent for laptops.

4. How does Combined Audience Targeting work?

Combined audiences implement a form of audience segmentation so you can target the most relevant audience for your offer.

If you want to target people that have an interest in food, you will use affinity audience targeting in Google Ads. By comparison, if you wanted to target people who are actively looking to place a fast-food order, you would use in-market audience targeting.

Combined audiences work by finding the perfect intersection between the affinity audience and in-market audience. So, doing that, you can advertise your pizza takeaway business to people that have an interest in food and are currently looking to buy some fast-food.

You can also drill-down to refine your targeting by a myriad of variables, such as age, location, or whether someone has previously visited your site.

5. What are the Benefits of Combined Audience targeting?

As we mentioned, combined audience targeting in Google Ads enables advertisers to reach people that have stronger buying intent.

Here are some more benefits of this type of Google Ads audience targeting:

• Target niche interests – If you have a niche brand, product, or service, then the combined audience technique is an excellent idea to reach the right audience based on their interests.
• Exclude unqualified leads – Doing this will ensure your ads are only served to people likely to click or convert.
• Better ROI – Your ads will reach relevant, interested leads, so it’s more likely your ad will yield results.
• Quick data collection – Combined audience targeting makes it easy to collect consumer data from multiple audience groups.
• Focused brand awareness – With the high-level, focused targeting, your brand is sure to get a good reputation as one that delivers whenever people are in the market for a product.

6. How to Set-up a Combined Audience?

Combined Audience targeting is a combination of “ADD”, ”OR” or “NOT”.  You can narrow down your audience by using these operators.

Let’s take an example where you are selling men apparel and wearable and you want to target the audience who are in the market and showing interest in men’s apparel and also have an affinity for lifestyle and hobbies but you don’t want to target those demographically who are parents of teen.

Follow the steps below to set the combined audience for the example above:

• Sign in to your Google Ads account.
• Select one of your existing campaigns or create a new one.
• Select audiences and then open the combined audiences menu.

• After you select combined audience, a new window will appear.

• Click on + new combine audience to add your audience.
• Under “Audience name”, enter a name for your new combined audience let’s say men’s wearable

• Underneath include people who match the following conditions you can include the in-market audience of men’s apparel and affinity audience who are showing an affinity for lifestyle & hobbies

• Now you can use “ADD”, “OR” or “NOT” to further add or exclude audience. As you don’t want to show your ads to those audiences who are parents of teenage, put your audience under “NOT” section.

• Once you have completed your combined audience set-up, you can see your newly created audience coming under combined audience section, you can include this in your list and continue on your campaign.

Now this single combined audience group which is Men’s Wearable is a combination of an audience from in market for men’s apparel and affinity for lifestyle and hobbies but those who fall under these two categories but they are parents of teenage will be excluded and not be targeted.

Here comes another scenario!

Now later you realize there is another in-market audience which is under formal wear but you want to keep your previously created combined audience as well, here you can do layering with them.

As you have added this formal wear category it will bring the new audience as well who might be the parent of teenage for its own category which is formal wear but those parents of a teen who were coming in men’s apparel and lifestyle & hobbies will still be excluded.

7. Is Combined Audience Targeting the Death of Keywords?

For what seems like an eternity, keywords have been the foundational building blocks of online advertising. They are integral to search engine optimization and vital to PPC campaigns.

Advertisers and marketers can target specific keywords, using them cleverly in their content and ad copy to attract a focused audience.

Now that combined audience is an option for Google Ads audience targeting, it’s feasible that advertisers will focus less on choosing keywords, and more on finding the perfect balance of audience attributes.

Of course, individual ads should still target specific search terms that generate a lot of traffic, but in the age of automation, we may not be far from a time when much of the groundwork is already done. Keyword research and selection could be automated, leaving advertisers to spend more time on audience insights and analysis.

Already, using broad match keywords and best match audiences is a viable advertising strategy that could attract potential leads and customers.

While keywords are far from dead, the rise of Combined audience targeting is sure to have an impact.

Combined Audience: A Game-changer for Google Ads Audience Targeting

So, you can see that the Combined Audience feature has a lot to offer. It’s a user-friendly option that acts like a catalyst for your audience targeting. By putting it in play, you can exclude audiences, and combine several overlapping niche groups to pinpoint the perfect audience for your ads.

In PPC advertising, knowing your audience is crucial. Now, you have another method of connecting with more of your ideal customers, and hopefully, increasing your profits along the way.

If you want to maximize this strategy, try implementing smart bidding to ensure your PPC budget is fully-optimized. That way, only users who have an interest in your products and services will see your ads.