How to Refine Your Campaign with Google Ads Targeting Methods?

Interests, behaviors, and topics are pay-per-click (PPC) targeting methods that help you discover new audiences that may be interested in your brand. With these Google Ads targeting methods, you have the potential to reach those audience segments that were previously unreachable.

One of the primary reasons you can achieve such a good return on investment (ROI) with paid search is that you can target keywords in your ad copy with high buyer intent. This system improves your ad rank as well as your quality score.

In this article, we’ll take a look at various Google Ads targeting methods. Plus, we’ll share a few tips on how to use PPC Signal for better campaign optimization.

What is a Targeted Campaign?

Targeted advertising serves the purpose of placing specific ads before particular groups to reach users who would be interested in the provided information. Advertisers intend to reach users as efficiently as possible, believing that it will result in a more successful campaign. In Google Ads, Search Network, or Display Network are very well known platforms for campaign targeting.

Targeted campaigns reduce wasted ad spend by ensuring your ads reach the right target users with the correct search queries. Targeted advertising addresses individual demographics or preferences, encouraging those who see targeted ads to respond and buy the marketed product or service. In turn, brands observe that this highly effective advertising leads to find new customers and increase sales.

These Google Ads targeting methods usually provide certain information and incentives to users, giving them a reason to select your brand over competitors in the same industry.

Google Ads Targeting Methods

Targeting always helps you concentrate on your goal and groups, which will ultimately lead to profits. In Google Ads, you can have different targeting methods such as:

Keyword Targeting

The first of Google Ads targeting methods, keyword targeting, has served as the lifeline of paid search since the beginning. The fundamental concept behind keyword targeting is simple. If you can detect the keywords customers use when they’re actively interested in purchasing your product or service, you can run advertisements to ensure that your brand appears in front of their eyes.

However, to choose the right keywords, you have to understand your audience. After all, if you don’t know your audience inside out, how can you predict what keywords they’ll use when they’re looking to purchase what you’re selling?

If you have many keywords in your campaigns, it’ll be challenging for you to check them regularly. You may not know which ones are working and which ones are not delivering any results. Just think about thousands of keywords in your account. Don’t panic. Later in this blog, we’ll share tips on how you can improve your keyword targeting with PPC Signal.

Device Targeting

Not all campaigns work well on every device. For instance, call-only campaigns are known to perform best on mobile as customers can quickly engage with you just by clicking on the call button. You can target your campaign on mobile, computer (desktop), tablet, and TV.

If you have several device-targeted campaigns, you can have different ad groups with keywords for each device-oriented campaign. These groups give you full control over your device-based bid. But keep in mind that not all devices perform all the time equally.

Device-specific campaigns need more effort and more work, as you have more actions to check and more data to assess. Your time investment will be more significant if you’re using a conventional campaign.

Usually, your investment is worth the reward. The data you get from the campaign is dispersed among all the devices that are part of the campaign, which means the result shows smaller numbers. All this makes data-driven decision making a bit more challenging.

Geo (Location) Targeting

On the internet, the whole world is your market; however, you still can’t offer everything to everyone on all corners of the globe. If your products and services are limited to certain geographic areas, you have to be specific.

For instance, the USA alone has around 19,495 cities. This means if you are targeting each city in a single campaign, and every campaign has ten keywords, you will have a total of 194,950 keywords. So, ask yourself:

• Do you think you can easily analyze all these campaigns with such a vast data volume?
• How will you find which keyword performs well in each city and which location does well for each device?

There is a hidden risk or opportunity when you have so many combinations. So you have to find all these combinations. However, it’ll take you a very long time if you continue to find them manually, you can check the combination calculator to automatically calculate the maximum possible combinations.

Time Targeting

Time targeting, also called dayparting, is a kind of Google Ads targeting method where advertisers schedule their paid ads to reach the right viewers during a defined time or day of the week. After you’ve created your PPC campaign, the default setting on Google Ads will show your ads all day. However, keep in mind that your campaign can’t give equal performance throughout the day. There will be some peak hours when users are more actively surfing the internet.

Suppose you have multiple campaigns with several keywords, running on different locations and scheduled all day. How can you identify the hour of the day at which a particular keyword performed well? Likewise, how can you determine the best performing device and location?

What if one keyword is doing well in the morning but not in the evening, but the same keyword performed well on a particular device in the evening as well? This situation will make your analysis more complicated and challenging. But you have to conduct in-depth research to uncover the opportunities, which is just not possible with a simple analysis.

Audience Targeting

Unlike keyword targeting, audience targeting is all about targeting users. With this targeting method, you aren’t just targeting several keywords that may or may not come from your target users. Instead, you’re targeting people who match your customer base.

Just because a user matches the age, interests, income, and behaviors specified in your ideal user persona, that doesn’t mean they’re actively looking to purchase whatever you’re advertising. No matter how particular you get with your audience targeting, you can’t ensure that everybody in your audience is in the market for your product when they come across your advertisement.

Consequently, you can end up with many impressions but very few clicks, or worse, a lot of clicks but very few conversions. To analyze your campaigns with several ad groups and keywords, you must identify the pattern of conversion rates declining all of a sudden or getting some sudden clicks that weren’t happening before on specific keywords. You may observe that the intent or keyword match type played some role here.

How to Use PPC Signal to Refine Your Targeting

Suppose an athlete depends on balanced nutrition to help create and maintain energy, improve endurance, and develop strength. If they indulge too long or too much in high-sugar, high-carb, or foods with additives, their performance will suffer. They may even get slower and weaker, and we know how even micro-seconds of lost time can benefit their competitors.

The same is true for how critical decisions are made for running large-scale digital marketing campaigns. Even the smallest thing missed or included can change the path of success.

PPC is not an overnight success. It takes time, cost, energy, and resources. By regular and consistent efforts, you eventually reach the road to success on it. Can you afford to face failure suddenly? Of course not, nobody wants that.

As easy as it may sound, PPC can be challenging to manage and complex to analyze.  Whether you are an ad agency or a freelancer, you always need to grow. In the world of PPC, you will need more customers or campaigns to yield good revenue.

Suppose you’ve got hundreds of campaigns with different ad groups and keywords. Do you understand how many combinations are possible based on different dimensions like Geo, device, HoD (hour of the day), etc.?  Hundreds of thousands of combinations can appear, so each combination has its significance. When analyzed deeply, you’ll see particular combinations that can bring exceptional improvement in your ROI if you properly concentrate on it.

Using PPC Signal for Keyword Targeting

In PPC Signal, there are different tabs available. In the keyword tab, you can find those signals which are at the keyword level. You can further filter your signals from the left filter panel, selecting your desired keywords on which you want to check the signals.

In the above image, you can see a signal on the keyword “Hublot watches.” This signal is highlighted based on the average cost per click (CPC) alert.

Now, how are you going to know if the average CPC is suddenly changed? Also, how will you determine when the Average CPC was altered? PPC Signal will give you an exact idea since the change or rise in the Average CPC happened. It’ll also show you the previous value and the number of points (or days) it took to reach where it is now.

There are other keywords as well, which might have different alerts based on various metrics. You may be getting excellent clicks on the keyword, but suddenly clicks may drop from the past few days. If that’s the case, it’s time to give a more in-depth look into these keywords.  So if there came a change in CPC, then we can see how suddenly the cost increased. Ask yourself:

• Were you not easily ranked during the auction?
• Was your quality score disturbed that led to an increase in your CPC?
• If suddenly the clicks got reduced, what change did you make in the ad copy?
• Was it not matching the intent of the user?

If you get low clicks, clickthrough rate (CTR) will decline, which will decrease your quality score and, ultimately, your average CPC will increase to balance it out.

Using PPC Signal, you can identify the keyword that is negatively impacting your ad performance. You can’t keep using the keyword that is not good for you and has a high risk for your campaign. With this tool’s help, you can also find those keywords that are bringing positive alerts with more opportunities.

Using PPC Signal for Device Targeting

Now it’s time to come on the Device Tab in the PPC Signal. As shown in the image, a signal pops up on the device: Mobile. This signal gives you a precise insight based on past data. You can see how your CPC is changing on mobile over the past few days as this alert is red, which is alarming. You must focus on the keyword targeting on mobile devices, especially if your CPC is high.

The same goes for Average CPC, Top Impression %, and CTR. Not all these metrics show positive results in your campaign, meaning it’s time to refine your device targeting.

Keep in mind that not all users around the world are using mobile devices. So targeting mobile devices will not always bring success. This is also evident in the analysis shown above.

Your experiences and intuitions may encourage you to go for this, but data tells a different story. You can’t always trust your guts. You need reliable data and proof that will help you in refining your targeting. You can’t let your device run the campaign that is getting low clicks. Instead, go for that device, which has hidden opportunities for the success of your PPC campaign.

Using PPC Signal for Geo-Targeting

Let’s discuss another alert example based on a particular location. PPC Signal has an exciting and user-friendly interface so that you can filter your records based on predefined parameters. If you go to the Filter section and select GEO, you’ll see a list of locations on which you have alerts. If you want to filter out those, you can easily choose or unselect, and the result will appear on the right section of the dashboard.

As you can see, the alert is showing that you must think something about the location Charlton, Massachusetts, US. That’s because, on this location, CPC is going upward for the past 4 points. Before Thursday, January 16, 2020, it was going well, but suddenly, there was a CPC change. You need to determine your non-converting keywords for this location and pause them. Review your search term to detect negative keywords.

If you’re dynamically changing content in your ad copy or landing page, ensure it is working fine, and the right ad copy is being shown concerning the landing page. Lastly, analyze your best time at this location when you are going through a good customer journey. Identify the time at which you are getting a good CTR with a high conversion rate. Schedule your campaign only for that hour and then check the results.

Using PPC Signal for Time Targeting

If you are worried why your campaign is not performing well throughout the day, PPC Signal can pinpoint those hours, which may be good or bad for your campaign. As shown in the image above, you can see that the average cost-per-click (CPC) moves upward from 4 AM to 5 AM. It’s likely that your competitors are bidding higher in this time frame and that it’s increasing the CPC. You may consider quitting the competition during these hours.

Using PPC Signal for Audience Targeting

All the alerts you observe through PPC Signal eventually link with the audience engaged with your campaign. Keyword clicks depict the audience. You can observe them through different device interactions and locations. Also, other times of the day tell you about the interaction of the audience.

As shown in the image above, you can explore the Campaign tab of PPC Signal, highlighting the whole campaign performance depending on different alerts. There is a good sign of CTR increasing for this campaign, but there is a wasted spend rising for the last couple of days.

This wasted spend means you need to refine your audience. You should check which keyword is bringing good impressions with good conversion, which device is performing well throughout the week, and which location at a particular time is working well.

Once you understand all this, you can infer the opportunities and risks in your campaigns. Eventually, you’ll be able to improve the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns. The right keyword, the right ad, the suitable device, the right geo, and the right time will direct the right audience to your landing page, which would significantly grow your conversions.

Wrap Up

When a brand uses a data-driven methodology that includes various Google Ads targeting methods, it makes strategic decisions depending on data analysis and interpretation. A data-driven methodology allows brands to assess and arrange their data to serve their users and clients better.

Data-driven targeting drives advertising into the contemporary era. It empowers you to dive deep into data to offer more relevant messaging to your desired audience. Customer engagement and behavior patterns with your ads help you to foresee prospective propensities of users.

There aren’t many tools available on the market that provide you with an in-depth analysis of your campaign combinations. PPC Signal stands out in this regard as it can perform detailed analysis on millions of data points in just a few seconds. Moreover, it breaks down your campaign performances with insightful alerts.