The Google Shopping Targeting Roadmap

Google Shopping Audiences is an excellent way to target your customers who search for your products. You can reach your best customers according to their behavior. Whether they visited your site, signed up for a newsletter, or more, you can target these segments in real-time with the search.

You can use audience targeting in your shopping campaigns to understand your market on a deeper level.  However, improving your ROI with ad spend is easier said than done. It takes hard work and understanding of Google shopping targeting.

In this article, we will show you how to get better at Google shopping targeting so that your campaigns will deliver more leads, sales, and conversions. First, we will start with the basics and then discuss more advanced tactics. Let’s get started:

How to Segment Your Audience

There are various ways to segment your audience. However, here are some common ways to consider first:

• General site visitors – These people have visited any page of your site, even just one page.
• Shopping cart or lead form abandoners – These people added products to a shopping cart but didn’t complete the purchase.
• Recent converters – These people went all the way through the purchase path and bought something from you.
• Loyal customers – These people have purchased from you multiple times, perhaps over several years. Upload your existing email list of loyal customers through Customer Match.

What is an Affinity Audience in Google Shopping?

Affinity audiences are ways to look at your market from a more holistic viewpoint. It takes into account passions, habits, and lifestyles. If someone is in an affinity audience, you can be relatively sure that they have an interest in it. For instance, you might want to target people who have shown an affinity for fitness if you are selling workout training. As affinity audiences in shopping campaign help in controlling traffic in advertiser’s campaigns so bids can be increased and managed on the target audiences that are most relevant based on the demographic to the products that the retailer is selling.

When to Use Affinity Audiences in Google Shopping Targeting

There are numerous reasons you might want to use affinity audiences. It helps with branding, message control, specificity, and market reach. These can drive actions such as clicks, signups, and sales.

One of the best reasons to use them is for awareness campaigns. This is when you want to spark interest or knowledge about your product or service. You target those who are likely to be interested and see if their conversions are relatively higher than your traditional market.

Use Affinity Audiences to Safely Branch Out

Sometimes you don’t have a lot of information about your audience. This can get tricky because you might want to reach more people but you have a limited budget. You can even get a gauge on relative audience sizes. If you are aiming for certain kinds of shoppers, their buying patterns could play out in a data-driven way. This way, you can get your ads in front of them without breaking your budget.

How to Setup Affinity Audiences in Google Shopping Campaigns

Luckily, it’s not too complicated to set up Google Shopping targeting in the form of affinity audiences. Just follow these simple steps and you’re on your way:

• Log into your Google Ads account.
• Select the Audiences from the left menu bar.
• Select your campaign and then set up your affinity audience.

Making the Most of Affinity Audiences

It is important to know about you customer. Just understanding the basics of affinity audiences isn’t enough to improve your campaigns. Let’s look at some specific ways to apply this knowledge to strengthen your campaigns:

Reach the Competition’s Audience

With affinity audiences, you can gain access to the audience of your competitors. You can use their specific pages or sites as URL targets by entering their products as your interests. This way you can target the best users for your goals.

Trade Shows

As we mentioned in the tip above, trade shows are an excellent way to get new customers. You don’t even need to attend them in person. Instead, target users who have attended them in the past. They are very likely to be engaged with the product or service on a higher level. It takes a lot of time, energy, and expense to go to a trade show so you know that their level of commitment is higher.

Use Ultra-Narrow Segments

When you use a more narrow segment, you can get to users or prospects who are farther down in your conversion funnel. Sometimes, you will want to expand it out once you reach a certain level. But to start with, fine-tuning your focus will let you be incredibly targeted with your ads in the hopes to reduce ad spend and increase revenue.

Audience Insights

This is a useful feature that is well worth it to use. If you are comfortable analyzing the audience insights about your market, you can hone your marketing messages to improve conversions.

Avoid Low Count Audience Lists

While it is helpful to target fewer segments at first, you will want to have enough people to make your ads effective. Without enough data, you might not know how to make sense of the insights and other data available to you. Plus, Google will only allow you to get so specific with Google Shopping targeting.

Take a Long Term Approach

Not everything is about the current moment in marketing. Sometimes, you have to set yourself up for better success and growth in the future. You can achieve this by looking at signals that are more long term in nature.

These longer-term signals can often be worth more to your brand or business. For instance, there may be certain patterns of behavior that indicate someone is about to purchase a new vehicle. If you sell cars, you can identify these signals and start with some “top of the funnel” advertisements to warm your market up before transitioning to campaigns designed primarily to sell.

Use Video

Using curious video thumbnails and an engaging video to follow it up with is a powerful way to get engagement. It could give you the valuable time needed to convey your marketing message.

Brainstorm Your Audience’s Passions

Affinity segments are supposed to represent what your target market is passionate about. These insights can come from looking at the data to a certain extent. However, you need to sit down every once in a while with your team and think outside the box. There may be certain affinities that are untapped and allow you to expand your market significantly.

Use Custom Messaging

For each affinity or segment, be sure that you are creating different ads and destinations. Your landing pages, URL’s, creative assets, and more should adjust depending on who you’re speaking to.

This can play out in a variety of ways across your branding and online advertising. For instance, you might have different campaigns based on where someone is in the funnel. If you sell home security systems to homeowners, you would first need to ensure that they have a home.

Then, you need them to schedule an appointment or product consultation. However, if they are not even remotely interested or qualified, then it is a waste of ad dollars to send them the wrong message too early. Knowing where your audience is in your sales cycle is just one powerful example of customizing your message for better results.

Wrap Up

In marketing, your audience is the secret to getting better results. However, the world is changing rapidly. Consumers are used to being bombarded with advertisements from every angle. To truly compete, you need to understand your audience in a deeper way.

By knowing how to use Google Shopping targeting, you can identify your best customers. Then, you can create engaging campaigns that are shown to them at the right time to produce the right result. At the end of the day, this means more revenue for your business.

By optimizing your audience segmentation, you will eventually see differences between your best and worst customers. From here, you can continue to tweak your Google Shopping ads to reflect the realities and needs of your market for greater brand success. This is true whether you have clients or run advertising for your own brand.