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“The customer is always right” is a long-used phrase in sales and service. For marketers, a better way to frame it is that the customer always comes first.
If you aren’t always considering your customers, delivering experiences and campaigns that wow and engage them will be impossible.
For your marketing and PPC campaigns to excel, you have to intimately understand every detail about your customers, including when they are active, what they care about, which products they prefer and more.
In the Digital Age, we have access to more data than ever. Marketers need to develop ways to utilize that data to get to know their customers.
Even if you believe you have a firm grasp on your target audience, there are always new and fresh details to learn.
This discussion will teach you how to identify your target audience and use that information to supercharge your PPC campaigns with a smart tool PPC Signal.
Let’s get started.
Keywords are the primary targeting method in PPC marketing. This leads some novice marketers to believe they are the only essential component to a successful PPC campaign.
Again, the customer always comes first, even before keywords.
This is becoming more and more evident as Google moves away from keyword-centric algorithms to focus more on audience interests.
In other words, Google is trying to connect people to search results, instead of relying only on the keywords they use.
This means that old practices, like keyword stuffing and others, are no longer viable.
By focusing on people and audiences over keywords, you not only optimize for the current direction of Google Search, but you also serve your customers with more personalized marketing and ad messages.
In the Digital Age, personalization is everything. Since users experience so much content and media throughout the day, messages directly relevant to them have a much higher chance of standing out.
A high level of personalization requires a deep understanding of each individual customer and segment.
This is why successful PPC campaigns depend on identifying target audiences and knowing your customers.
Beyond personalization and abiding by Google’s audience-centric approach, there are many other powerful benefits to identifying target audiences in digital marketing.
Remember, the customer always comes first.
Learning about your target audience isn’t just about maximizing your PPC metrics and driving more clicks and conversions. It’s about consistently delivering great experiences to your customers.
This consistency is vital in today’s world. Customer loyalty tends to be fleeting because Internet users are always looking for the next thing, whether it’s an offer, ad experience or otherwise.
If you can’t continuously deliver relevant, valuable experiences to customers, it’s very easy for a competitor to attract their business instead.
If you want to foster the strongest customer relationships, you need to excel at identifying target audience insights.
Creating experiences that always align with the latest audience trends, questions and concerns keeps you on their mind, increasing loyalty and making it harder for competitors to attract customers away from your business.
You only have a finite amount of money in your Google Ads budget. A crucial part of running successful campaigns is optimizing this budget. You want every dollar and cent you invest to produce positive returns.
Identifying target audience insights helps you optimize your budget by ensuring that you’re investing in the keywords and other targeting settings more relevant to prospective customers.
Plus, developing personalized ad experiences drive higher conversion rates and more substantial ROI because the content of your ads, landing pages and other components have higher relevance and more value to prospects.
The more you work at identifying target audiences, the easier it is to optimize your strategies for better and better results.
You’ll learn which keywords and targeting strategies match your audience’s current interests, giving you a clear sight of how to spend your marketing budget.
Optimizing your budget and creating better results from your customers has a direct impact on your bottom line.
You will reduce your wasted spending by allocating your budget only to the strategies that produce results. At the same time, you’ll also experience higher click and conversion rates.
Reducing waste and improving results is a guaranteed method to enhance your bottom line and ROI.
As your PPC marketing strategies grow and prosper, your budget will also expand. This means more money to spend on ads. With a larger budget, you can target even more keywords, audiences, locations, etc.
Thus, improving your bottom line through PPC advertising gets easier and more effective the more time goes on.
Google Ads and other PPC platforms offer many ways to discover audience insights and refine how you target and reach new and old customers.
This section will outline many ways you can use ad settings to identify your target audience with Google.
Earlier, we mentioned that keywords are taking a backseat to audience targeting and other components.
That said, they are still a critical piece in the marketing process. In many respects, keyword research forms the building blocks of your digital marketing strategies.
They are also valuable clues into the interests, questions and concerns of your target audience.
Take a look at your search terms report to see which keywords and topics your customers search for actively. It will help you understand their interests and preferences.
You can even use these insights to build better products and services! For instance, if most of your customers are searching for a particular style or type of one of your products, you know this is a popular option for many people in your target audience.
Tracking keyword and topic trends will also help you identify when the interest shifts from one area to the next.
After all, customers can be very fickle. They may be heavily interested in a topic one month, but completely shift their focus next month.
Staying on top of these changing interests will help you stay a top business in your customers’ eyes.
Google Ads has an “Audience Insights” feature that helps you discover new details about your customers. You may even find entirely new segments that you didn’t know existed!
Once you enable conversion tracking on your website, you can see detailed reports about the individuals most likely to convert. Google creates these profiles using the data from past conversions.
For instance, your Google Insights report may reveal that the people most likely to convert are men between the ages of 25 to 44 that are health enthusiasts using mobile devices and living in the San Francisco area.
The Audience Insights report is a great method for identifying target audiences you may not be aware of. You can discover new demographics, locations, devices and other dimensions that help you more accurately target your customers with ads.
Using these insights will help you make better campaign optimization decisions that drive sales and other key figures.
Timing is a vital factor in successful marketing. If you aren’t targeting your ad and marketing messages when customers are actively looking for offers, it may be difficult to see good results.
Google Ads allows you to create a complete ad schedule to target the exact days and hours that you want. You can even increase your bids for specific time frames to ensure that you capture the audience’s attention at the best points throughout the day and week.
There are two effective methods for optimizing your ad schedule.
As you’re looking at your hour of the day data, you want to keep a few things in mind. It’s not just about finding the times with the highest metrics. You also have to think about costs.
Often, the most active customer time slots are also the points where competitors are advertising the most. After all, they have access to very similar data.
This means that you’ll pay more for clicks during these peak times. So, don’t forget to consider the costs when creating an ad schedule.
Sometimes, it’s best to advertise off-peak to avoid the competition.
You can target your marketing messages by location. The default setting is for Google to show your ads to users across the US. If you’re a global company, you’ll have to add other countries to your targeting list.
Similarly, companies that only operate locally will need to adjust this default setting. Local businesses can use location targeting to target ads based on distance.
You could have one ad message for users less than 1 mile from your business and another for users 5+ miles away.
In this respect, location targeting doesn’t just help you find the right areas to advertise. It also allows you to personalize ad experiences by location, which helps drive more sales and other key performance metrics.
Device type is another essential dimension to use when viewing your data.
There are stark differences between mobile and desktop users. Many of these distinctions are due to the radically different browsing experiences of desktop devices versus mobile ones.
For instance, desktop devices have larger screens and use a mouse and keyboard to navigate pages, enter searches, etc.
Meanwhile, mobile devices use touchscreens, feature smaller screens and don’t have any tertiary equipment to help navigation.
You need to create ad experiences optimized for each device type to ensure the best browsing experience for both types of users.
For instance, you don’t want your landing page to appear as a giant wall of text for mobile users, while desktop users have a much fuller experience with more varied content.
You also have to consider the types of content that each device user wants. Mobile users may be browsing on the go, meaning they want quick and hyper-relevant results.
On the other hand, desktop users may be looking to do more research, like comparing prices, reading reviews, etc.
The bottom line is that device type is a factor you absolutely must consider when deciding how to identify target audiences.
Identifying target audiences deals closely with looking at current and past customers to better understand who interacts with your business and how.
Your remarketing list is a wealth of information in this endeavor. A remarketing list is built from users that have previously visited your site. They may have even converted in the past.
It is one of the most valuable audience segments because these are individuals that have already expressed interest in your company.
You want to take extra care to learn from these customers. In particular, consider the factors that led them to convert or at least visit your pages.
What can you learn from these interactions to improve your campaigns moving forward?
Learning how to identify your target audience is an arduous process that requires you to dig deep into your marketing data to uncover new truths about your customers.
Several problems may occur:
Data is crucial for knowing how to identify target audiences and refine them. The problem is that conducting data analysis to discover audience insights is tedious, complex and immensely time-consuming.
In many cases, the results don’t justify the work. Plus, data analysis is rarely a marketer’s favorite activity, making it all too easy to neglect this step in the process entirely.
This is why advanced tools and automated marketing solutions are necessary in today’s marketing environment.
With AI and machine learning technology, you can automate the discovery of new audience insights. You can spend less time digging through your data and more time creating positive changes to your campaigns to meet the latest demands of your audience.
When it comes to decoding the mystery of your target audience, you need best marketing automation tools.
Not only will it produce better insights into how to best market to your customers, but it will also save you mountains of time and money.
PPC Signal is a great PPC optimization tool for Google Ads users. It provides complete actionable insights using your campaign metrics, which you can quickly turn into valuable audience insights.
The primary tool of PPC Signal is its main dashboard. This is where all of the current, active changes in your Google Ads account appear.
In the above screenshot, the account owner has 21 active insights waiting to be explored further. They can also view signals that they’ve bookmarked or acted upon earlier.
Each individual insight includes all of the necessary details you need to understand the change and take action.
Other solutions promise to deliver insights, but they fail to provide all the details you need to actually use the information. In other words, they present half-finished insights, which requires you to do the rest of the legwork to put the remaining pieces into place.
PPC Signal, on the other hand, doesn’t leave any details out. You can see what’s changing, when it started, how significant the change is and much more. And, all of this information is packaged in just this tiny window.
When you find a change you want to investigate, clicking Explore opens up the data and gives you a fuller view of the details.
PPC Signal even has a Take Action option that shows you how to resolve any of your insights. This means that this advanced Google Ads tool takes you from insight to action in just a few clicks!
Managing the number of active insights populating your PPC Signal dashboard gets more challenging when you’re running a robust Google Ads account.
You could easily have hundreds of active signals, with more appearing all the time. While having all of these insights is good, you won’t have time to get to all of them right away.
So, you have to think about which changes should take priority.
PPC Signal makes it easy to hone in on the changes that matter most to you. There are several filtering options you can apply to focus on different types of insights.
You can select a specific metric, like clicks, and only see positive or negative changes to this measure. Or, you could choose a particular campaign or ad group and see any changes impacting that part of your account.
To help you identify changes to your target audience, you can look at signals related to device types, location and different times of the day.
Here’s an example of PPC Signal showing insights for a specific location – Houston, Texas.
By selecting the location filter for Houston, Texas, the user reduces the 21 active signals from earlier to just 2.
These filters are handy when you have many active changes happening at once. You can go right to the types of changes you want!
The target audience is the group of people you intend to connect with through your marketing efforts. If you were selling a new sports drink, your target audience might be active males and females between the ages of 20 and 45 that are into exercise and sports.
That said, your target audience may differ from your actual audience. This is why it is important to always refine your target audience and work towards better understanding your customers.
Your target audience is basically the people you intend to sell and market to. When you create your business or develop a new product, you have a specific customer persona that you expect will be the most valuable. This becomes your target audience. Over time, you may refine your audience.
Everything you do from a marketing standpoint is to engage your customers and encourage them to buy, subscribe or otherwise act. If you don’t know your audience, then it is nearly impossible to craft the right marketing messages. This is what makes knowing your audience so crucial in marketing.
Identifying target audiences is an absolute necessity in marketing. If you don’t know how to identify the target audience, it’s like you’re marketing with a blindfold over your eyes.
In terms of your PPC accounts, this means you could be wasting valuable ad budget and hurting your performance results.
However, if you can tap into detailed audience insights, you can strategize based on what your customers actually want to see from an ad experience.
This will create better PPC results and improve your business overall.
To help you make the most of your PPC data, we recommend PPC Signal. Its easy-to-use interface makes learning about what ads work and don’t work a breeze.
You can consistently delight audiences with exceptional, relevant ad experiences and avoid making poor choices that detract from customer engagement.
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