You Can Use Audience Targeting to Show Your Ads to Most Relevant Users

In paid advertising, you can use audience targeting to show your ads to your ideal customer. Indeed, targeting is a fundamental aspect of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, but when done right, it can make your budget go a long way.

In this article, we’ll explore the advanced features of audience targeting Google Ads has to offer, giving you the knowledge you need to deliver relevant ads to the right people.

Understanding Search Audience

If you already know your audience’s interests and behaviors, that’s great. However, if you don’t, you may need to do a little more work. You can get started with the audience options on the Google Search Network.

If this is your first pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, go live first, gather some behavioral data, then determine your audience from that. For example, you may get a lot of impressions and clicks from a specific location so that you can focus on that next time.

What is Audience Search?

Audience search finds prospective customers across the board, without focusing on any specific category. You can use this feature on all campaigns to find new audiences that are related to your chosen keywords.

What is Browse Audience?

Browse the audience lets you target users that are searching for similar products to yours. This a smart type of audience targeting Google Ads has for new campaigns.

What are Audience Ideas?

Audience ideas are suggestions based on aggregated data from your website, campaign, and similar advertisers. You can use this tool to reach a broader audience.

What Type of Targeting Option You Can Select?

You can use audience targeting to show your ads to a variety of niche groups of potential customers. It’s easy to achieve this by targeting and observation:

Targeting: This option is used to show your ad to your defined audience. In Google Ads there are many ways to define the audience which we will be discussing in this article.

To make it simple, if search term matches your keyword and that customer falls under your selected audience, only he will be able to see the ad.

Observation: you don’t want to stick with a defined audience. Although you have selected an audience who has an interest in a specific category.

If someone who does not fall under these audiences and still searched for a search term that matches your keyword, still your ad will trigger for him. In this case, you will get a broader audience.

Initially “Observation” is recommended so that you must get familiar with the audience and customer behavior of searching. Once you have enough understanding about your audience you can always go with the “Targeting” option later to narrow down to precise results.

How to Add an Audience to Your Campaign

Follow these steps to get started:

1. 1. Sign in to your Google Ads account
   2. Click Audiences on the menu. You can add an audience to the Campaign and Ad Group level.
   3. Select the audiences you want to reach.
   4. Click Save.

 

 

 

Now that you understand the basics, let’s look at the different types of audience targeting Google Ads has for you.

You can use audience targeting to show your ads to these types of audiences:

1. Demographic Audience
2. Affinity Audience
3. Custom Affinity Audience
4. Remarketing Audiences
5. In-market Audience
6. Seasonal Audience Targeting
7. Similar audiences
8. Layered Audience
9. Customer match
10. Combined Audience

Now, let’s take a more in-depth look at each one.

1. Demographic Audience

In Google Ads, you can narrow your audience targeting by demographics in several ways:

• Age – Whether its beauty products for young women or hair dye kits for older men, targeting a specific age group is a smart move for your budget.
• Gender – Focusing on one gender can reap rewards. Toy-sellers may target women and kids to drive conversions.
• Household Income – You can use this in tandem with demographic targeting to create effective, granular PPC campaigns. There are seven subsets of income targeting:
  • Top 10%
  • 11-20%
  • 21-30%
  • 31-40%
  • 41-50%
  • Lower 50%
  • Unknown

Note that the “Unknown” group will always end up being the largest, as Google doesn’t know everything about everyone – surprisingly! Also, income targeting is currently only available in Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and the U.S.

Other than the above-mentioned demographics you can also target based on the Parental Status, Marital Status, Education, Home Ownership, etc.

How Does Google Determine Demographic Details?

Whenever a user signs in to their account, Google analyzes information from their account, activity on Google properties, and third party data sourced from social networking sites to determine that account’s characteristics and estimated income.

How to Setup Demographic Audience

1. 1. Sign-in into your Google Ads account
   2. Click Audience on the menu.
   3. Go to Browse Audience and click on “Who They Are”

 

 

 

Now, you can use audience targeting to show your ads to a custom audience, which you define by their parental status, marital status, education, etc.

But if you want to include or exclude audience based on Age, Gender and Household Income then click “Demographic “on the left side of the Google Account main page. Select your desire category from the top section and then select from the list which Ad group/Campaign you want to edit and then either you can exclude the group or you can include it in your campaign.

 

2. Affinity Audience

Coming back to the audience section, “Affinity Audiences” is one of the more advanced audiences targeting options in Google Ads. The platform creates predefined lists of users, which are segmented by general interests based on search history and browsing behavior.

You can compile your Affinity Audience lists, and customize them based on factors like:

• Search history
• Keyword use
• Website visits

Why use Affinity Audience Targeting

If you don’t have a lot of information about your audience, this option allows you to target people who have already visited your site or expressed interest in your business. You can use this type of targeting to reach more people with similar interests to your existing customers. For that reason, Affinity Audience targeting is good for brand awareness campaigns.

How to set up an Affinity Audience

• Sign in to your Google Ads account
• Click Audience on the menu
• Click Browse to select your affinity audience.

 

You can set up audience targeting by their interests and purchasing habits to connect with prospects that may relate to what you have to offer.

3. Custom Affinity Audience

If you don’t want to be limited to predefined segments, you can use audience targeting to show your ads to Custom Affinity Audiences. Doing this gives widens your scope, which is useful if you need to target a particular niche.

Custom Affinity Audiences is based on recent browsing behaviors, and it offers several unique benefits, as you can target:

• Audiences based on specific URLs
• Users that visit your competitors’ websites
• Advertisers that use specific keywords and search terms

You should use this type of audience targeting for branding or awareness campaigns, as it generates high impressions, low bounce rates, and low cost-per-click rates (CPC).

How to set up Custom Affinity Audience

1. 1. Sign in to your Google Ads account
   2. Navigate to Tools & Settings > Audience Manager.

 

 

1. 1. Click on the “Custom Audience” tab.

 

 

1. 1. Click on the plus icon to add the custom affinity audience.

 

 

1. 1. Choose the “Custom Affinity” option from the dropdown.

 

 

1. 1. Provide the “Audience name”, “Description” and “interest” to of your audience. And click on the “create” button.

 

 

Based on these interest audience will be created which further can be associated with your ad group or campaign for targeting.

4. Remarketing Audience

You can use audience targeting to show your ads to connect with people that have already had some interaction with your business. This strategy of serving tailored advertisements to warm leads is known as remarketing or retargeting.

Why use Remarketing Audience Targeting

Remarketing is effective because you can re-engage prospects with ads that are relevant to their on-site behaviors and interests. As a result, your ads are more likely to drive conversions.

Remarketing is another good strategy for lead generation and to multiply your campaign ROI.

How to set up Remarketing Audience

1. Navigate to Tools & Settings > Audience Manager.

Then click on + button to show the list and select website visitors.

Here you can provide a name for your audience

You can select what type of audience you actually looking who has visit the page already or some other pages

Here are more options for that

Addition to that you can also put some rule either visitor has visited the specific URL or not

 

Once you are done with rules now you can provide either you want last specific days audience or some other duration. The maximum you can use till 540 days (around 18 months)

Once you are done with the remarketing audience you can further attach this with ad group or campaign.

Learn More: Google Ads Remarketing Best Practices

5. In-Market Audience

With in-market audience targeting, Google Ads allows you to target people based on recent browsing history and their present search activity. Therefore, you can find users that have high purchase-intent signals.

For example, you may discover a user who is watching videos about different cameras and reading customer reviews of different models. Google may suggest you add them to your in-market audience.

Whenever you consider visitors for this audience type, Google Ads will take a couple of factors into account:

• Their clicks on related ads and any subsequent conversion
• The content of the site and the pages they visit

Why use In-market Audience Targeting

Here are three good reasons:

• It offers high-level targeting that boosts ad performance, generating more conversions to earn you a much better return on investment (ROI).
• You only pay when you attract more qualified leads, which saves costs on unqualified clicks.
• You can focus on a niche category, product, or service, nurturing greater audience engagement on that alone.

If you want to target people in the consideration phase of the buyer’s journey, in-market audience is a useful option.

How to setup In-market Audience

1. 1. Sign in to your Google Ads account
   2. Navigate to Audience > Browse
   3. Target people that are actively researching or planning.

 

 

For example, if you sell cars, then you must target an in-market audience for people showing an interest in vehicles and driving.

Learn more: MQL to SQL conversion rate

6. Seasonal Audience Targeting

Seasonal Audience targeting is perfect for major retail events, like Christmas or Black Friday. People are actively searching for products and services in the lead up to these dates, so advertisers can tailor their strategy to maximize conversions and minimize costs.

First, you should understand user search behaviors. You can use Google Trends to identify search patterns, and Google Keyword Planner to find valuable keywords to target.

With clever ads that are relevant to users and some appealing discounts, you can use seasonal audience targeting to show your ads to the users who are already thinking about buying your products.

Why use Seasonal Audience Targeting

There are plenty of benefits of this type of audience targeting, including:

• It increases brand awareness and online visibility
• It can grow sales and revenue at certain times of the year, bolstering profits in quiet periods
• You can convert one-time customers into loyal brand advocates

If you have products that you want to sell during a specific month or season, you should use seasonal audience targeting to drive sales.

How to set up a Seasonal Audience

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account
2. Navigate to Audience > Browse
3. Target people that are related to your business or its offers
4. Check remarketing lists and similar audiences to identify prospects that display an interest in your products during specific seasons or periods

7. Similar Audience

Similar Audiences targeting will expand your reach to find valuable new potential customers. This feature works by targeting people that share interests with customers on your existing remarketing lists.

Google Ads bases its research on demographics, browsing activity, and purchasing habits. The platform aims to find qualified leads and to drive more qualified clicks to your ad.

Why use Similar Audience Targeting

This form of targeting ensures that your ads will be shown to more people with similar interests to your existing visitors. As a result, you’ll benefit from:

• Higher conversion rates – people are more likely to convert, and you can build a loyal audience of engaged customers.
• Better knowledge of your audience – Furthermore, as you gather more statistical data on a larger group of similar visitors, you will be able to understand more about your target audience and their behaviors and interests.
• Budget optimization – Over time, as you optimize your ads to engage more people, your ad relevance increases. Google Ads will reward these relevant ads with a higher Quality Score, which is great news for ad performance, and your PPC budget.

Similar Audience targeting is best used when you want to increase traffic from existing prospects. However, take care not to focus solely on this strategy as it may be too narrow to attract new leads with different interests.

How to set up a Similar Audience

1. 1. Sign in to your Google ads account
   2. Navigate to Audience > Browse
   3. Target people based on how they have interacted with your business or you can also select from the remarketing audience.

 

 

8. Layered audience

You can layer your audience like:

• In market + demographic
• In market + remarketing
• Custom affinity audience + in market

For example, you can layer custom affinity and in-market to tell Google you want to display ads to people within the affinity audience if they have also shown buying intent. Google considers their search history to determine qualified leads here.

Why Use Layered Audience

Layered audiences refine your targeting to minimize unwanted traffic, which optimizes your budget in two ways:

• Qualified leads – You focus on users with buying intent and a proven interest in your products or services, thus saving costs on unqualified leads.
• Maximize conversion chances – As you exclude people with certain interests, you invest your efforts in attracting traffic that is more likely to make a purchase.

This form of targeting is best if you want to target people with buying intent, which will increase the profitability and relevance of your PPC ads.

How to Setup Layered Audience Targeting

1. 1. Sign in to your Google ads account
   2. Navigate to Audience > Browse
   3. Layer audiences by considering detailed demographics and user browsing activity with respect to your business.

 

 

9. Customer Match Audience

You can use Customer Match Audience targeting to reach with past customers and new prospects alike. This strategy leverages data from your Ads account, such as:

• Names
• Addresses
• Emails
• Phone Numbers

Google uses this data to target users across several channels, including its partner network.

Why Use Customer Match Audience Targeting

With the Customer Match setting, you can use audience targeting to show your ads to test out new sales offers with prospects. This technique helps strengthen existing customer relationships, and also allows you to refine your ads before rolling them out to new prospects.

How to Setup Customer Match Audience

1. Sign in to your Google ads account
2. Navigate to Audience > Browse
3. Target the audience based on how they have interacted with your business

 

Check your remarketing and similar audience lists to identify prospects that already have an established relationship with your business or an interest in your products and services.

10. Combined Audience

Combined audience allows you to reach the right audiences by combining various audience attributes, such as detailed demographics and interests that represent segments of your target audience. You can target your audience based on your advertiser’s background, needs etc.

Why Use Combined Audience Targeting

Let’s say you are doing business of rental cars before combined audience you are able to target the audience in-market and also to those who have interest in traveling. By Normal targeting you might be targeting those audience who have interest in traveling might have their own cars, so it will be waste of budget to show Ads to them.

Consider another use case where you are a pizza company and want to target parents of specific age group, have interest in food and dining, but you don’t want to target those who are parents of some other age group and have interest in sports.

Now here combined audience solves this problem by including and excluding specific interest and include based on the mutual factors.

Lets Setup Pizza Company example in Combine Audience

• • Click on audiences and open the combined audiences menu.

 

 

• • Click on 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.

Under “Include people who match the following”, add the audiences that you want to target your ads to. You may enter a term or phrase, or browse based on: Who they are, what their interests and habits are, what they are researching or planning, or how they’ve interacted with your business.

At least one audience must be included before an exclusion is allowed. The exclusions only affect the combined audience and does not impact other audiences targeted in the campaign or ad group.

Note: Don’t get confused with the combined audience and layered audience. In the combined audience, you can create a separate group of the audience that can further be layered with some other interest-based audience.

Wrap Up

Now you have a solid grasp on the various types of audience targeting Google Ads offers. In PPC advertising, getting your targeting correct is crucial, as it makes all the difference between a wasted budget and an excellent ROI.

You can use audience targeting to show your ads to a niche group of prospects, effectively showing the right ads to the right people at the right time.

Find out more on our blog about Time Targeting in Google Ads.