The Dos and Don’ts of Search Audiences

As of late, Google has been playing with audiences, and there has been an introduction to many different topics including in-market searches and the release of detailed demographics.  The fast nature of search advertising is one of the things that makes it super fun. In order to be a PPC hero, you need to be able to constantly update and have the practice done in the correct manner, which means throwing out the old rules, the A/B testing, and whatnot, and getting an up-to-date list of what you should do in order to get the search audiences that you want. So here they are, what you need to have an effective search audience.

First, is to maximize the audience depth, which means that you are looking through all the audiences with a modifier applied to the total spend.  Maximize it in order to give more data points to optimize towards, and even I the audience might have a poor CPA, it can be really helpful to success, and research has shown that audiences have been chronically underused, though there are benchmarks.

Do not with this use a one-size fits all approach though.  You need to make sure that you have lists for this, break them down to recency along with intent, and keep these mutually exclusive. For example, if you have three intent groups, split these up based on days, but also don’t get too granular, since audiences can end up being too small to target or get significant data on.

Also, don’t just rely on third party data.  that’s easier said than done, but the intelligent tracking prevention does show that third party data might be losing the effectiveness over recent years. While Facebook and Google might try to make the tags the pixel count as the first party, the release of this is showing how the new cookie-based audiences are becoming more and more restricted, which is muddling the metrics and the conversion tracking.

However, you should future proof the audience by using more first party data.  This is good because customer match is an advantage to not restricting the visitors, and having customer match lists that are available to you will help with figuring out the size and scope of your ability to capture the audiences.

Finally, do consider excluding audiences.  This is good especially if you feel it would make sense as a business. For example, for lead generation, you’ll probably want to exclude those who have already been converted in the past, and in a later time period, it might be interesting to remarket these, while optimizing the different KPI that’s out there, such as revneu.e. if you want to assess the value of this, you’ll be able to divide the customer group into previous customers in half, and the targetted ones and compare the different revenue.

Use these tips to help build your audience and make it better for you so that you can boost the conversions too.