Audiences In Google Ads: Remarketing And Prospecting

In addition to configuring conversions in Google Ads, audiences are another important point when configuring campaigns. We can use several classes of audiences in Google Ads to segment our campaigns in different networks. This article will dive into all the content that can be created, managed, and viewed directly through Audience Manager.

What are Google Ads “Audience Manager”?

The audience manager is a section accessible from the same Google Ads interface where you can manage all audiences and their sources (Google Ads tags, third-party analysis providers…) and also see a large number of statistics related to the size of each network.

To get to this section, you have to go to the shared library, which can be accessed from the “Tools and Settings” section. From here, we can create user lists based on their previous searches, browsing, or behaviour on your YouTube channel or app, etc.

Here you can see a list of remarketing and custom audiences. There are also the same statistics, the origin of the audience, and its configuration.

It is from the audience manager, where you can create user lists based on their previous searches and browse through “custom audiences.”

Remarketing lists

In conclusion, remarketing lists are designed to re-influence users who have already visited us to behave in a certain way. These are often the most qualified audiences because they allow us to reach people who know us and who we know and segment them based on past behaviour or how they have interacted with our website.

These lists can be created through Google Ads or Google Analytics, depending on the tracking pixel of each Platform. There are some differences between using one or the other three main ones:

When creating remarketing audiences in Google Ads, we can go back up to 30 days, which means that the lists do not start from 0, but the data is collected during that period. In Google Analytics, audiences start at 0 and fill up as more users match your targeting.

In Google Analytics, we have many more segmentation options. In Google Ads, we can only select users who have converted, viewed a specific page, or viewed multiple pages. This excludes an audience of (for example) users who have logged in X times or logged in from X sources.

Analytics data can be applied to Google Ads. Still, we can also look at those segments in Google Analytics in such a way that we will see the behaviour of those audiences, whether or not they return through advertising campaigns.

Reviewing these three points, Analytics beats Google Ads as the best source to create user lists.

Also Read: How To Be In The First Position At Google?

Prospecting: Google Ads Audiences

Beyond remarketing lists, which serve to re-impact users who have already visited us, Google Ads allows us to create prospecting audiences to find new users who may be interested in our business.

When it comes to finding new users, Google Ads audiences are the best:

Similar audiences

They are based on our remarketing lists and are created automatically. They consider interests, sociodemographic profiles, consumption habits, and browsing history to select the users who are most similar to us, taking into account the “robot portrait” of the remarketing lists. It is very important to know that these lists are fully updated, and the user only stays on any of them for up to 30 days.

Google Ads Custom Audiences

We manually select who belongs to these audiences by filtering by search or interests (for example, pageviews). When created, the Platform provides information about the membership size and demographic profile.

You are one of our favourites. A very good, clean, and discreet way for our ads to reach users who have browsed, searched, or (for example) shown interest in our competitors.

Advanced targeting options in Google Ads

In addition to creating and selecting this type of audience as targeting for our Google Ads acquisition strategies, let’s not forget that we can also select targeting based on keywords, gender, etc., for each ad group.

But beware, if we add multiple targeting options to our Google Ads Display campaigns, we will limit the audience and reach a lot, so the CPC will probably be more expensive, and the volume of impressions and clicks will be quite low.

Observation and segmentation of audiences in Google Ads

If you’ve already worked with audiences in Google Ads, you know that you can use them as targeting or observation when you add them to an ad group. Let’s see the explanation:

Targeting audiences in Google Ads

Only these users are impacted.

If you add an RMK audience and set up keyword targeting, your ads can only be shown to users who meet both criteria.

This severely limits the campaign’s reach and reduces the number of available impressions. If you follow such targeted users, CPCs will become quite expensive.

Our recommendation: If you have little traffic, segment less. You’ll get slightly less qualified impressions, but you’ll have to pay less for each one, so it was well worth it.

Observation

Adding audiences (or whatever) as “watching” doesn’t limit our audience but allows us to examine the data in those watch segments separately.

Let’s say we add a similar audience as a target and age groups as an observation. We will only impact users who are in our similar audience. Still, we will be able to observe in a differentiated way how users in each age range selected for observation behave.

Summing up: 5 Key Points about Audiences in Google Ads

• A highly segmented and defined audience does not have to be the best option. Even if it is a more qualified audience, the cost of impacting those very specific users can be very high and reduce our profitability.
• The duration of the affiliation must also be taken into account: a user who abandoned the cart five months ago is less qualified than one who only visited the product file but did so yesterday.
• When doing dynamic remarketing with Google Ads, you have to be sure that the variables with the retailer parameters are being stored with the tag from which we create the audience that we will impact (either Google Ads or Google Analytics).
• And the locations? Well, although we haven’t said anything about them, they can be crucial in determining the targeting of our Display Network campaigns. Managed placement campaigns can bring us very good traffic.
• Broaden your audience based on your databases (customer list), as the cookie paradigm will make it very difficult for us to maintain sufficiently sized audience lists in the coming months.

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