Utilising Audiences In Paid Search Campaigns

(This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would)

Hi guys, Steve Harris here, the head of paid media at Koozai.

I’m gonna talk a little bit about how and why we could be using audiences to inform decisions on our paid search campaigns.

Now of course when we talk about paid search, we’re talking about the user going to the search engine and typing in a search term and our ad appearing. so it is very much still keyword based, but there’s a lot of audience data that we can use to our advantage to inform and make better decisions basically.

So the first layer of the audience framework is CRM data. And this comes from your business or your clients and it’s the first party data that they have. Now we can upload that to the Google Ads platform and we can make decisions based on the segmentation of that CRM data. For instance, we can segment the CRM data for anybody who’s purchased in the last 12 months. Or we can segment it for anybody who has purchased regularly in the last month. Or perhaps a lapsed user who purchased three years ago, but hasn’t purchased since. Now, we can overlay this data onto our search campaigns, so when a user in that CRM database comes to Google and searches for one of our keywords, we can choose to apply a big modifier to appear at the top of the page for that user or to be more aggressive in our bidding for that user. So in terms of CRM data, it all comes from your business or your client, but it’s really, really vital because this shows users that have already interacted and perhaps have already purchased or signed up to some of your assets.

The second layer is remarketing lists and these are website remarketing lists set up in the Google Ads platform or in Google Analytics and this shows users that have visited a certain area of your site. So it’s really important to create lots of remarketing lists perhaps one for a user who has visited the homepage and another for a user who’s visited a certain section of your site, all the way through the journey right up until basket abandoners or even those users who have converted that we can then exclude from our paid search campaigns. And why this is important, again very similar to the CRM list database, is that we can be more aggressive or less aggressive on those users when they return to search for one of our keywords.

The third is similar audiences. Now, these are built from the CRM database and also the remarketing lists and Google will build these automatically. And what this does is it finds similar themes in the behaviours, the interests, and the demographics of the users in our remarketing lists or CRM database. And it will find like-minded users based on users browsing, searching, and demographics basically. It’s a good way of finding new users and prospecting to new users, particularly when they are searching for our keywords. And again, we can choose to be more or less aggressive on these similar audiences.

The fourth layer is in-market and affinity segments. Now this is based on Google’s data, and it looks at users who are in the market for a particular product or service and there’s lots and lots of information available. Affinity audiences contain longer-term interests or longer-term investments in certain things. So it might be fashionistas who are big on their fashion and like shopping or shopaholics for instance. And this would give us a more longer-term view of the user rather than in-market, which is basically saying, somebody is in the market for car insurance at this present moment. But what this enables us to do is overlay the data on top of our keywords so when somebody searches for one of our keywords, we overlay the in-market or affinity segment, and we can then increase or decrease the bid based on the performance of that segment.

The final is demographics and it’s very, very simple that we want to see the differences in performance between males, females, but also the age groups that are available to us. So it’s really, really important that we apply these to our campaigns and we analyze the performance. It might be that a particular product is relevant to 45 year olds plus, but not so much for 18 to 24 year olds, in which case we can choose to decrease the bid. Essentially to summarize, it’s really important that we overlay this audience data because without it, we’re treating all searches as the same. Somebody who searches for one of our keywords, we’re treating everybody the same. With audience data, we’re able to see the differences in those users, whether it be in their age group, their gender, whether their in market or have an affinity interest, or whether they actually are in one of our remarketing lists.

We can choose to bid more or less aggressively on them so, we want to find out as much as we can about those users and adjust our bidding accordingly.