To provide a comprehensive and consolidated view of your Audiences and make audience management and optimization simpler, you’ll find the following improvements in Google Ads:
- New audience reporting
Detailed reporting about audience demographics, segments, and exclusions is now consolidated in one place. Click the Campaigns iconand open the “Audiences, keywords and content” tab and click Audiences. You can also easily manage your Audiences from this report page. Learn more About Audience reporting.
- New terms
We’re using new terms on your audience report and throughout Google Ads. For example, “audience types” (these include custom, in-market, and affinity) are now referred to as audience segments and “remarketing” is now referred to as “your data”. Learn more about the Updates to Audience terms and phrases.
How you set up your campaign depends on your business goals and the types of customers that you'd like to reach. To help you meet your goals, here are some tips and suggestions to keep in mind as you set up a campaign that uses your data to reach out to your website visitors and app users.
Strategies to set up your data segments
1. Target all your website visitors and app usersThe most basic way is to reach out to an audience that has visited your website or used your app. The recommended approach is to use the “Google Ads optimized segment,” which help you reach website visitors, app users, and other audience sources.
Smart bidding strategies such as Enhanced CPC (cost-per-click) will automatically adjust your manual bids for clicks that seem more or less likely to lead to a sale or conversion on your website.
Target CPA (cost-per-action) bidding is an optimization tool that can help you maximize your return on investment (ROI) by optimizing bids in real-time, impression-by-impression. With Target CPA bidding, you'd no longer need to adjust your bids manually to reach your conversion goals.
Target ROAS (return-on-ad-spend) helps you convert customers by setting a maximum cost-per-click bid while trying to achieve an ROAS equal to your target.
Maximize conversions will seek to obtain the most conversions for your specified budget, independent of ROAS or a target CPA.
Manual bid strategies: If you prefer to manage your campaign bids manually, we recommend setting a maximum CPC bid.
Here are a couple of bid strategies that can help you improve your campaign performance:
If you're happy with the performance of your campaign, you should consider raising your bid to reach more customers and improve your ROI. Raising your bid can help you improve your ad's position by increasing your chances of appearing consistently on Display Network websites and to reach your website visitors and app users.
If you've created your data segments with various membership durations, you can use bid management to your advantage. Say that you want to reach visitors who came to your website in the past 30 days separately from people who visited your site in the last 7 days. You can create 2 different data segments, each with varying durations, and then bid more aggressively for the segment that is more valuable to you.
Example
To do this, she creates an audience segment of television page viewers with the membership duration set to seven days and targets this segment with a more aggressive bid. She also creates a second audience segment of television page viewers with a membership duration set to 30 days. To prevent reaching 7-day visitors with both segments, she then creates a custom combination to target the 30-day membership segment, excludes the 7-day segment, and uses a less aggressive bid.
With dynamic remarketing, a Google Ads product suggestion engine can show products and services to people who previously viewed those products and services on your website. The suggestion engine will also decide which type of ad layout is likely to perform best, based on the person and device they're using. Learn more about Dynamic remarketing
Sometimes people will place items in their online shopping carts without completing their purchase. Since these customers are often very close to making a purchasing decision, it can be a valuable opportunity to reach out to them and help them purchase. To reach this audience, set up your audience data segment to target “Visitors of a page who did not visit another page,” and specify the URL of your shopping cart page and order confirmation page.
Example
Nina runs an online electronics store. She finds that her customers put big ticket items in their shopping carts but don't always complete their purchases. Nina decides to set up a campaign to attract the customers with abandoned shopping carts to hopefully complete the sale.
Customers who have already purchased items from your website may also be interested in complementary products or services that you offer.
By creating an audience segment of "converted customers," you'll reach a smaller group of your website visitors, but these customers will already be familiar with and interested in your business. Be sure to customize your ads for this group.
You can also create your data segments for certain products. If customers have viewed certain items and then made a purchase, you could show them ads for another related product.
Example
Jason owns a gardening supply store and wants to reach customers who already viewed the plant seeds section from his store and then made a purchase. He knows customers who purchased plant seeds are often interested in plant food products, so he sets up a campaign to advertise these related products to those existing customers.
To showcase different product categories, create a data segment for each product category where the URL for each segment contains the category name.
Example
She creates an ad that appears for customers who browsed her "Women's Apparel" page and a different ad for customers who browsed the "Men's Apparel" page.
If you anticipate that customers are likely to purchase from your business within a certain time period after their initial interactions, you can create an audience segment that includes your website visitors with a specific membership duration.
To reach customers who made a purchase within the last 30 to 90 days, create two audience segments: one with a 30-day duration and one with a 90-day duration. Then use a custom combination segment to reach all customers on the 90-day segment, but not the 30-day segment.
Example
Ad strategies
10. Tailor your ads according to the audience segments you choseIt is important to have a creative strategy when designing ads for your website visitors and app users. Here are some general recommendations:
- Relevant to the audience you'd like to reach
- Same look and feel as your site
- Compelling call-to-action
Example
Jane's advertising to people who visited the women's outerwear section of her website would be more relevant if they promoted women's down jackets instead of a generic message.
Higher bids increase your ability to reach more people in your segments, maximizing your exposure to this valuable audience. When determining what bid to set, consider the value of your customers in each of your data segments.
Examples
Reggie sells electronics. Since TVs are more profitable than cameras, he bids higher for an audience segment that targets visitors to TV pages than for a segment created for camera pages.
He's also set up two custom combinations to target two sets of customers:
- Those who have visited his website but haven't initiated a purchase
- Those who have already begun the checkout process on his website but abandoned it without completing a purchase
People who have already added products to their shopping carts are more likely to complete a purchase, and therefore are probably more valuable to him. In this case, he bids higher for the ad group with this data segment.
General strategies
13. Broaden your location and language targetingSince your data comprised of your website visitors can help you reach the ideal customers, you should be able to show them ads no matter where they are on the web. Your website visitors may be multilingual and may access your website from around the world, so make sure that in your campaign settings you select to target all languages.
When you choose your location targeting, keep in mind that you should be able serve customers in the regions you target.
Increasing the duration of your data segment (for example, from 30 to 60 days) allows you to engage with people who visit your website within the specified time period. In most cases, the longer the duration, the more users you'll have on your segment.
To potentially increase conversions from your data segment, you could decrease its membership duration to get only the most recent visitors. However, decreasing the duration could limit the number of potential customers you're able to reach.
Frequency cap limits the number of times a person is exposed to an ad per day, which could reduce your impressions.
Ad scheduling lets you specify certain hours or days of the week when you want your ads to show so that you can reach your customers while they're awake and online to view your ads.
Long-term strategies
18. Invest your ad dollars on websites that show resultsIf you're spending a large percentage of your budget on one or 2 websites but aren't getting enough conversions to justify the investment, you could decrease your bid for this website or exclude the site from your campaign.
Conversely, if a handful of sites are performing exceptionally well and delivering a low CPA, you may want to increase your bid on these sites.
Conversion Tracking lets you view how many conversions you're getting from a Google Ads campaign. You can also evaluate your performance on Display Network sites that showed your ads compared with the performance on the Search network and decide how to bid and optimize based on this data.
Use a complementary online advertising strategy to attract more people to your website so that you can add them to your data segment. Display and Search campaigns are effective ways to achieve this.