Google Ads, the goliath of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, recently launched two new offerings to help you reach your target audience in Google Search, and it’s pretty big news. The rollouts include Affinity Audiences and Seasonal Event Segments for In-Market Audiences – just in time for the holidays. Read further to discover more about these targeting options and to find out what they might have to offer you.
What’s It All About?
When potential customers – and there are likely far more than you realize – are in search mode, they are exploring their personal interests, searching for inspiration, and digging around for things that matter to them. If you can provide these potential customers with what they want (even if they’re not aware of what it is they want in the moment) when they want it, you’re golden. Google Ads’ latest additions are focused on helping you make your advertising efforts more useful in the moment – the moment when the searcher needs help, advice, guidance, and/or direction. The first step in this process is establishing a clear understanding of what motivates your potential customers, and that’s where Google Ads’ new features come in.
Audience Expectations
Consumers have come to expect a highly polished ad experience that is personal, informative, interesting, useful, and seamless. The best way to provide your ad audience with an optimal experience is to get to know them better – enter Affinity Audiences, which is designed to help you cultivate your ideal audience.
Affinity Audiences
An affinity audience refers to those potential customers who’ve already shown an interest in what you have to offer – they have an affinity for your wares. Affinity Audiences is designed to help advertisers like you raise awareness, pique interest, and drive greater consideration in consumers who’ve demonstrated a keen interest in businesses like yours – they’re known as interest-based customers. The idea is to significantly increase conversions on every search campaign that comes your way, and it works.
In fact, Google has been offering a Custom Affinity Audiences advertising option for several years. With Affinity Audiences, however, it’s opening up these services to a much wider range of advertisers and audiences – for businesses both large and small. As a business owner, availing yourself of these services will allow you to target specific audiences that are of special interest to you and/or to simply observe how these audiences of interest perform in your ad campaigns.
By Way of Example
For example, if your company sells office furniture, you’re likely to get online hits when an office manager happens to be looking to change things up. Affinity Audiences, however, can help you pair with potential clients who have an ongoing interest in your products and services. By layering terms such as office designers and trendsetting office interiors with keywords that apply more generically – you can cultivate a deeper level of interest by connecting with customers – like interior designers for offices – who have a long-term, organic interest in what you have to offer.
Why It Matters
Targeting an interest-based audience by mining valuable information through Affinity Audiences matters on multiple levels and for myriad reasons, including:
- It can help you build brand recognition with those potential customers who are most likely to further advance this recognition via word of mouth and by way of example.
- It can help improve your conversion rates as they relate to turning searches into purchases.
- It can help you reach potential customers when they are still higher in the marketing funnel – when they are just beginning to explore their options and before they’ve locked into anything.
More to the Story
There’s more to increasing your conversion rates than just getting to know your audience better – although that is important. Whether you are looking to deepen brand-recognition, to grow sales, or to do both, another important piece to every purchase story is understanding where the consumer is on his or her path toward making that purchase. While Google’s In-Market Audiences allows advertisers like you to connect with people who are already searching for, researching, thinking about, and/or comparing services and/or products like those you offer, it’s Seasonal Segments for In-Market Audiences takes things a step further.
Seasonal Event Segments for In-Market Audiences
The holidays are nearly upon us, and Google Ads has taken the opportunity to introduce its Seasonal Event Segments for In-Market Audiences on YouTube and Search. As a business owner, you recognize that consumer searches expand considerably over the holidays, and tapping into this peak interest is good for business. Google Ads’ new rollout is geared to help you connect meaningfully with this bounty of potential customers – by helping you meet them on their own turf with relevant, timely holiday offers in hand.
Holiday Shopping Is Serious Shopping
If you are in retail, you certainly understand that Black Friday and Christmas shopping are significant sources of revenue. Google Ads is responding directly to the shopping power inherent to the holidays with its Seasonal Events Segments. While your audience remains rooted in its buyer intent signals – such as those mined in Affinity Audiences – Google Ads’ Seasonal Events Segments can help you further refine your targeting efforts. While targeting every holiday shopper isn’t useful, layering holiday information over your already highly specialized targeting strategies can help you reap your share of the bounty that is holiday shopping.
We’re Here to Help You Find and Mine Your Target Audience
The intrepid digital team at The Web Guys has been specializing in clients like you since 2005. In fact, your online success is our business. Your online presence is not only your calling card but also what drives your business. An important component of cultivating your strongest online game is making new digital products work for you, which just happens to be our area of expertise. With the holidays upon us, now is the time to dig deeper into Google Ads’ new offerings, and we’re here to help you do just that. To learn more about us or our services, contact us at 317-805-4933 today.
