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Audience targeting focuses on consumers within the pre-determined target market. It’s identifying targets or recipients of a particular advertising message. So, we’re targeting people.
It allows you to be more accurate when we’re choosing who sees your ads. It’s that word “who” that’s important. We’ve got in-market audiences and we’ve got other audience options available to us. Using audience targeting Google Ads is a way of segmenting your website users and creating campaigns around them, and that’s key. That is essential to what we’re doing, because it’s the segmentation of those audiences that allows for better targeting.
There are some different categories within the audience section:
We begin with demographic targeting because it is the broadest methodology.
Demographic targeting is age, gender, parental status, and income. And a lot of the time because the Google Display Network is not a logged-in environment. People come up as their gender is unknown or their age is unknown. so we do find a large proportion of the Google Display Network functionality, such as age and gender, is quite limited because it’s based on an assumption from the type of browsing behavior that they might have versus Facebook where you have a profile that elects that you’re a male, and you’re aged 24, and you live in New York.
If I want to target 24-year-old males in New York, it’s far more accurate on Facebook than the Google Display Network. But it’s getting better as more and more people log into Chrome, and as more and more people log into their Gmail as they browse on Google. So it’s just not as accurate as the logged-in environments of social media.
These will be what they like to call TV audiences. These are people who are interested in a certain topic. For example, they are travel enthusiasts. They are shutterbugs for photography. They are fashionistas who are interested in fashion. They are petrol heads. They’re whatever they may be. They’re interested in certain topics. They’re interested in lots and lots of other things too, so you’re buying access to a mass reach and audience that has a certain affinity with a certain product.
You may sell that product. You also may not sell that product, but you just want to target that group because you believe that it is the most appropriate audience for your targeting. Similar to the way traditional advertising would have been set up, so you might want to target men who are in their 50s and who go on business travel. So we might find business travel affinity is an option to choose because you’re selling cologne. You’re not selling travel, but you are selling that product that relates to that particular audience.
You know, so that’s the type of thinking you need to apply to affinity audiences.
In-market audiences are those very specific audiences who believe that they’re on the cusp of a purchase, they’re in the middle, they’ve done their research, Google has tracked all this, and they’ve put them in this group. They’re actively shopping around. So you can influence their consideration or indeed drive that sale through in-market audiences.
Back to TopCathal Melinn is a digital strategist, lecturer, and trainer. He has over 15 years’ experience in eCommerce, social media, affiliate marketing, data analytics, and all things digital. He worked at Yahoo! Search in 2005 as a Senior Search Strategist for the UK Financial Services vertical. He moved to the world of agency in 2010 as Head of Search and Online Media. Cathal’s previous clients include Apple, Vodafone, Expedia, Virgin, Universal Music Group, Amazon, Compare the Market, and HSBC.
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ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE
This module introduces the key concepts involved in display advertising. It covers the advantages of different types of display platforms and demonstrates how to set up a display advertising campaign. It also explores the key considerations for targeting and bidding in a display advertising campaign, and how to report on and optimize campaign performance.
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