When it comes to paid advertising, I love talking about audiences. They’re incredibly helpful for optimizing campaigns and ensuring they reach the right people. However, I’ve noticed that many advertisers focus solely on audiences for display, YouTube, or social media strategies. Search audiences, on the other hand, seem to be forgotten. This post aims to change that. Here are my top methods for utilizing audiences within Google Ads search campaigns to enhance and expand your results.
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How can you use search audiences?
First, let’s recap the ways you can incorporate search audiences into your campaigns.
Wondering if your campaigns could benefit from search audiences? Our free Google Ads Grader can help you find out!
1. Observation layering
This is the least intrusive way to integrate audiences into an existing paid search strategy. By adding audiences as observation layers, you can segment data in your search campaigns without restricting your overall audience reach.
You can modify the audiences applied to your search campaigns at any time. Simply go to the “Audiences” section in the left-hand navigation and click “Edit Audience Segments.”
As you’ll see, all audiences within search campaigns default to “observation.” (We’ll delve into “targeting” strategies shortly.) Google explains that observation targeting doesn’t limit your campaign reach but allows for bid adjustments based on different segments.
Let’s start with targeting. The audience options for search campaigns are identical to those for any other campaign on the Google network. You can select from in-market or affinity audiences, remarketing, YouTube Engagement, detailed demographics, and more. Just check the box next to the desired audiences, and they’ll be applied to your campaign.
This is where my preferred approach comes in: I add almost every available audience as an observation layer to my campaigns.
It’s crucial to remember that I’m not narrowing my targeting. So, even if an audience like “financial services” doesn’t perfectly align with my target audience based on our persona documents, I can still observe its performance compared to other audience segments on Google.
Then, based on the chosen bid strategy, I can modify bids for each audience according to its performance. For instance, with a Target CPA of roughly $400 in this account, I might adjust bids as shown in the image. Audiences with CPAs significantly lower than the target might receive a bid increase, while those above the target get a decrease.
The main constraint here is the bid strategy you’re using. As you can see in the chart below, only manual and enhanced CPC strategies permit bid modifications for audiences. Other strategies will ignore these bid modifiers.
However, bid modification isn’t the only reason to utilize observation layers. If a particular audience demonstrates exceptionally high or low performance, you might want to consider segmenting it into its own campaign for more focused optimization or excluding it entirely.
While other bid strategies don’t allow for bid adjustments, they do allow for exclusions. To add audiences you want to avoid, simply scroll to the “Exclusions” section at the bottom of the page and click “Edit Exclusions.”
2. Targeting and remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA)
For a more innovative approach with audiences, we can shift from “observation” to “targeting.”
This means focusing solely on the audiences applied to your campaigns. All other users will be excluded. While this may seem limiting—and it is—restricting your audience opens up numerous search strategies that might not be suitable without those audience limitations.
The primary obstacle is ensuring you meet the minimum audience size of 1,000 active users in the past 30 days. If you’re struggling to reach this threshold, you might need to stick with the observation methods mentioned earlier until you can drive larger user volumes.
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The benefits of targeting vs. observing search audiences
Now, let’s explore the advantages of using a targeted approach and its implications for your options.
Opportunities for highly customized ad copy and keywords
By narrowing your audience to only the most desirable users, you can tailor campaigns more precisely based on your knowledge of them. For instance, if you’re targeting previous website visitors, you can likely skip the detailed brand introduction and instead focus on differentiating yourself from competitors.
This image from Facebook provides a good illustration. While it might seem odd to use a Facebook example, customized search ads based on audiences are rare. This means you’ll stand out from competitors by creating tailored messaging!
Here, LinkedIn is targeting me on Facebook, encouraging me to return and utilize their platform for B2B marketing, showcasing their impressive B2B targeting capabilities. As a frequent user of their advertising platform, they likely want to redirect my attention from Facebook and encourage me to spend on their platform. A smart move!
Think about how you can apply this to your potential customers. For those who have visited your site before and are still searching for similar services, you could tailor your ad copy to present a promotion, highlight specific benefits not offered to first-time customers, and more.
This also extends to your keywords. While your regular search campaigns might center around your core services, you could use broader terms promoting less popular services or offerings reserved for returning customers when targeting those who have already visited your site.
Need targeted keyword ideas for personalized ads? Try our Free Keyword Tool!
Improved call-to-action strategies for funnel movement
This same principle applies to calls to action. I work with several software companies with lengthy sales cycles. For their prospecting campaigns, we might use video views or content downloads as the call to action. However, for Remarketing Lists in Search Ads (RLSA), we’ll switch to demo requests or something further down the funnel since these users are already familiar with our offerings and may be ready to take the next step.
You can create remarketing lists based on user actions on your site. You’re probably already creating lists for campaign exclusions based on these actions. Why not replicate these lists in Google Ads and apply them to search campaigns to promote the next step in the buyer’s journey? The only real limitation is the minimum audience size!
Tighter Dynamic Search Ads
Besides manual keyword expansion, remarketing lists are also excellent for refining the reach of Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs).
DSAs operate differently than regular search campaigns. You provide Google with your website URL or a page feed, and Google dynamically matches search terms relevant to your site content and generates ad headlines for you.
The advantage of using Remarketing Lists is that you can likely bypass most Dynamic Search Ads restrictions, as the audience targeting takes care of most of the qualification process. When someone who has previously interacted with your brand conducts a relevant search, a Dynamic Search Ad with customized headlines and landing pages will appear.
Using more broad match keywords successfully
Going beyond DSAs, you can also start leveraging broad match keywords with remarketing lists. The same principles from the previous strategies apply, but we’re using match type instead of targeting type for increased reach.
You can find more information about match types here, but in short, broad match is the broadest option available. With broad match keywords, you’ll match to terms outside the typical range of phrase and exact match. Assuming Google’s machine learning is as effective as advertised, these terms should still be relevant to your business, and the added remarketing list layers increase your chances of engaging with known users.
Broad match keywords may not be ideal for regular prospecting search campaigns, but combined with audiences, they become a powerful tool for scaling your reach.
Whether you observe or target, don’t sleep on search audiences for Google Ads campaigns
While audiences are often discussed in the context of display, YouTube, or social advertising, their usefulness extends far beyond. Whether you’re observing audience performance to gain insights or adjusting your keywords, targeting strategy, messaging, or calls to action, audiences can be invaluable for improving search campaigns. Interested in learning more? Discover how our solutions can help you get the most out of your search campaigns!