October 8, 2021
The Ideal QA Process in Digital Advertising
Advertisers want to know as much about their consumers as possible. Luckily, Google released a new feature from beta called In-Market Audiences for Search, where you can overlay 500+ different audiences on top of your search campaigns. In-Market Audiences are a popular targeting feature on the display network. You can use them to target people who are currently shopping for a specific product, from clothes to cars to houses to vacations and everything in between.
You can utilize the data gathered from In-Market Audiences in various ways to fuel your digital marketing efforts. My favorite use-case is to adjust bids on In-Market audiences based on performance. These audiences can also inform larger strategy initiatives, such as display targeting if you are not yet running ads on the Google Display Network or even language that could be used in ad copy.
But how do you go about selecting which In-Market Audiences to target?
1. If there is large enough conversion volume, Google Ads will provide insights on the “Converters” audience. This indicates what other things the most valuable users are searching for. To find these insights, select “Tools,” “Audience Manager,” and then “Audience Insights” on the left-hand side.
2. If conversion volume is low, you must be creative in selecting audiences. Of course, you would want to add the audiences that are directly relevant to your business, but it’s also important to test tangentially relevant audiences. Think about what else is often purchased alongside the product.
For example, consider a clothing store. The first audiences to overlay include Women’s Apparel and/or Men’s Apparel. But what else could a person be looking for if they are already shopping for clothes? Perhaps they are shopping for an upcoming trip. In which case, you could test the audience “Trips by Destination.” Maybe these users are shopping for clothes for an upcoming concert, in which case it would make sense to test out “Concert & Music Festival Tickets.” Depending on the product, this can be a great way to gain new insights on your target audience.
Since the release of In-Market Audiences, we have tested a number of tangentially-related audiences for a client who sells appliances. Assuming those who are shopping for appliances recently purchased a new house or rented out a new space, we overlaid the “Commercial Properties” and “Residential Properties” audiences. By applying these new audiences, we discovered that the “Commercial Properties” segment was a much more valuable user segment, driving about a third of the overall revenue in the testing period. Meanwhile, the “Residential Properties” segment drove almost no revenue. We would not have been able to gain this insight by evaluating the Search Query Report, and it has allowed us to pivot strategy towards a more commercial audience.
By getting creative with your In-Market Audiences, you can easily learn more information about your target demographic while also helping improve your strategy moving forward. You can more aggressively target your strongest user segments, adjust your ad copy to speak to your most valuable users, utilize these audiences in display efforts, and more! Contact us if you would like to learn more.
