October 8, 2021
The Ideal QA Process in Digital Advertising
Understanding Your Customer Personas
In a world where advertisers are constantly trying to determine the optimal targeting for paid search and paid social efforts, understanding your customer personas or cohorts can give you a very effective roadmap on where, when, and who you should be advertising your products or services to. One of the best ways to kick off this process of understanding your consumer is by using the audience insights tool in AdWords.
The audience insights tool uses your remarketing lists to help you learn about your customers and website visitors, providing information on their demographics, interests, locations, and devices. The tool can be found in the Shared Library under Audiences and is automatically applied to any remarketing audience or customer match list you have in your AdWords account.
How to Use Audience Insights
While there are various users who convert on your website, the most valuable audience to gain insights on is your top revenue customers. You can do this by uploading a customer match list, using the emails of users who generate the bulk of your revenue or have the most value to you depending on your goals. Once that has been uploaded, Google will match your email lists to the Gmail users and provide insights on who these users are.
Once Google has matched enough emails to provide audience insights, you can navigate through the tabs to start defining your personas. The key here is to look for categories that are a small percent of the U.S. and a large percent of your audience list. This is because there are certain categories, such as Shopaholics, that all users fall into in one way or another. When you find a category that a very small portion of the U.S. falls into, you can be sure that Google is more selective about who they place in that audience list, making those users who fall into a said category a bit more niche.
Looking at the example above, we can tell that the most valuable user for this business is in the market for perfumes, likes luxury items, and is female between the ages of 18 to 24. This data not only informs display targeting but also helps you determine what types of keywords or demographic layering you should add to your search campaigns. With audience insights, you can take out some of the guesswork in determining the best audience personas that will drive revenue for your business.
