In-Market Audiences are a powerful targeting tool available in Google Ads. Google segments users as being “in-market” for a wide array of products and services – everything from “Desktop Computers” to “Child Car Seats’” to “Investment Services.” This feature, which Bing Ads has also adopted, now has several main use cases on Search, Display, YouTube, and more.

Getting Started

Before jumping in and targeting In-Market Audiences across campaigns, let’s take a moment to understand which audiences correlate most with conversion. Luckily, Google’s valuable feature called Audience Insights can provide context on the relationships between their set of In-Market Audiences and your converters. Start by visiting the Audience manager tab under the Google Ads Tools section.

 

Next, click on Audience Insights on the left-side navigation section. As long as your All Converters audience has 1,000 members, there will be a list at the bottom of the page for In-Market Audiences that has the highest correlation with converters. If the All Converters audience does not have 1,000 members, you can still attain insights on the All Visitors audience.

 

In this view, Google provides a multiplier of the conversion likelihood of a user in the given In-Market Audience versus an average American. For example, a particular technology-focused account can reach an audience of 15 to 20 million users in the “Business Printing & Document Services” In-Market Audience that is 21.2x more likely to convert than an average user. Audience Insights can be super interesting because while some audiences are logical, others are less intuitive, like “Home Theater Systems,” but they still provide a valuable, data-proven opportunity for targeting and testing.

Testing Your Hypotheses

After viewing Google’s Audience Insights report, test the efficacy of your account’s highest indexed In-Market Audiences by applying them in Observation across all search campaigns. Observation is essentially a data-collection mode in which the scope of a campaign isn’t limited, but metrics for an audience can be collected. Apply the top indexed In-Market Audiences in a search campaign by heading to the Audiences tab, and once applied, copy and paste across all search campaigns. Make sure you’ve selected Observation mode, or else you risk limiting the reach of the campaign to only the specified audiences.

 

Targeting & Use Cases

After you’ve gathered enough data in Observation mode, you should have a good idea of which In-Market Audiences have the strongest correlation to conversion. At this point, you can take advantage of several different targeting methods. Google allows you to target In-Market Audiences across the Google Display Network, YouTube, Gmail, and even Search (called In-Market Audiences for Search). Run a campaign across one or more of these networks that targets users in the top In-Market Audiences from your findings. Be sure to frequently check and assess performance, as users in these audiences may convert differently across advertising networks.

Don’t be afraid to test several In-Market Audiences in separate ad groups, as one of these groups of users could be a new key source of conversions for your business. Contact us to learn how Metric Theory can improve your digital marketing using In-Market Audiences.

Share: