MA Exams | PPC Targeting

Types of Targeting

Google Ads provides multiple methods of targeting. Targeting is how you tell Google what types of people you want to show ads to. Different campaign types have different targeting options.

First, it will be helpful to understand some basic vocabulary:

• Audience: groups of people with specific interests, intents, and demographics, as estimated by Google. You can select from a wide range of categories – such as fans of sport and travel, people shopping for cars, or specific people that have visited your site. You can also create your own audiences using a few different methods provided by Google.
• Remarketing: targeting ads to people who have already interacted with your site or service. You can create remarketing lists for anyone who has visited your site, or a segment of visitors to your site. For instance, you could create an audience of people who have visited a checkout page but not made a purchase.

Audience Targeting

When adding an audience to a search campaign, you have two options: Targeting or Observation.

If you choose “Targeting”, you will be limiting ads to only those within the audience. If you choose “Observation”, you will get a report of how people within that audience interacted with your ads. So if you choose to add the in-market audience “Hosted Data & Cloud Storage” with an “Observation” targeting setting, the report will show the metrics for everyone within that audience that has searched a term that triggered an ad.

* = Treated as a target adjustment

Types of Audiences:

• Affinity segments: Reach users based on what they’re passionate about and their habits and interests.
• Custom segments: Custom segments help you reach your ideal audience by entering relevant keywords, URLS and apps.
• Detailed demographics: Reach users based on long-term life facts.
• Life events: Reach users when they’re in the midst of important life milestones.
• In-market: Reach users based on their recent purchase intent.
• Your data segments: Reach users that have interacted with your business.
  • Website and app visitors: Reach people who have visited either your website or your apps.
  • Customer Match: Reach your existing customers based on your CRM data.
  • Similar segments: Reach new users with similar interests to your website visitors or existing customers.

This video describes 3 of the biggest audience types:

Bid Adjustments

Bid adjustments are a percentage increase or decrease in your bids. Bid adjustments allow you to show your ads more or less frequently based on where, when, and how people search. For example, sometimes a click is worth more to you if it comes from a smartphone, at a certain time of day, or from a specific location. You can also adjust your bids based on how your ads perform, helping to improve your return on investment (ROI).

If you are using a manual bidding strategy, you can also add a bid adjustment to an audience, so if a specific audience is performing better than the general traffic, you can increase the amount you are willing to spend for each click by some percentage.

If you are using a smart (automated) bidding strategy, bid adjustments don’t impact the cost per click.

Bid adjustments can be made to more than just Observation audiences. You can also add bid adjustments to locations, times of day, and device. However, if you are using automated Smart Bidding strategies including Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize conversions, and Maximize conversion value, you don’t need to make manual bid adjustments since those strategies automatically set bids to optimize for the conversion goal specified by the customer. If you make a manual bid adjustment to your automated Smart Bidding strategy it won’t be supported. With device bid adjustments for Target CPA, you are modifying the value of your CPA target.

* = Treated as a target adjustment

RLSA

RLSA stands for remarketing lists for search ads. It is exactly what it sounds like. They are remarketing lists that you add to a search campaign. The purpose is to see how people who have interacted with your site in the past interact with your site. In general, the idea is that people who have already visited your site will be more likely to convert than general visitors. A potential use of RLSA would be to create a campaign with more general or broad match keywords with the “Targeting” targeting setting selected.