In this day and age of personalization as well as automated ad practices, marketers have the ability to choose from several audience targeting options. These different segments can help you fine-tune your strategies—whether it’s through your bidding or your content material—in order to show ads that resonate with your audience.
In your audience report, Google provides different key audience groups such as Demographics, Audience Segments, and Exclusions. For this newsletter, we’ll be focusing on Audience Segments or the different types of audience targeting options available for marketers.
Affinity Segments
Affinity segments target based on people’s individual wants, passions, lifestyles, and habits. With a deep dive into the person’s psyche, your campaigns are able to reach out to the people who can find the most value for the product or service you provide.
With more specific ads served to these audiences, you can generate more conversions, and therefore, lower your cost per acquisition.
Life Events
Think of major milestones in your life. Surely you’ve had some sort of purchase in mind during these moments. Whether it’s a holiday trip after graduation, furniture before moving into a new house, or even a special outfit during one’s birthday, the Life Events segment allows you to customize your ads during the right moments.
Keep in mind, though, that because life events are far and few in between a year, this segment is much smaller than Affinity Segments.
However, opportunities in this segment are larger than the next options which are in-market segments. That’s because purchases aren’t limited to a single product during these milestones, allowing marketers to have a wide range of campaigns and strategies at their disposal.
In-market Segments
The keyword here is audience intent. As is its name, the in-market segment deals with customers who are proactively looking for a similar service or product that you’re providing. Campaigns under this option should not be focused on showing the wonders of remote learning, for example, but on your specific online course.
Custom Segments
This is a more specific segment since Google allows you to fully customize the audience of your choosing. You can do these by curating your own keywords, URLs, and apps that you think can entice your audience.
All inputted data will be sorted by Google based on the following factors:
- Reach
- Consideration
- Performance
Remarketing
As the name suggests, this targeting option allows you to show your ads towards people who have displayed interest in your company previously, whether it’s through visiting your website, providing their contact details, or even those who share interests with your current audience.
Detailed Demographics
It’s no longer enough to just know about the age, location, or marital status of your audience. People have unique tastes, even those with a similar demographic identity.
This means you need to go deeper and examine their current life stages—are they college students looking for supplementary courses? Mid-level professionals learning to reskill? Parents looking for time-flexible programs? Take all these things into consideration when targeting under detailed demographics.
