How to pinpoint the right customers with Google’s new AdWords features

Sometimes implementing keyword research isn’t enough to qualify the right type of user in Google Search. Luckily, Google has been releasing a range of features over the past year that allow users to better target searchers more accurately, beyond just keywords.

New releases allow advertisers to adjust bids for audiences, or exclude them entirely. This means that they can explore new avenues, covering age, demographics, your past site visitors, and from this month — ‘similar audiences’. This opens up huge opportunities for advertisers — particularly where a business might only service a portion of a market, or wants to focus on a particular demographic segment due to budget or performance.

Here are the some of the latest changes your business should be incorporating into your AdWords strategy.

Targeting similar audiences

In the latest of the audience developments, similar audiences can now be targeted on Google Search. This allows you to find people who share similar interests, search patterns and demographics with your existing site users.

For example, you might be selling upmarket furniture. By bidding on users that are similar to your past purchasers, you’d be able to isolate users that are more likely to purchase high-ticket items and reduce spend on less relevant searchers.

Age, gender bidding

This feature gives advertisers the power to adjust bids by gender and age bracket, or both. Bid adjustments can exclude a segment altogether, or increase/decrease bids for users in that bracket.

A gym focused on the 18-24 demographic could reduce significant wastage by reducing bids on older audiences, for example.

Google’s age and gender targeting is impressive, but it’s worth assuming some imprecision here. Take the time to test bids first before blocking out a segment entirely.

Remarket to YouTube lists

YouTube is a fantastic channel for brand building, but it’s hard to quantify the impact on actual downstream sales and searches.

You can now add your YouTube viewers lists to your search campaigns, which will give you hard numbers on the actual number of searches you generate from brand campaigns. This is an amazing development in YouTube attribution and a great way of gaining a better insight into the behaviour of your target audience.

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