Google Ads Custom Audiences

Google Ads Custom Audiences allows you to create custom audiences of people who have visited your website or interacted with your mobile app. You can then target these audiences with relevant ads on Google.com or across your network of sites and apps.

 

Custom Audiences is a Google product that allows marketers to target people who are researching specific topics, products, and solutions on the web using display or YouTube video ad campaigns created in Google Ads. 

 

 

Data such as interest and behaviour, types of websites browsed, types of apps downloaded, category of physical location visited can be included as subheadings to create Custom Audiences. Thus, instead of choosing from the list Google Ads offers, a more specific target audience can be created by considering consumers.

 

You will learn 3 main issues about Google Ads Custom Audiences in this article:

• How Do You Set Up Custom Audiences in Google Ads?
• What Are the Types of Custom Audiences?
• Benefits of Google Ads Custom Audiences

 

How Do You Set Up Custom Audiences in Google Ads?

Custom Audiences can be a valuable way to reach potential customers who are interested in what you have to offer. To create a Custom Audience, you’ll need to have a Google Ads account and meet the following criteria:

 

• You must have at least 100 unique visitors to your website or app in the past 30 days.
• Your website or app must be integrated with Google Analytics or Firebase Analytics.
• You must have a Google Ads account that’s linked to your website or app.

 

Once you have met the criteria, you can create a Custom Audience by following these steps:

 

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. Click the “Tools and Settings” icon , and then under “Shared library,” click “Audience Manager”.

3. Click the plus button.

4. Select “Create a new audience”, then click “Custom Audience from website or app”.

5. Enter a name for your audience and select how you want to identify your website or app visitors.

6. If you’re using Google Analytics, select the view that you want to use for your audience. If you’re using Firebase Analytics, select your app and enter your Firebase project ID. It can be shown “Your Data Sources” part of the left bar.

7.  Select the days that you want to include in your audience, then click “Continue”.

8. (Optional) To exclude people from your audience, click the “Exclusions” tab and follow the instructions.

9. Click “Save” and continue.

Your Custom Audience will be created and you can start targeting it with ads. Keep in mind that it may take up to 24 hours for your audience to be fully populated.

 

What Are the Types of Custom Audiences?

Although you determine the target audience of an advertising campaign in line with your brand’s identity during the campaign setup stage, sometimes you may not be able to make the right Google Ads optimizations. Google recommends using Google Ads insights in your past campaigns to move forward with a more accurate audience preference. Here are some types of audiences:

 

• Interest and Behaviour Targeting: This targeting is very suitable if you want to use an audience you have created on properties owned by Google. This targeting has 2 options, and it is necessary to choose one of them to create a target audience.

• People with any of these interests or purchase intentions: When selected as the target audience, you are instructing Google to create people with any of these interests or purchase intentions. If you click this option, your target keywords will direct your ads to your ideal customers with interests and purchase intentions on Google and other platforms.
• People who searched for any of these terms on Google: When selected as the target audience, you are given the command to create people searching for any of these terms on Google. For this option, you must be using the keywords your ideal customer uses on Google. In addition, your ads may show when these or similar terms are searched on Google properties. If they use non-Google properties, your ads will show as interest or purchase intent.

• People who browse types of websites: In this type of targeting, Google asks you to provide the types of websites your audience will visit, in URL form. This option is very suitable if you know which websites your target audience spends their time on. Thus, new users benefit from the insights obtained from the websites. 

• People who use types of apps: This type of targeting is very similar to website targeting options, but includes apps instead. It’s a targeting that takes into account the types of apps your potential customers will use. During the list creation process, Google automatically offers a list of suggestions to match the themes of your list. You can take advantage of this or create your own list entirely.

• People who visited certain places: This targeting is very useful if a business knows who and where it should reach as a target audience. This targeting will be physical location categories rather than individual locations themselves.

You can regularly review campaign results and campaign performance analyzes and optimize your ads in order to observe the functionality of your target audience in the future.

 

Benefits of Google Ads Custom Audiences

Choosing Custom Audiences has a number of advantages over other types of targeting. Do not forget that accurate targeting will increase the click-through rate of your campaign, help you minimize CPC and CPM, and help you gain an advantageous position in auctions. Learning more about what is CPM and what is CPC will help you better manage and optimize your advertising campaigns.

• Custom Audiences Have Flexibility in Audience Creation: Custom Audiences provides flexibility in creating audiences. In line with the criteria of a business, it allows to create all kinds of audience segments that are most suitable for that business goals. There is no rule like other audience targeting methods (e.g. affinity, in-market) that only allow you to choose from a limited list of interest groups.

• Custom Audiences Allow Using Competitors’ Data for Targeting: If people who browse competitors’ websites are chosen as the target audience, this means that a business can increase its market share and perform better in a competitive environment. In other words, you can find whatever keywords your competitors rank for on the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and target these interest groups. For example, if you’re developing an app, you can target people who will be interested in your product by researching industry best practices and then discovering who downloads such apps. Google ads competitor analysis is something that should always be taken into consideration.

• Custom Audiences Is Budget-friendly: We mentioned that a more flexible and more specific targeting is made with Custom Audience. Therefore, it is a fact that the product and service offered by a business reaches the most relevant people. Custom Audiences is the best way to target people in niche areas rather than reaching large audiences with high spending. It will give you the opportunity to appeal to potential customers using only relevant creatives and offers.

 

Relevant audience + Relevant creative + Relevant content = Higher Performance

 

That way, budget isn’t wasted as with ad impressions when targeting broad categories to reach the right audience, as only certain groups are targeted that are interested in a particular topic.

• Custom Audiences Creates Only One Audience: Unlike other audience types, with Custom Audiences, it is possible to include all segments of people in a business’s industry into a single target. This way, you don’t have to deal with combining multiple audiences and you can only run one audience targeting method for your entire campaign. Expanding or narrowing the reach depends entirely on the marketing strategy.

---