Google Ads audiences are a powerful targeting tool for distributing various advertisements to a public (group of people) with specific characteristics.
Whether predefined or customized, audiences serve multiple purposes. On the one hand, these can help you improve your brand awareness among an audience with an interest in products or services similar to yours. On the other hand, they can be an effective leverage to convert your actual users.
We will not discuss here the networks and types of campaigns in which these audiences can fit, nor the ad formats with which they can be associated.
The goal is to see in detail the different types of audiences, so you can understand the tremendous possibilities of Google targeting. Overview of audiences on the Google network.
As the name suggests, Google’s demographic audiences are built from demographics.
Information such as parental status, marital status, level of education or even being a landlord or tenant are some of the factors that are taken into account in the creation of these audiences.
These audiences are an effective way to target an audience with a strong and genuine interest in a particular topic, lifestyle, habit or passion.
This type of audience is particularly suitable for advertisers wishing to target people with an interest in the services or products they offer.
The choice of these affinity targeting is very large, it includes targeting based on interests in such varied fields as finance, political news, purchasing behavior or even gardening and DIY.
Making an exhaustive list would take a whole article, as the choice of targeting is truly vast!
These audiences predefined by Google allow advertisers to target an audience that is actively seeking a good or a service. These are therefore very interesting audiences for advertisers wishing to maximize their conversions and who offer services or products similar to what the members of these audiences are looking for.
Here too, the number of targeted services and products categories is large. We have, for example, the possibility of targeting people looking for a digital marketing agency (as it may be your case ), electronic products, beauty care or sports products.
In-market audiences are also associated with ‘life events’ audiences. These allow to target people who have planned in the near future or who have very recently experienced a major change in their life.
Including, for example, the possibility of targeting people who have started or are planning to start a business, a person who has just retired or even people who are planning to buy a house in the near future or who have just acquired properties.
One of the most powerful audiences in terms of performance and conversions. Remarketing audiences are custom audiences targeting people who have performed a particular action. It is therefore a question of reaching a pre-qualified audience.
You can, for example, decide to retarget people who have seen a specific page of your website, who have contacted your company or someone who has already made a purchase on your site.
Having previously been exposed to your brand, these people are more likely to take an action leading to conversion.
Lookalike audiences are relatively similar to remarketing in their approach. These are created using machine learning from Google and allow you to target people who have behaved similarly to audiences that you have previously defined. For example, you can target an audience similar to people who have converted on your site.
These audiences are created by Google according to the mix of different settings that you control.
To make it clear, the idea is to indicate to Google a theme that you define with various parameters. From these input parameters, Google will create the most relevant audience possible.
These “entries” can be keywords, application names (for example, applications similar to yours), or even URLs (for example, your competitors websites…).
There is a more advanced version of Custom Audiences. This allows you to create custom audiences that are similar to your existing audiences from data shared by your actual users. Given the reliability of this data, the likelihood of targeting similar, and therefore relevant, people is very high.
So it is a very powerful tool that Google offers here. However, the creation of this type of audiences requires on the one hand a relatively high minimum investment threshold. On the other hand, in addition to the intrinsic limits that it can present, the database must be substantial in order to be relevant and correctly exploitable by Google.
As you can see, Google audiences make it possible to achieve a very precise level of granularity. To the point that some believe that they can represent a privacy issue.
Indeed, this level of precision is such that in theory, pretty much nothing can prevent Google from identifying precisely each of the members of a given audience. It is therefore understandable that this can represent a profound breach of user confidentiality.
This is one of the reasons why the “end” of third-party cookies was announced. Although this is not the subject of this article, it should be noted that this new paradigm will profoundly shake up the methods of creating audiences (to find out more, I invite you to watch our video on the subject, or read our blog).
All the big players are affected and there is currently no specific solution to address this new challenge. One of the avenues put forward would be to abandon the audience model in favor of cohort based targeting.
In the meantime, we invite you to take advantage of these audiences while you can . To stay informed of developments in this matter, make sure that you are subscribed to our newsletter.
Christophe
