The benefits of audiences in Google Ads

Using audiences in Google Ads text ads is becoming increasingly important to achieve campaign goals. With increasing competition, click rates are rising year after year, this makes it increasingly difficult to achieve your target at the right cost. Do you suffer from this as well? Then quickly read this article, using audiences can help you use your media budget more effectively.

Types of target groups

Within Google Ads’ search ads, there are roughly three distinct audience categories, detailed demographics, in-market and remarketing audiences. Below is an explanation for each target category.

Detailed demographics

Audience detailed demographics, is about who visitors are. This target group consists of the following subcategories:

Parental Status: Within this subcategory, you can target visitors who are parents of children in different age categories. Google Ads distinguishes five different categories: 0-1 years, 1-2 years, 3-4 years, 5-11 years and 12-17 years. This audience is perfect for companies that sell toys, for example.
Marital Status: The marital status subcategory consists of three different categories, single, in a relationship and married. A practical example for a business where this target audience is very interesting are dating services.
Education: Within education, a distinction can be made between current students and highest attainment. For highest educational attainment, Google Ads distinguishes between three subcategories: high school diploma, bachelor’s degree and high university degree. If as a company you are targeting the high end in terms of price, then the target group high university degree, in general, will be many times more interesting than people with only a high school diploma.
Home ownership: The last subcategory deals with home ownership. Here the distinction can be made between renters and homeowners.

In-market target audiences

In-market audiences are very interesting if the objective of your campaign is focused on conversions. Within these target groups are visitors who have recently actively searched on a particular topic, which is an indication that these visitors have a buying intent. There is a multitude of categories and subcategories that Google has defined, from travel to baby products. There are categories of interest here for almost all businesses.

Remarketing Google Ads

The last category are remarketing audiences in Google Ads. These are target groups based on previous website visits. An example is a list of visitors who put something in their shopping cart in the past 7 days but did not order anything. This is obviously a very interesting group to approach again through a search ad.

Another great advantage of remarketing audiences is that Google itself will create a similar audience of visitors who resemble the remarketing group. It is very valuable to create a remarketing list of all visitors who converted, Google will create a list of people who look like this. You can make good use of this list to bring back new interesting visitors to your website.

Setting up target audiences within Google Ads

Setting up audiences within search ads in Google Ads can be done under the “audience” tab. When creating a target audience, it is important to make a good choice between observation and targeting. Observation means that Google adds the target audience and you can analyze whether it performs better than the average. With targeting, you set up the campaign so that only visitors within this target audience see the ads.

Best practices target groups

The best practice for target groups is to add as many relevant target groups as possible on observation in all possible categories. Ultimately, the data will need to show which audiences are performing above average, this will give you more insight into your audience and will increase the quality of your campaigns. On the basis of automatic bidding strategies Google will naturally start sending more budget to the audiences that perform best. The end result is that you’re going to get more conversions from the media budget compared to if you don’t use audiences. Not using target groups yet? Then set them up quickly!