PPC advertising campaigns are beneficial for modern businesses due to their cost-effectiveness and ability to target audiences. For any business that leverages paid advertising, PPC audience targeting is critical. However, you can easily get lost in the process.
When managing a PPC campaign, knowing which customer segment to target and the keywords to use can become challenging. Other business owners lack a general understanding of what techniques to use as well as the available options.
The following guide covers PPC audience targeting and explores the best targeting methods your business can apply to find the perfect PPC target audience.
What is PPC Marketing?
PPC is an acronym for pay-per-click, an internet marketing technique that involves businesses making a payment every time someone clicks on one of their ads. PPC advertising also means that your business pays a fee so that it can appear on a search engine result page (SERP) when an internet user searches for specific keywords or phrases. The search engine displays your ads on the SERP page to direct leads to your website.
It is vital to add that search engine advertising is the most common PPC advertising technique. Advertisers must bid for their ads to be placed on sponsored search engine links. The results are displayed when a potential customer searches for keywords or phrases that are related to the business’s service or product offerings.
Therefore, when done right, PPC advertising can bring quality leads to your organization. Leveraging a seamless PPC campaign will boost your return on investment (ROI) and give your business a much-needed competitive edge.
When enacting a PPC marketing campaign, several activities are involved. For example, you must choose the right keywords, put them into ad groups, and create competitive PPC landing pages specifically optimized for conversion. Search engines like Google prefer businesses that develop relevant and strategically targeted pay-per-click drives. These businesses are rewarded by paying less for the clicks, which translates to improved profit margins.
Google’s Google Ads PPC advertising platform has been used by many businesses worldwide. Google Ads is the primary system where businesses’ ads appear on the Google search page when a potential customer does a search. Therefore, when implementing Google Ads for your website, you must be aware that Google will charge you to bid on keywords. Every time an internet user undertakes a search, Google chooses a winner from an advertiser database and shows them in a specific ad space on the SERP.
Business owners who have trouble understanding PPC marketing can always talk to qualified experts.
An Explanation of Audience Targeting
In PPC marketing, audience targeting refers to the process of segmenting consumers based on demographic data (such as age, average income, gender, location, interests, and gender). Audience targeting is vital because it helps businesses enact their PPC campaigns, regardless of the system being used. Basically, this technique helps you align your approach with your potential customers’ lifestyles and penchants.
For businesses, a critical consideration is how much data to collect for PPC audience targeting. The reality is that the more, the better. However, always ensure that you collect only essential data and leave out data that will not benefit your campaign. It is always vital to maintain relevancy during audience targeting.
Why is PPC Audience Targeting Important?
Let us now consider the benefits of audience targeting for your business.
- Understanding the buyer journey: The first advantage is that PPC audience targeting will give you a clearer picture of the customer’s buyer journey. You become better placed to know what the ideal customer is looking for from your business, ensuring that you can allocate resources appropriately.
- Cost-effectiveness: When you target the relevant audiences for your PPC campaign, you maximize your ad spend. Cost-effectiveness becomes possible because your ads only go to the relevant audiences, as stated earlier.
- Your business gets high-quality leads: Another vital benefit is that audience targeting opens doors for your business to convert serious customers. When you market your product or service to the right people, you are sure that you will get quality leads. There is a subsequent enhancement of customer loyalty because you can always remarket to leads you have converted before to help them re-engage with what you are offering on your website.
The Audience Targeting Process
There are two main data elements that you must consider when undertaking audience targeting for your PPC campaign. These are:
- First-party data: First-party data is collected from the cookies that your website creates when an internet user visits your website. These cookies tell you more about the visitor’s interests and behaviors.
- Third-party data: This data type comes from outside sources, meaning that your business never collected the same. The best practice with third-party data is that it should be appropriately filtered to make it more valuable and relevant to your business.
Once you have first-party and third-party data for your PPC campaign, you can start segmentation. Segmenting the data by considering the goals of your campaign and based on the relevant demographic groups is vital.
The first-party data collected from website cookies will be easily accessible and comparatively cheaper to collect. However, filtering third-party data to make it more valuable will require substantial finances, time, and resources.
Additionally, your business can choose from several audience targeting techniques. These methods include search, display, inventory, and user targeting.
Search targeting occurs when your adverts appear on a search engine results page, while display targeting occurs when your adverts appear on display networks such as Microsoft Audience Network and Google Display Network.
On its part, inventory targeting occurs when your adverts are placed on niche or authoritative websites. The ad is displayed when a customer visits such a site.
Finally, user targeting occurs when advertisements are displayed when a customer with a particular behavior or interest visits a site.
The following section discusses how you can improve your PPC audience targeting process.
Four Best Practices for PPC Audience Targeting Campaigns
As stated in the introduction, audience targeting can become complicated for most business owners. You will need to enact appropriate, cost-effective, and strategic methods. Sometimes, your approaches don’t work, meaning you must keep trying until there are visible performance improvements. These are some tactics you can use to enhance the process.
1. Leveraging Audience Exclusions
When you target your audience by topic, you display your ads to specific groups of people based on the intents, demographics, and interests that you think are important for your campaign. Google collects audience user data from people’s search histories and puts them in segments based on these parameters. This data can improve your ad bidding and audience targeting campaigns.
Audience exclusions occur when you isolate certain sections of the targeted audience to improve relevance. For example, when targeting car enthusiasts, you can use the process to create a sub-segment of the specific model that you are selling. This technique becomes beneficial because you have the opportunity to qualify higher-quality leads, reduce ad expenditure, and avert any ad delivery issues.
2. Leveraging In-Market Audiences
You can also target in-market audiences, defined as customers who are actively looking for or considering spending on specific products or services. The benefit of in-market audiences is that they can boost lead conversion since they interact with your business during the final stage of the buyer lifecycle. The fact that you can use real-time data to know which customers want specific products can help you with remarketing and enhancing its impact on your campaign.
3. Create Buyer persona Profiles
Although the two techniques differ, you should consider combining buyer personas with target audiences. A buyer or marketing persona is a profile that depicts the typical customer within a targeted audience. Although buyer personas are fictional, they are the results of intensive market research.
There are four main steps involved:
- Intensive market research: The first step is considering your target audiences and what they stand for. You need to collect in-depth audience data for this part. The trick is to use social media analytics tools and Google Analytics to group audiences based on age, language, location, interests, spending power, stage of life, and challenges. Organizations can focus on business size and top leadership.
- Know the customers’ needs and pain points: The next step is identifying your audience’s goals. Understanding their motivations, end game, and pain points is vital. You can ask your sales team to collect this data from social media sentiment analysis. This process gives you an idea of what challenges your products can solve.
- Understand what you can offer: Here, you should consider the actual benefits brought about by your product or service. You can write down this answer as one simple sentence.
- Buyer persona creation: You can now develop the targeted buyer persona. Consider the common characteristics and then create a hypothetical profile. You can even talk about job titles, home types, and potential addresses. The aim is to make it seem real.
In the long run, these personas help you target your ads to the right people based on their demographics, which saves you resources.
4. Testing Your Assumptions Through A/B Testing
The final approach is to use A/B testing to measure the effectiveness of your marketing techniques. The process entails showing certain users your methods based on their behaviors. First, you will need to split your audiences and ask users to test the effectiveness of variations of your PPC campaign. You can then decide what works best and go with it.
Talk to the Professionals
If you want to learn more about pay-per-click advertising, you can get more information from our experts. We are a results-driven digital marketing agency that can help you get qualified traffic, convert leads, and increase revenue for your business.
