Are you using audiences in your Google Ads campaigns?  It isn’t hard to do and can make a big difference in campaign performance.  For the most part, I always say measure everything you can to help make better decisions.  Google Ads allows you to set up Audience observations with a pretty simple search and a few clicks. If you want to get more advanced, you can create your own custom segments, but that may be a future post. For now, find your audiences and set up anything you think is relevant for “observation” and you can at least begin checking the data. You may be surprised by what you find and the ways you can improve performance.  Check out Google’s instructions on how to add audiences here.

Collect Audience Data and Make Adjustments

As your campaigns run, you can check back and see how different audiences perform. Google provides standard audiences like gender, age, and income. If you have things turned on and are paying attention, they can give you great data for your decision-making as well. But you can also get even more refined and view audiences based on their activities and interests online. For example, in the main image for this post, we show some early steps for a B2B trying to target their audience a bit better. They want to measure conversions for people in their market and want to look at education level and business-related interests and in-market segments.  In market suggests that they have been actively searching for those types of services.

Bid Up or Down Based on Audience Performance

As data comes in you can see which audiences perform better and then potentially adjust your bids to better target those that perform better or stop wasting money on those that don’t.  Below you see a client that learned that men convert at nearly half the cost that women do. To be fair, there is a lot of Unknown for all of these audiences, but when you do know and see substantial differences, it is worth your time and money to act on it.

Gender Cost per Conversion Example

It is free to observe these audiences and easy to act on. You can make bid adjustments based on performance, or even set up campaigns to specifically target just the successful audiences if they are large enough and successful enough to focus on in such a way. Audiences are one of the biggest tools I think small businesses are missing out on. It is so simple to put in place. It takes less than five minutes if you know where to go. In a future post, I will show how to set up some custom audiences to help target things like those that are searching for your competitors. For now, go turn audiences on in your own campaigns and adgroups.  Just a note that if your adgroups have significantly different types of concepts, it is worth observing different audiences separately at the adgroup level rather than the whole campaign.

If you need help staying on top of all of this, give us a call. We have been doing it for over 15 years and have great reviews to show we know what we are doing.