Google launches new audience targeting options—Here’s what you need to know
In conjunction with its new BERT-focused search algorithm, Google has also introduced two new optimization models. This might impact your bidding strategies for the holiday season and into 2020. These new audience targeting features for search ads are designed to help you reach your ideal audience, but you’ll need some analytical intelligence to see if they actually work for you.
Here’s how the new models operate:
- Affinity Audiences for search ads help you acquire new customers through targeting searchers who have already demonstrated a strong interest. The model looks for people who have similar characteristics to your customers and have bought similar products in the past. These are essentially lookalike audiences for upper-funnel marketing.
- In-Market Audiences for search ads enable you to target people who are actively researching and comparing similar products and services. This is worth considering as a seasonal strategy to help you reach lower-funnel shoppers actively seeking products or services like yours.
These new optimization models can help you target audiences based on both their behaviors and their queries. This enables marketers to reach more consumers searching for similar products and expands the reach to maximize SEM footprint. However, these optimization models will also boost competition by making target groups more accessible, which could inflate bid prices. You’ll want to monitor your strategy and your competitors, while keeping an eye out for emerging ones, to carefully to assess the impact of these models (and other targeting options available for search ads) on your overall search ROI.
With Adthena’s Strategic Advantage solution, you can monitor your digital advertising strategy impact and benchmark your performance against your competitors to confirm you are applying the right optimization techniques to the right campaign and audience. If you have multiple domains, Strategic Advantage can also help you understand what model works best in each scenario.
Reach out to an Adthena account representative now to request a demo.
