Audience segmentation is a crucial part of marketing. You may be able to run campaigns and optimise well, but if your ads aren't targeted to users within your niche or users with an interest in it, it raises the question is your ad budget being spent efficiently?
With audience segmentation, you can gain a deeper understanding of your audience to allow for better tailored messaging and product offerings which drives more conversions and gives you rich bits of data to utilise.
It can be tempting to market towards every single user but marketing platforms such as Google Ads is an algorithm, so if you don’t feed it the correct data you won’t see as great of a return.
Now, sometimes no audience signals can be useful. At mira, we implement these campaigns labelled ‘catch-alls’ to identify strong audiences that could be useful to test, as well as utilise our client's entire inventory. This paired with budget and tROAS optimisation can make a great pair!
We will explore different types of audience segmentation and how you can execute it effectively for your business.
The types of audience segments
You may be asking yourself, what are the different types of target audiences? Let’s look at Google Ads by breaking them down and defining why and when you should use them…
Demographics
These are broad characteristics that define who a person is. It can include things like age, gender, income or parental status. Demographic targeting allows you to exclude or include users on a larger scale, making it easier to clean up your targeting for smaller-scale segments such as in-market users.
Predefined data
This contains audience data from Google Analytics or your chosen marketing platform. Here you can create remarketing audiences, users who may have abandoned their cart, high value past purchasers and more. What’s great about this is you’re putting your pre-existing customer data to work to encourage more repeat purchasers or similar types of users.
In-market
Target in-market users will allow you to find customers who actively search for products or services across the internet. They have an intent to purchase, so it is the perfect opportunity to nurture that interest with engaging ad copy or promotional deals.
Affinity audiences
Affinity audiences are made up of users with similar lifestyles, passions and hobbies. For example, these could be ‘outdoor enthusiasts’ or ‘vegetarian lifestyle’. By targeting relevant Google affinity audiences it adds that extra layer to segment audiences more appropriately to the given product, service or offer that you are advertising.
All of the above signals combined can help you crack down on your target audience in Google Ads. This concept can be applied across all marketing channels and remains a crucial aspect of successful marketing. If you want to scale your business profitably with digital marketing, contact us today for a free consultation.