Expert Tips For Audience Targeting for PPC

Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing for display ads is getting smarter and smarter every year. In years past, you used to only be able to enter your desired keywords for your PPC marketing campaigns and hope they resulted in your ads being clicked. However, new technology in PPC marketing is letting you target web browser users who have shown recent Internet search and website viewing history related to the products and services you offer. This is called affinity audience targeting and it’s completely changing the way PPC marketing for display ads works such as Google Ads’ Display Network, YouTube, Facebook, and more.

As a Dallas PPC agency, we know that figuring out how to define custom affinity audiences may be confusing to someone who doesn’t spend all day, every day in PPC marketing tools such as Google Ads like we do. That’s why we put together this blog post to help explain the best strategies for using affinity audience targeting in your pay per click display ad campaigns.

What is Affinity Audience Targeting?

Custom affinity audiences are PPC marketing audiences that you define using browser data that your advertising platform has collected about each person using their browser. It’s essentially creating a TV show advertising audience for the Internet. 

Rather than choosing to have your PPC ads shown to just anyone based on your keywords, with affinity audience targeting, your display ads are shown to a custom selected group of web users based on their recent browning history and the amount of time they’ve spent on each webpage they’ve recently visited.

Based on these factors, PPC marketing platforms such as Google Ads, YouTube, and Facebook determine what a user’s passions and interests are. This makes using affinity audience targeting for PPC marketing options like Google Ads Display Ads very beneficial and a great way to increase display ad clicks while lowering lead acquisition costs, too.

How Do You Create Custom Affinity Audiences?

Each PPC marketing platform is different. To explain how to create custom affinity audiences and take advantage of them for display ad options, we’ll use the world’s largest PPC marketing platform – Google Ads – as an example.

In Google Ads, you can create custom affinity audiences for display ads based on:

• Interests which Google determines due to the keyword phrases a user has been entering in their Google search queries, of course, looking for related keyword phrases and trends
• Using recently visited URLs as a proxy for interest bundles
• Selecting the types of places Google users are interested in, for example, locations as varied as restaurants and shoe stores
• Mobile apps that your target customer may be interested in downloading and/or purchasing or use and make an in-app purchase

What Are the Best PPC Marketing Strategies for Affinity Audience Targeting on Display Ads?

As a Dallas PPC agency, we’re always researching the best ways to use PPC marketing, including taking advantage of custom affinity audiences to boost display ad results. Based on our findings, here are the top 3 strategies we deploy for our clients’ PPC marketing campaigns that use custom affinity audiences for display ads:

• Using Only Your Top Performing Ads for Display Ads

PPC marketing is all about paying for clicks. Obviously, while you want to generate clicks, you want your cost per action (CPA) to be as low as possible.

One way we’re using custom affinity audiences strategically is by using our clients’ top-performing ads for display ads. We are:

• Defining custom affinity audiences with contextual keywords
• Using our clients’ top-performing ads for display advertising
• Running regular placement exclusions

As a result, we’re seeing CPA come down for our clients when we use this affinity audience targeting strategy.

• Targeting People Who Have Looked at Or Use Your Competitors’ Products or Services

Your competitors’ customers are, of course, great leads for you. After all, they’re using products or services very similar to the ones you offer. Why let these leads go to the competition when they could be choosing your brand instead?

When you’re trying to use display ads to win over your competitors’ customers or leads, however, you have to be mindful of your cost per lead (CPL). In a space where all competitors are likely targeting the same keywords, it’s easy for CPLs to skyrocket and get out of control, or for it to become unsustainable to continue bidding on those competition-related keywords, no matter how many qualified leads they provide.

This is where custom affinity audiences come in.

When we combine affinity audience targeting with our competitor-related keywords, we’re seeing incremental increases in leads, with CPL decreasing as much as 30% in some cases.

• Combining Interest and Custom Affinity Audiences Together

As a Dallas PPC agency, we’ve found that the combination of interest-based targeting and custom affinity audiences can yield great results. This is one area in affinity audience targeting that Google recommends PPC advertisers use.

We Can Help You Create PPC Marketing Campaigns with Custom Affinity Audiences

We know that for many companies, and especially for entrepreneurs, creating and managing PPC campaigns on advertising platforms like Google AdWords is a huge undertaking even when you’re using only the most basic of the features offered to advertisers like you. This means that many brands like yours who can benefit from affinity audience targeting and the strategies we listed above don’t leverage this feature because they simply don’t have the internal resources or expertise to use this functionality.

That’s where we come in. While we’re a Dallas PPC agency, we help companies throughout the United States with their pay per click advertising campaigns. We are PPC experts and know how to best use custom affinity audiences for PPC marketing display ads.

If you need help with your pay per click campaigns, or if you want to take your existing campaigns to the next level through affinity audience targeting on your display ads, we’re here to help. Simply call us today to start a conversation at (877) 682-2012. 

Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “Strategies for Custom Affinity Audience Targeting for PPC” instead.

Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!