Paid search isn’t generally at the top of marketers’ minds when they think about audience planning, but it’s a vital part of all campaigns.
Though paid search is a “pull” instead of a “push” marketing channel, there are still plenty of audience signals to implement when building and optimizing PPC campaigns.
Search is a unique channel because customers tell you who they are in their search queries and path to purchase journeys (i.e., YouTube > search attribution paths).
Conducting audience research is a huge variable in campaign preparation, mid-flight optimization and post-campaign analysis.
For this article, we’ll focus on Google Ads, but the same concepts apply to anywhere else you may be running a search campaign.
Pre-build research
Outside Google Ads
The first half of audience research in the pre-build state takes place outside of Google Ads and lives within your organization.
Who is your target audience?
What are you trying to tell them?
Have you conducted research or focus groups around who they are and what resonates with them?
Start here. Once you know your target customers and have a good sense of the language you think will connect them to your brand, you can apply these learnings to your search campaigns.
Inside Google Ads
When starting to build a campaign, you’ll use the existing knowledge about your audience to set campaign-level targeting, like what devices your customers usually convert from (using Google Analytics or another source of truth) or which countries you can sell in/ship to.
Have you formerly had a poor mobile experience, but the site has been updated and you can’t wait to send users there?
Are most of your customers in the United States, but you’ve earmarked a media budget to expand into Canada?
Even setting a location target or device target is noting where your audience is and how to best reach them.
From there, at the campaign or ad group level, you’ll be prompted to apply audiences for “Observation” or “Targeting.”
You will not be able to conduct any meaningful research if you do not apply these.
Applying an audience under Observation mode means you’ll be able to gather insights about that segment, but you will not be narrowing your potential reach.
Observation is a great option for all campaigns to pull reports mid and post-flight to see how different audiences engage with your ads.
If you choose to use Targeting mode, you’ll only serve ads to people who are both on that list and searching for your keywords or product.
Targeting is a helpful way to designate different ad copy for a specific segment, such as returning customers or loyalty club members who get different perks than new customers.
Google’s support pages outline in more detail the different types of audiences that can be applied:
In-market.
Affinity.
Custom segments.
Detailed demographics.
Life events.
First-party segments.
Mid-flight analyses
Mid-flight audience management all counts as consumer research.
Audience performance
Tracking the performance of prospecting (in-market audiences, affinity audiences, demographic details, etc.) and remarketing lists will show you how your targeted customers react to your messages.
You can find this detail by going to Campaigns > Audiences, keywords and content > Audiences.
The table can be viewed from an ad group, campaign or account-level perspective. In this view, you will also find demographic information.
Is one affinity audience converting three times better than another? See if you can apply that learning to another channel or to better inform copy or creative.
Is an in-market segment getting nearly zero impressions? Consider if you can reach that group another way or recalibrate your expectations of that ad group or target audience.
Audience insights and indexes
Another in-flight audience optimization is to check your audience insights (Campaigns > Insights and reports > Insights > scroll to Audience Insights card) to see which audience segments are indexing the highest with your current converters.
These can be massive insights about your customers that you otherwise may not have known.