Crafting Core Retargeting Audiences for Optimal PPC Performance| Review
During week 2 of my CXL journey, I was able to finish the “Maximizing audiences for your PPC campaigns” course. Michelle and Joe walk us through strategies for finding, creating, and aligning audiences with an “AIDAA” like funnel. They wrap up the course with a bonus class that outlines the funnel based strengths and weaknesses of each platform, and offer a few cross-platform tracking and messaging strategies in the end. It was a week that was packed full of amazing insights which have helped me better understand how to utilize audiences for optimal ppc performance.
Since there was so much rich content delivered in these lessons, I decided to break my review up into two more parts. This week, I’ll be writing only about what I learned in lesson 2 since I had more time to reflect on that video. Then, I’ll have a week to gather my thoughts on lesson 3–6, and I’ll write about the remaining videos in next week’s post.
Preview
Maximizing Audiences for PPC Campaigns — Lesson 2
Good retargeting is crucial for campaigns, so I’m excited to learn about some of the lists that will be discussed. Since exclusion and lookalike audiences are mentioned in the description, I’m sure that this will lay solid ground for intermediate level remarketing lists.
Notes
Picking up right where they left off in lesson 1, in lesson 2 Michelle and Joe dive a little deeper into mid-level nuances of audience creation and segmentation. I mentioned in my last post that the lesson specifically covers the following:
- Creating exclusion/expansion audiences
- Cookie length considerations
- On-site segment options through GA
- Off-site social segment options through FB
- Prompts for Retargeting Lists
What they teach in this lesson is still a part of the “Finding and Creating” section of their journey map, so they guide us just a bit deeper into the world of audience creation using GA and Facebook.
Creating exclusion/expansion audiences
Exclusion Lists
Just like with negative keyword lists, knowing who you want to exclude from your targeting is often just as important as who you’re targeting in the first place. More “nested audience” strategies are discussed in later lessons, but consider for now a couple of basic audiences you will want to exclude.
- Leads that have already converted.
- Wrong Persona
- Jr. positions titles
- Wrong company size
- Poor engagement
- Users who bounced after a few seconds.
- Users who frequent your career page.
The lists that you use to exclude these audiences should have two sources, email uploads and regular cookie tracked. Using contact upload lists in addition to regular GA lists helps ensure that nobody falls through the cracks due to technical load time errors, cross-device tracking limitations, cookie expiration or other unforeseen reasons.
Just as with the regular retargeting lists, they also provided a list of negative retargeting list prompts, featured below.
Expansion Lists
Expansion lists are used to find new customers in top-of-funnel prospecting campaigns. In Google Ads they are called Similar Audiences, and in Facebook they are called Lookalike Audiences. It’s important to note that the quality and performance of an expansion audience will depend on the data you put into it. Since Google and Facebook analyze the behaviors and characteristics of users in expansion lists to look for patterns to copy, it’s vital that you do your best to provide sizable and segmented lists of customers. The minimum number of users required by each platform varies, but you can use 1000 as a good starting point. You’ll also hear different thoughts on the ideal audience size to base lookalike audiences on, but anything in the wide range of 5k — 50k should be sufficient for the platform algorithms to spot patterns. I have had success with audiences as small as 3k, and lists no larger than 30k. It really depends on what you’re selling, the type of ad you’re creating, how much data you’re providing and how segmented the list is. As is the case with every audience, you need to test to find the best performance for your campaigns.
Michelle and Joe also provide a few thought starters to help you identify segments to test.
Prompts for Retargeting Lists
Every business is unique. Even direct competitors have different website structures and business goals. There’s not a “one size fits all” template for setting up retargeting lists, so if you’re struggling with thinking about which retargeting lists you need to configure, or before you just copy everything you read on the internet, take some time to answer the following question prompts that were thoughtfully provided by Michelle and Joe.
Once you have the answers to these questions, you’ll be able to set up a few behavioral and demographic audiences that will best suit your business.
The course dives into how you can strategically use the audience ideas you just came up in later lessons, so just hang tight!
Cookie length considerations
Segmenting your audiences by time is necessary for most audiences that you create because it allows you to match your message with user location in the customer journey. It doesn’t matter if the conversion is product sales, demo scheduling, or podcast patronage, you should have some idea of how long it takes your customer to convert after initial contact with your business. With that insight you will be able to use the “cookie length” to time your messaging, and increase conversions.
Even without precise information about your sales cycle, you can still use a more generalized approach to segment your audiences by 30, 60 and 90 days after visit/contact. Below is an example of how you would align your CTA with those time segments.
On-site segment options through GA
Continuing with the meaningful segment suggestions, ecommerce and B2B sites should always create audiences for each stage of the funnel to serve as core remarketing audiences for campaigns. Lesson 5 discusses these particular audiences along with strategies on how to target them, so I’ll save my thoughts for the lesson 5 section.
GA offers a ton of targeting options for marketers to create audiences from. A few were explored in lesson 1, but that didn’t even scratch the surface. Marketers can create audiences from user technology, on site behavior metrics, traffic sources and a unique mixture of other possibilities.
It’s easy to create audiences in both GA and Google Ads. Creating your audiences in Google Ads is okay for simpler account strategies, but if you want to dive deeper to eventually test by the list of options mentioned above, you need to link your GA account with Google Ads and create audiences in GA. (As a side note, the two aren’t mutually exclusive, you can create audiences in both platforms and even filter out by creation source in Google Ads. But it’s generally a good idea to simply use one or the other.)
You can find out more about audience creation in both platforms here: GA Audiences | Google Ads Audiences | Connecting GA to Google Ads
Off-site social segment options through FB
Facebook audience engagement targeting options somewhat reflect on-site behavior targeting options.
Given these similarities, you can think of the social targeting options in terms of B2B buyer funnel stages.
For videos, you will be able to create better engagement lists if you group videos into themed sections. You’ll be able to target all users who engaged with videos in a category, and have a clear theme for targeting.
TL;DR Review
Learning about audience configuration and considerations on Facebook and Google Ads can be daunting. It’s definitely possible, and each platform provides awesome educational material, but having Michelle and Joe walk you through the intermediate considerations and configurations really makes this an approachable task. They also sprinkle in small previews of content from future lessons to help keep the student interested in the bigger picture down the road, that’s also important!
