Intent Based Audience Targeting | Review
In last week’s post about crafting core retargeting audiences for optimal ppc performance, I mentioned that this week’s blog post would wrap up my reviews for the final 4 lessons in the “Maximizing Audiences for PPC Campaigns” course. But once again, I found the topic of funnels too comprehensive to stuff into a 4 lesson review, so I’ll be separating it into the final week 4 post. In lessons 3–4, everything from core platform walkthroughs to advanced techniques and tactics were discussed. There’s a lot of material to review, so I’ll dive right in.
[Preview] My Impressions Before Watching the Lesson
Lesson 3
I have only finished ⅓ of the course and I already feel like the course has covered a lot. (Remember, this was written before I watched the lesson.) I don’t really know what the difference between “Creating Good Retargeting” and “Intent-Based Audiences” could be, but I hope it will involve some level of digging deeper into the meaning of “Good” since lesson two was more of an introduction to the ocean of audience creation possibilities.
Lesson 4
Since lesson 4 is the beginning of the “Campaign Strategy” section, I hope they cover audience prioritization frameworks and tracking.
[Notes] Major Points Discussed In Lessons
Lesson 3 introduces us to a super customizable and indispensable tool that helps marketers understand what users like and dislike after visiting their site — event based intent. Lesson 2 kind of touched on a little bit of everything for GA & FB audience creation, with a focus on page views and general engagement. Lesson 3 takes it a step further and shows how Google Tag Manager literally opens up an infinite world of possibilities for tracking and gathering insights on user behavior. Below are a few of the techniques I have found to be super effective for campaign optimization, and definitely recommend all students to research further.
On-Page Element Clicks — Phone
If you’re marketing for a business that receives leads in the form of phone calls, you’re probably already tracking calls through some sort of software or a forwarding number. What you probably didn’t know is that you can create an audience from visitors who call during off hours, such as in the morning before the call center opens, or nights and weekends when the call center is closed. Assuming you already have Google Tag Manager installed on your site, all you need to do is simply find the name of the call button element from the source code, create a trigger in GTM to fire whenever an element with that unique name is clicked (Mobile CLick to Call image below), then configure the audience in Google Analytics for users that clicked during off hours! (Image 2)
Image 1
Image 2
On Site YouTube Video Engagement
Given how important video has become for remarketing and branding, tracking video engagement is crucial! I won’t burden you with the step-by-step for tracking here, as Joe and Michelle included a link from the esteemed tracking guru himself, Mr. Simo Ahava.
Simo Ahava Guide to Youtube Video Trigger in Google Tag Manager
After you have followed his guide, you’ll be able to create audiences for users who completed, started, paused, or reached a certain time/percentage threshold.
Exclusion Intent
As is the case with all audience types, you should not only be thinking about what you can retarget, you should also think about which actions signal intent that you want to exclude. A few examples covered in the course are clicks on support buttons or forms, clicks on job description buttons, or clicks from users who have already converted since you can target them in CLTV campaigns or through owned media channels.
Lesson 4 is where we start to apply the audiences created in lesson 1–3 in campaign strategy.
One technique that is covered is uploading your segmented email lists to create customer match audiences. For example, if you have an email list of users who have signed up for your “VIP Discount Newsletter”, and a certain subsegment of that list consistently doesn’t open your emails, you can target them with promotions since you know they are value shoppers who might have overflowing inboxes. You can also try targeting the entire list via low cost display or search terms.
Targeting Options — “Observation” and “Targeting “
Once you have created custom audiences, behavioral intent audiences, demographic audiences and affinity/in-market audiences, you need to start adding them to your campaigns with targeting set to “observation” so you can better understand the performance of each audience you layer in. Some marketers prefer to limit the number of audiences they observe due to time restrictions, or other limitations, but I personally think it’s best to test out 5–10 audiences you have a hunch about. It’s actually very easy to add the audience performance analysis to your daily routine, and when you find winning audiences simply set their targeting setting to “targeting” and increase bids. When you find losing audiences, replace them with new audiences you wish to observe performance for.
Lesson 5 is where it all comes together. Funnels were discussed a bit in earlier lessons, but this is really where they focus in on each stage of the overall AIDA model of the funnel and specific examples of campaigns to match.
Since this is such a large topic, I will again be saving my post on funnels for next week!
[Review] TL;DR Review of the Lessons
As a digital marketer, I have taken my fair share of courses on audiences and PPC strategy. Whether it was the official ppc courses offered by platforms such as Google Ads, or lead generation/ecomm strategy courses offered on Lynda or Udacity, each course always included sections that touched on both audiences and channel strategy. Since I think those sections were meant to be more of a primer than a deep dive, I feel like they did a great job covering the material and pointing me in the right direction to further my expertise in the particular topic. But given how important paid acquisition is to overall marketing mixes, and how central audiences are to optimizing campaigns, it’s surprising that it has taken this long for me to find an in-depth course that covers audiences in the context of ppc campaigns. It’s definitely something that I wish I had back in 2018 when I was trying to piece it all together, so I’m definitely using it for training associates and recommending it to any intermediate paid media buyers I know who are trying to reach the next level!
