New Audience Targeting in Google Ads Search (Black Friday & Christmas Essential!)

Joey Smith
Nov 5 · 3 min read

Google recently announced that over the coming weeks they are rolling out two new ways to reach your target market via Google Search: seasonal event segments for in-market audiences and affinity audiences.

What are seasonal event segments for in-market audiences?

In-market audiences are Google-defined audiences of customers who are actively researching products and looking to make a purchase of a certain product or service.

-> Backlinks indexer

Google are rolling out a Black Friday and Christmas segment in time for the upcoming peak trading period.

Read more: 10 Reasons Why Outsourcing App Testing is the Best

Before rolling these new segments out, Google worked with Toyota to test the Black Friday and Christmas segments; resulting in a 67% increase in conversion rate alongside a 34% reduction in CPA.

One tactic could be to apply these audience lists as an ‘Observation’ to search campaigns to gain visibility of how this list of users are interacting with your campaign. Once this data has been analysed you have the option to modify bids for users present on this list.

What are affinity audiences for search?

Affinity audiences have been available for some time across display campaigns. Here, Google group users into specific categories (e.g. Cooking Enthusiasts or Fashionistas) where the user has demonstrated a strong interest in a given topic.

Google is now giving advertisers the ability to layer affinity audiences on top of search campaigns.

Read more: 3 Tips for Retail Success with Google Ads in the Holidays

For example, if you are trying to promote an innovative new cooking utensil, you could layer the ‘cooking enthusiast’ affinity audience with generic but relevant keywords e.g. ‘cookware’ to focus your budget on users that are most passionate about cooking.

Google tested this feature alongside Volkswagen, achieving a 250% increase in conversion rate compared to search traffic with no audience lists applied.

When are these available?

Google Ads has started to roll these out across all ad accounts this week. These are available through the ‘Audiences’ tab of Google Ads accounts.

Summary

The holiday season is as anticipated a very competitive time of year across search. With these audience features you can be sure to focus budget on users most likely to be interested in your products or services. We recommended testing using both features once rolled out.

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Once the festive period is over, it is important to analyse campaign performance so any learnings made this year can also be used to influence campaign strategy next year.

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