Businesses will soon be able to use two innovative ways in order to reach their Google Ads target demographics within Google Search. The new initiatives are ‘affinity audiences’ and ‘seasonal event segments’ and will be rolled out over the coming weeks.
Affinity audiences targeting will allow an advertiser to raise awareness with users who have previously expressed interest in a topic. By pairing an affinity audience with generic keywords associated with the subject matter, an additional audience layer is created.
Google claims that the approach was recently tested by Volkswagen, who achieved an increase in conversion rates of 250% as compared to non-audience traffic.
Seasonal event segments are the second new option for in-market audiences, and unsurprisingly the launch is being made in time for the holiday season. This new Google Ads feature will also apply to YouTube and well as the search engine.
Google has provided a way in which this new process can be used to target a campaign effectively. In their announcement, they used Toyota as an example. Toyota used the Black Friday and Christmas segments to streamline its focus on consumers who were consciously looking to purchase their next car. As Toyota used these segments, they saw a huge 67% increase in conversion rate, as well as a 34% reduction in cost per conversion.
In-market audiences were first included in Search in 2017 and work by building audiences based on buyer intent signals that include recent search queries and other browsing activity.
Essentially tools for prospecting campaigns to reach a larger number of people than can be achieved by specific query intent signals targeted with keywords.
The difference between affinity audiences and in-market campaigns are that the former targets higher-funnel awareness users while the latter connects with people lower in the funnel who are already preparing to make a purchase.
The Google Ads UI will be updated to offer the new services over the coming weeks.
