The Facebook ads revolution of the past 5 years has taken retargeting to new heights. Custom audiences, lookalike audiences, and interest targeting have lead to more precision and control over where your ad spend is going and how you can acquire leads for less money.
This idea of targeting audiences instead of just keywords is now being put into place in Google Adwords’ (oops, I mean Google Ads) search campaigns. In 2017, it was announced that in-market audiences would be coming to search campaigns, and in June 2018, it was opened up as a tool for all U.S. advertisers.
How In-Market Audiences Works
How do you know where your customers positioned are in the sales process? It’s been historically difficult to gauge this with Ads. For example, if someone is searching for “bakeries in Chicago,” how do you know whether they are ready to buy muffins today, or they are merely just beginning their search for a bakery?
Adwords in-market audiences alleviates this guessing game from your workflow. Now, you can specify to serve ads only to people who have previously searched for other terms.
So for the “bakeries in Chicago” example, you can choose to show ads to people who have previously searched for “best bakeries in Chicago” or “where to buy muffins in Chicago.” Whichever terms help you indicate that a person is deeper in the funnel.
As you can tell, there’s really no limit to how granular you get. Google Ads is making a concerted effort to to enhance your targeting options for improved conversion rates on their platform.
In-Market vs Affinity Audiences
Just to clarify, there’s a difference between in-market and affinity audiences.
In-market looks at specific search behaviors related to your industry and search queries. Affinity audiences take a much broader view of audience behaviors, taking into account factors like overall interests, passions, and proclivities.
For example, if you subscribe to a lot of fashion blogs, you will probably get placed into an affinity audience related to clothing or fashion.
While both are effective means of targeting, in-market audiences lets you focus more on the actual searches that are taking place around your products or services.
Using In-Market with Remarketing
In-market audiences work great in tandem with remarketing. While remarketing efforts are always important so that you’re targeting people who have previously visited your website, in-market helps approach the other segment of users—those who haven’t yet interacted with your brand.
Ideally, you could pinpoint your initial targeting using in-market audiences. Then as soon as you capture that traffic on your website, you would add them to your RLSA list and serve remarketing ads to them.
By synergizing these two valuable Google Ads features, you can uncover new customers who are further down your sales funnel and are much more likely to buy.
With this improved targeting you’ll receive more clicks to your website, leading to a higher Quality Score in Google, and lower overall CPCs.