Targeting the appropriate audiences is key to engaging customers, yet many of Google’s predefined affinity audiences may need to meet your customer base’s specific needs.
Custom Affinity Audiences can help protect your budget. Available at both campaign and ad group levels, these can be applied to keywords, URLs, apps, or interests for targeted advertising campaigns or ad groups.
What are Affinity Audiences?
Finding your ideal target audience for ads is the key to connecting with customers and seeing a return on investment. Unfortunately, finding that target audience can be time-consuming and challenging, leading to wasted advertising dollars spent reaching unqualified leads with low conversion rates. Affinity audiences offer a solution by targeting groups with similar passions or interests.
Contrasting In-Market Audiences, built off users’ recent search and browsing activities, Affinity Audiences can be more expansive in scope. Google uses affinity audiences to target people interested in particular topics – movie lovers or cooking enthusiasts. You can then use these audiences as the foundation for creating custom affinity audiences by inputting keywords, apps, URLs, and locations relevant to your product or service and narrowing down ad reach through keywords, apps, URLs, and locations that match these audiences.
PPC Signal can help you monitor the performance of your affinity audiences so you don’t overspend or waste money on irrelevant clicks, making it easier to optimize ad campaigns quickly and maximize return on investment (ROI).
Using a custom affinity audience to restrict exposure of your ads only to people interested in your product is another effective strategy for targeting a narrow niche audience. Furthermore, this type of audience saves you money since you won’t pay to show ads to those not interested in your product.
Are You Ready to Create Custom Affinity Audiences in Google Ads? Log into Your Google Ads Account and Click Tools and Settings before selecting Audience Manager in the left menu and Clicking Add Custom Audience (using Plus Icon ). Specify keywords, apps, URLs, or locations you would like to target before Click Save Audience ( Alternatively, if an audience already exists in your list, simply choose it to include in Your campaign).
How do I create an Affinity Audience?
Affinity audiences are pre-defined buckets of general interests that Google analyzes based on browsing and search history. This makes them an excellent way for businesses to build awareness and consideration of their offerings. For instance, yoga pants sellers could utilize an affinity audience targeted towards fitness enthusiasts such as Lululemon, Outdoor Voices, or Girlfriend Collective products.
However, using these audiences can be problematic as they can reach users not interested in your product directly. For instance, ticketing companies promoting musicals may find using Affinity audiences such as Art & Theater Aficionados unsuitable as this group includes everyone from Shakespeare fans to Pop Art collectors.
Therefore, we suggest creating custom affinity audiences as distinct lists from standard affinity lists to gain more control over the size and composition of your audience. This way, ads will only reach those most likely interested in them.
To create a custom affinity audience in AdWords, navigate to the Targeting menu in the left menu of AdWords dashboard and choose “Affinity Audiences.” Once in this drop-down list, select “Custom Affinity Audience,” enter competitor URLs or relevant keywords as interests(s), name the audience, and save.
Once you’ve created a custom affinity audience, it can be a targeting option for video, search, shopping, and discovery campaigns. Furthermore, bid modifiers based on that affinity audience ensure your ads appear in prime positions.
Affinity audiences offer businesses of all sizes an advantage as they’re available across devices and campaigns, making them a versatile tool. Affinity audiences can help generate clicks and conversions at lower costs than other types of Google AdWords targeting strategies; however, it is important to recognize their limitations compared with other forms of AdWords targeting.
How do I use an Affinity Audience?
Affinity audiences are an effective way of narrowing your reach by targeting specific groups. Affinity audiences allow you to target individuals based on their passions and interests. This helps build brand recognition for products or services like organic baby food by appealing directly to those passionate about environmental causes – saving money on wasted clicks and increasing brand recognition among potential consumers.
Google Ads also offers in-market audiences, groups of people actively researching or considering purchasing similar products and services from your business. You can target in-market audiences on third-party websites, apps, and Google platforms with bid adjustments for search and shopping campaigns.
While pre-built affinity audiences may provide convenient advertising solutions, they might only sometimes provide optimal results for your campaign. For instance, running a branding campaign targeting dog lovers or people watching videos about them on YouTube would not necessarily make for an ideal target group; targeting “dog product enthusiasts” might provide more targeted and qualified leads who might be interested in what your product or service offers.
Creating your affinity audience is an easy process. When creating an audience, you have four criteria: interests, URLs, locations, or applications. Of these options, interests, and URLs tend to provide more granular insights into who your customers are.
Once you’ve created an affinity audience, you can incorporate them into your campaigns in the following ways:
How do I manage an Affinity Audience?
Businesses often need help to connect their products and services with customers who will appreciate them, leading them to cast too wide a net with their advertising budget, spending too much, or missing out on valuable leads altogether. A custom affinity audience provides the solution by targeting only those people interested in your business.
Google accomplishes this task by collating user data such as browsing patterns, site time spent, and search patterns into predetermined audiences based on interests or habits – such as “Sports Fans” or “Food & Dining.” From there, these lists are divided into Affinity Audiences and In-Market Audiences, perfect for lower funnel targeting (awareness, consideration).
Affinity Audiences, on the other hand, are divided according to users’ lifestyles and interests. One popular audience category is “Lifestyles & Hobbies/Frequently Attends Live Events,” which encompasses those who love attending concerts, square dances, rodeos, hootenannies, etc.
AdWords provides a convenient tool to build and manage affinity audiences through its Custom Audiences tab. Simply select your campaign or ad group, click “Add audience,” and you will be asked whether to choose from existing custom audiences or add one by clicking the “+” button. Enter a name for the audience you wish to create, and select from available options such as interests/purchase intents/URLs/apps/places – then add an audience!
Once you have identified an audience, click “Save and continue.” Your new target group can now be utilized in campaigns, with results shown under the Audiences tab in AdWords.
Affinity Audiences can help expand the reach of your advertising by reaching new potential customers who would be interested in your product/service yet have to encounter it. By pairing affinity audiences with your remarketing efforts, you can increase conversions and impressions by connecting with people at the right time.