Who are you?
This isn’t a philosophical question directed at you, personally. It’s a question that every person in every organization should be asking themselves, every day, about their customers. You should be hooting all the time, at every meeting, and in every review.
Who is our market?
Who are these brave souls that buy our products?
Who are these superstars that use our services?
Who are the intrepid heroes that will drive our profits to the stratosphere?
Who is our next customer?
Who. The Fuck. Are You?
It’s the questions you ask to figure out how to get more “whos” to buy whatever it is you’re selling online that will make or break your company. With Google Ads Audience Insights, you can learn whom to target, how they relate to you and even discover segments you didn’t even know existed. It’s a little bit of magic that anyone can learn to use.
To find the Audience Insights report, follow these steps:
Click the tools icon ? in the top right corner of your Google Ads dashboard
Under “Shared library” click Audience Manager
From the page menu on the left click Audience Insights.
Welcome to the Boom-Boom room.
There are two things you’ll need before you see anything here: you’ll need to set up an audience source, and you’ll need to have at least 1,000 people on your audience list.
Google Ads lets you figure out and target people with similar interests and similar demographics, including:
– age, gender, location of your “ideal” audience (demographics)
– what other kinds of things are they interested in online? (category-interest)
You’ll want to look at the report for “All Converters” since you want an overview of your entire converted audience. This report will give you insights into who makes up your audience (wow, imagine that), and by choosing those who converted you can see who makes up your paying customers and not the riff-raff of looky-loos and interlopers.
Let’s say you’re a florist based in Jacksonville, Florida. All-day at the store, you see middle-aged women and older men visit your store. Some buy, some ask questions, but that’s your demographic based on foot traffic and your own two eyes. You may get customers that fall outside this bracket, but as you spend time talking to the people who stop and take the time, consistently this is whom you see.
You (like any good modern business) also have online ordering. You can’t talk to these people, and all they boil down to are names on a form and credit card numbers. You assume that these customers are the same demographic; why wouldn’t they be? The product it the same, your store and branding are the same, and these orders are for similar product mixes (roses and lilies and posies… oh my!), so it stands to reason the audience is the same.
If you take this approach, I can tell you you’re going to be fucking frustrated watching your carefully crafted display campaign crash and burn with an abysmal CTR, clicks that don’t convert, and wasted spend. Let’s try and avoid that, eh?
To get useful data, you first have to gather it. Start by building a branded campaign targeting related keywords; for your florist business, I recommend a combination of tight copy focused on your products (“Great local flower arrangements” or “Handcrafted bouquets” is a great start) and beautiful imagery (thankfully flowers are GREAT models, and if you don’t want to go to the trouble of a photoshoot you can easily buy stock photos). Run your keyword-targeted ads until you gather a large enough audience to open up the report.
Yes, you still need to spend money to make money… even in the future world of online advertising.
It turns out that the internet is a VERY different place in the real world. Your online customers are younger, more male than female, and less affluent than those nice women coming in to gather centrepieces for a dinner party or looking to “brighten Bernice’s day.”
They aren’t older men grabbing a “bouquet of sorry.” There’s a significant audience of 30-somethings buying presents for parents in a city they don’t live in, looking for a local delivery option. There’s a whole cadre of women in their 20’s giving “congratulations on your engagement” pansies to each other. You can’t know this without either the tightest data gathering I’ve EVER seen a florist do… alternatively, looking at your Google Ads Audience Insights.
Audience Insights will give you an idea of who the people behind the clicks are. It’ll tell you things like age ranges, what device category the use, their interests, and what they were interested in when they clicked your ad. Armed with this kind of insight, you can use all of this stuff to increase your Click Through Rate (CTR), reduce your overall cost per click (CPC), and get more people to do what you want them to do on your landing page.
That’s right, more conversions. Let’s see how!
Using these insights you create two campaigns: the first campaign targets those out-of-town buyers with copy and visuals that speak to their needs (“Want to say ‘Thanks a mill’ in Jacksonville?” coupled with an image of flower delivery to a couple in their 60’s), while the second campaign is better suited to those 20-something women (“Be a part of their joy” with flowers being handed to a trendy young woman and her fiance). Target campaign A to keywords like “Jacksonville florist” mentioned in online content (ie blogs) when the user is from outside the city. Campaign B can be geofenced to customers inside the city limits, and demographically targeted at people who are avid gift-givers.
While these are hypothetical audiences, there’s a lot of great learning to be done when you look at the data. By asking “who?” at every opportunity, you can discover great ways to better speak to people who will listen. Your coworkers may start calling you Hedwig, but you’ll have the last laugh when the monthly reports are delivered.
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