Module 1 - Owned by Google so audience and targeting building second to none

What is the biggest opportunity with audiences on Google?

The ability to overlay audiences and create audiences that interact with each other, which is where you will effectively live within the platform.

My biggest piece of advice is not to necessarily rely on the standard audiences Google serves up to you. There are tons of different audiences, placements and topics you can build your own from, based on keywords, and this all works across search, display and YouTube. What we want to do is combine the basis of an audience, meaning what people are searching for, which websites they visit, which apps they use, and who someone is, and then layer keywords on top of that. Doing this as a strategy takes Google longer to learn, because it is not an off-the-shelf audience it can immediately serve your content into, so you can approach it in two ways: use one of the off-the-shelf audiences first and test to see where your conversions come from, learning which placements and channels are working for you.

Why not just target the entire off-the-shelf audience for your niche?

Because that audience could be enormous, and you need to know which part of it is actually engaging with your ad, not just which part exists.

I was recently asked on a podcast by someone in internet marketing why he should not simply target the entirety of the ClickFunnels audience, since that is his perfect customer. You could do that, but there are going to be millions of people in that audience, and you want to know where the best part of it actually is. People in a ClickFunnels audience will be watching all sorts of content across YouTube, so think about whether they respond better to your advert while watching something like DIY content, or while watching a marketing channel, since building an audience around ClickFunnels is probably going to serve your ads into a lot of marketing channels anyway. Are those people actually responding, or are they staying focused on the content they came to find, doing their own research, and just skipping your ad when it appears? You might find, surprisingly, that all your conversions come from channels other than marketing. Closing yourself off to that kind of exploration within audiences makes campaigns struggle more than they need to.

What happens if you just pick an audience and let it run?

You will probably get some results, but the worst thing you can do is choose an audience, let it run, and hope for the best, because the ongoing testing and refinement within audiences is what makes the real difference long term.

We see great results with YouTube ads into particular audiences, but a topic like marketing, taken on its own in the ClickFunnels example, is too general. Add a keyword like ClickFunnels to that same topic and you narrow it down considerably to people who are specifically relevant.

How do you narrow a broad audience down further?

By overlaying a topic, a keyword, and a custom audience built from the specific websites your ideal customer visits, such as a competitor's or an influencer's site.

You might create a custom, competitor match audience of people who have been on Todd Brown's website, or on Strategic Profits, or other sites that top marketing people visit. Now you know somebody is in marketing, has searched ClickFunnels, and has been on Todd Brown's website, and that combination points to someone who is far more engaged and minded to buy your product. A lot of people are not overlaying audiences in this way. When building these audiences, which is covered in more detail in a later module, we are combining several signals rather than running a campaign against a single topic or a single set of keywords the way you would in traditional text based search PPC. We are trying to combine audiences to get the best possible placement list for where to serve those ads.

What are the main audience types, and where should you start?

Affinity, custom, demographic, in-market, remarketing and similar audiences, and remarketing is generally the best place to start if you have never run YouTube ads before.

Affinity looks at what people are doing and their habits. Custom audiences let you build your own based on keywords, websites and apps people are using. Demographics are self explanatory. In-market audiences reach people who are actively searching for a particular product, which works particularly well if you run a campaign as an in-market audience for the next seven to fourteen days, depending on your product. Remarketing is probably where you start if this is your first YouTube ad: putting an ad up in front of people who have already been on your site builds awareness, and if they skip within the first thirty seconds on an in-stream ad, that awareness is essentially free, or very cheap.

When should you move on to similar audiences?

Only once you have enough conversions in a campaign for Google to build a proper similar audience from them, not before.

We will come on to similar audiences later in the course, but you can expand and test them once your campaign has enough conversion data, letting Google do its thing from there. Do not go for similar audiences too quickly. Affinity within YouTube also works really well, and across all of these you have plenty of opportunity to mix and match.

Why shouldn't you rely on the audiences Google suggests?

Because the off-the-shelf suggestions are not always the right weighting for your actual customer, and building your own, more specific audiences forces you to think it through properly.

One of our clients is a debt recovery firm for landlords, and a previous agency running that campaign had used the keyword rent arrears. That sounds reasonable, but there are probably twenty or thirty times more tenants than landlords, and anyone getting a letter about rent arrears is likely to be searching the internet about it too. So that keyword was too broad, or too heavily weighted towards the wrong audience. Think carefully about your keywords rather than charging in with an obvious set, and test your audiences properly rather than just going with what Google suggests or what you initially assumed. Once you find out where your conversions are actually coming from, that knowledge helps you develop your audiences long term, and as those audiences develop, your understanding of where conversions come from grows with them.