Module 3 - Audience Lists

Where do you build audience lists?

Inside the Google Ads interface, go up to tools at the top and open audience manager. That section gives you the ability to build lots and lots of different audiences based on all sorts of criteria: how people interact with your site, remarketing audiences, custom audiences and combined audiences.

What do you need to connect first?

Look at audience sources on the left and connect your YouTube account and your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics. You need Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and YouTube all attached to your Google Ads account. That is what allows you to create different audience lists.

You may well be using GA4, and I hope you are. It is complicated, but there is a lot more functionality in there if you are going to work with an agency and get all sorts of events tracked, such as basket values, the way people navigate around your site, and different goal completions. There are lots of articles online about how to track events through GA4 and link it up to Google Tag Manager, and we will show you some of that later in the course.

What can you build inside remarketing?

Within remarketing you can build lists of website visitors, app visitors, and YouTube users, which covers people who have been on your channel, people who have subscribed, and people who have taken certain actions such as watching a certain amount of a video.

Then there are customer lists, which may not be available to you to begin with. I think Google has a limit currently where you have to spend about 20k to enable customer lists. That said, I have seen it enabled at a lower threshold on some accounts when people go into the help section and request the ability to add customer lists. Who knows what Google does at the moment. They seem to be a law unto themselves. One minute it works, one minute it does not, depending which direction the wind is blowing in.

The last option is custom combinations, where you combine different audiences to work out where your best conversions are coming from.

How do you build a custom audience?

Custom audiences you can build on the fly, and as I have said throughout this whole course, give it a really detailed name with as much detail as you can, including the date you created it.

You can use intent based audiences: people who have searched for certain terms on Google, and people who have been on certain websites, which is really interesting if you want to build a competitor audience list. You can also target people who have used certain types of apps.

The app store is still developing at the moment in terms of Google tracking the usage of apps, and as we move into federated cohorts I think it will get easier and easier to target people using apps. At the moment it is a bit hit and miss, so it is worth testing with small budgets. It also helps you profile your audience, because you can see which types of apps your customers are using, and that gives you some great insight.

There is also people who visited certain places. As a rule I do not tend to use that. We are normally working off intent or keyword.

How do you pick keywords for an audience list?

Use good phrases and keywords that match carefully to the intent you are trying to achieve. If you put in a keyword like mortgages, Google brings down a list: how much should a mortgage payment be, monthly mortgage payments, estimate your mortgage payment. Try something like estate agency, which I think in the US is real estate, and you get property hunters, rural properties, home estate agents and so on.

Whenever we talk about building audiences, make sure you are choosing really relevant, targeted audiences, otherwise Google has the ability to spill out at the edges into groups of people who do not fit your ideal customer.

The tip when you are building this type of audience is to keep them on topic. Do not mix different keyword categories into one audience, because that will confuse Google. If I created an estate agency audience and then moved on to a mortgage audience, I would keep those separate, even though I am probably going to use them both in the same campaign.

Categorise your audiences as you build them. Test them, learn, see if they work, and build more. It does take time for Google to let these audiences learn and grow, so do not be surprised if they do not deliver on day one. Be patient. One of the golden rules you are going to learn throughout this course is that it can take two, three or four weeks for a campaign to really gain some traction, and after that we are looking to see where traction drops off, or where Google starts to take a bit more of our budget than we might like.

When should you use combined audiences?

Use combined audiences when you would otherwise be stuffing too many separate audiences into one campaign. You can combine different audiences from within your group, so for a marketing campaign I might combine marketing, PPC and SEO audiences, or browse my custom audiences and choose agencies, Facebook advertisers and people searching for influencers, and turn those three into one combined audience.

It is a way of condensing audiences you have already created for campaign use. What you will see as we go forward in the course is that if you start sticking five, six, seven, eight, ten audiences into one campaign, only one or two of them gain traction, and the other seven or eight are not actually being tested.

So if you want to run a campaign with several audiences in it, combine them, test them, and then split them out at the next stage. Once that combined audience is producing conversions at a good rate, create another campaign with those three audiences separated out, so you can understand where the best conversions came from and which one was the winning audience.

That is a little insight into the back end of the audience list and creation section of Google. Have fun, and as always, keep them on topic, make them specific, and do not be tempted to go too broad.