Create advertisements that are more successful, relevant, and personal by gaining a strong understanding of your target audience demographics. It’s critical to understand your potential customer’s interests, passions, desires, and fears.
My last two articles have reviewed audience segmentation and ad copy strategies for your remarketing campaigns. Not only can remarketing help bring users back to your website in order to increase conversion volume, but it can also help you learn more about your audience demographics and this information can be applied to your other Google Display Network initiatives.
To create and manage successful Display Network campaigns, you need to have a strong understanding of who you’re targeting. You need to understand your potential customer’s interests, passions, desires, and fears. Painting a clear picture of your audience will help transform your website visitors from faceless statistics to living breathing people – and as a result, this will help target your display ads with higher accuracy, and you’ll create more relevant and personal advertisements.
Once your remarketing campaigns are generating impressions, clicks, and conversions, you can run a placement performance report to see the websites on which your ads appeared. To acquire this information, you need to go into the Networks tabs within your remarketing campaign, and then you need to view the Automatic Placements information. Here’s a screenshot of this information within Google AdWords:
When you run this report you will get hundreds, maybe even thousands, of websites that display your remarketing ads. You should focus your analysis on the websites with the most volume.
Also, you’re looking for websites that will help you determine a user behavior pattern. From my placement performance report, I discovered that the majority of this client’s Remarketing traffic was being generated by these websites:
There is a healthy list of free and paid services that provide demographic information for websites. To get you started in this process, we’ll focus on the free options.
Below is a short list of websites that provide useful free demographic information. Hopefully, you’ll find that this strategy works well for you, and if so, you can subscribe to any of these services in order to acquire even more detailed demographic information:
Take the list of websites that you pulled from your placement performance report and put them into these tools. For the sake of this example, we’ll focus on the information that we acquired from Quantcast. Here’s a snapshot that includes four of the websites from our list:
Now we’ve acquired some general information about gender, age, and ethnicity.
Now, you need to compile all of the information you’ve gathered from Quantcast.com (or whichever service you choose) and paint a picture of your audience. In other words, we’re creating a persona for your target customer.
Some of the information that we acquired is more direct (e.g., age and gender), and some of information that we’ll use to complete our audience persona is applied. By this, I mean we will brainstorm on our audience’s potential goals, fears, and dreams – especially in relation to our product/service.
To discover the applied elements of our persona, you should visit the high-traffic websites and try to determine why your audience would be visiting these sites:
Here’s a summary of the persona we created for this client using the information that we acquired from our remarketing campaign:
Now that we have developed a persona for this client, we can apply this information to our PPC ads. You can test these new ideas in search and display. In this example, we’re discussing a client that helps individuals with debt consolidation.
Remember, we’re targeting women from 35-60 who have families; who are looking for solutions to their problems; who are self-motivated; and who are concerned with quality of life. As a result, here are some of the successful ads that we tested:
You may notice that we didn’t focus on the specifics of the debt consolidation services, but we focused on our potential client’s hopes, dreams, and fears. We tested this strategy in our remarketing, display, and search advertisements.
This method isn’t an exact science. However, we’ve worked clients who completely based their persona work on “gut feeling.” At least with this technique of audience research, you’re applying a method that helps you better understand your website visitors – and more importantly, how you can use this information to write more relevant and successful PPC ads.