How to take advantage of strategic PPC audience targeting

Audiences are the dotted lines that have the potential to connect nearly all of our digital channels.

Audiences can help improve performance within a campaign, and they can also help influence strategies in other campaigns, and even in other channels. Using audiences within paid search, we can strategically share content based upon where the prospect is in the funnel and bid accordingly. We can start to gather information about their interests, their demographics and the ways that they’ve engaged with the brand.

Today, I’d like to talk about all of the audiences you should be using within your paid search accounts. I’ll review the audiences you should be leveraging within your pay-per-click (PPC) account plus a few bonus suggestions on how you can leverage what you learn from the other paid and organic campaigns you’re running.

Action, action, we want action!

Activity-based remarketing lists are tried and true. I love to create audiences based on different activities within the buyer’s journey. These audiences are great because they give you a sense of where your visitors are in the funnel.

You can start to create marketing funnels that parallel your sales funnel. Audiences can be based upon things like:

1. Visiting certain pages (product pages, pricing pages, loyalty logins, case studies).

2. Watching your YouTube videos (You just need to connect your YouTube account!).

3. Completing a micro-conversion (downloading an infographic, white paper or e-book).

4. Visitors who spent a lot of time browsing or had a high number of page views.

Then you can set up your campaigns to guide people down the funnel. If they’ve already completed an action, you can be sure that you’re providing them with content that will help them get to the next stage in the buying cycle. This strategy also helps to ensure that all of your cross-channel campaigns are informed by the prospect’s journey, regardless of which platforms the visitor has or has not previously engaged with.

Customer match

Customer match is another great way to capture segmented audiences with detailed segmentation.

If you have access to an email database, you can use data points you have within your customer relationship management (CRM) that aren’t otherwise accessible in the search engines or Google Analytics to create segmented lists. These, too, can be used to parallel the sales funnel.

For instance, you can do a lot of things with loyalty and purchase information, such as sharing new products. It can also be used in low-funnel campaigns to target people w…

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]