Performance Marketing Expert

Google Custom Affinity Audiences

As marketers we are always striving to have our ads seen by the most relevant audience. Because targeted ads usually are more successful, marketers value tools that help get our messages in front of the right people.

As we all know, Google collects massive amounts of data on users. However, few people are aware of how much we can leverage that data to create predefined audience segments for display campaigns.

Custom Affinity Audience Breakdown: Sports and Fitness vs. TV Comedy Fans

There are many ways to create custom audiences, but a custom affinity audience puts the power of segmentation in the marketer’s hands. When you insert your own combination of URLs, topics, interests, and keywords, Google will create a custom audience segment.
 
Say, for example, you are a home improvement brand. You could create a custom affinity audience targeting your competitors URLs and have a highly customized audience inclusive of people who have visited or are interested in your competitor’s site.

Venn Diagram: People in your custom affinity audience against people interested in the URL you used to create the audience

There are many benefits to using custom affinity audiences. See below for examples on how to utilize this tactic to help you improve campaign success:

1. Highly Targeted: By utilizing a custom affinity segment you can make sure that your ads only appear for the most highly engaged users at the right time.

2. Better CTR: The industry-wide benchmark for display ad’s CTR is currently 0.35%. Utilizing a custom affinity audience, Rise has been able to see an average all-time CTR of 2.12%.

3. Increase Incremental Conversions: Finding additional ways to increase conversion volume can be an obstacle for some. Using a GDN campaign with a custom affinity audience and targeting competitor URLs, Rise reached highly interested audiences who were not actively searching. In the first month of running we were able to increase conversions by 50%.

4. B2B Success: A common struggle with B2B accounts is acquiring volume with only keyword targeting. By creating a custom affinity audience and targeting competitors URLs, you can create an audience with the similarly high intent of search but with a far wider reach.

If you have questions about leveraging custom affinity audiences for GDN campaigns or implementing them in your strategy, reach out to Rise to discuss a solution that is right for you.

07/12/2018 at 07:15