Introduction
Online advertising is all about getting the right message in front of the right person, at the right moment. This course provides a high-level introduction to the tools Google Ads provides to reach your potential customers online.
What you’ll learn:
The best targeting options for your goals
Google’s audience targeting solutions
What would you do?
You’re managing a Google Ads campaign for a national company that sells high-end outdoor gear for camping, climbing, and hiking. What’s the best way to drive sales of these items?
Find potential customers online
Before you start figuring out which targeting strategies to use, it’s helpful to visualize how you will find potential customers online. The following framework breaks this down in three distinct ways.
Who:One aspect of targeting focuses on “WHO” is in your target audience. Audience targeting helps you identify, re-engage, and expand your audience online. You can target those who actively intend to purchase your products and personalize your ads with relevant messages. All thanks to machine learning. Example: For customers who abandoned a shopping cart without making a purchase, show ads with “20% Off Your Next Order!” to encourage them to complete the purchase. This is called remarketing. Demographic targeting allows you to reach a specific set of potential customers who are likely to be within a particular age range, gender, parental status, or household income.
Where: Another aspect of targeting focuses on “WHERE” your audience is. “WHERE” can refer to where your customers are in the physical world (e.g., location and device targeting) or where they are online (e.g., contextual or topic targeting). Example: Suppose you've created an ad group to advertise your car dealership’s latest lineup and you've included keywords like “fuel-efficient cars” and “2018 electric cars”. We use contextual targeting to identify and place your ad on pages that match those keywords.
What: The final aspect of targeting focuses on “WHAT” is of interest to your audience. With Google Ads, you can specify keywords based on what people are searching for. When people search for words like your keywords on Google or partner sites, you can display your ads alongside those search results. Example: Say you own a flower shop. You can create keywords like “flowers for mom”. When people search “flowers for mom”, your ad may show alongside those search results.
Example: Target your ads with Google Ads
There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to targeting, but we can still learn by example. Let’s take a look at how one business – Fareena’s Flowers – is setting up their targeting for an upcoming holiday promotion.
Goal: Fareena is preparing for the upcoming Mother’s Day holiday and wants to advertise her local delivery service to sell special Mother’s Day bouquets.
Demographic: This year, she’s designed a clever advertising strategy designed for sons. She decides her target market is men aged X-Y. She uses demographic targeting to reach them.
Location — local store: Since she’s focused on local delivery, she chooses to use location targeting to restrict advertising to within 15 miles of her city limits. She doesn’t want to be driving two hours for one delivery!
Topic targeting: Fareena knows her target customers are interested in music, art, and travel, so she selects these topics to target. With topic targeting, her ads may be featured on sites and apps with related content.
Remarketing: Not one to lose a customer, Fareena also decides to try her hand at a remarketing campaign to re-engage interested customers. If a user visits her site without completing a purchase, she’ll show ads to them while they browse the web to remind them to place their Mother’s Day order while there’s still time.
Close: With demographic, location, and topic targeting, as well as a remarketing campaign, Fareena has a robust advertising strategy to set her up for success this holiday season.
Recap
There are many powerful ways to use Google Ads to reach new and existing customers online. Other targeting courses will dig into the details of using each feature to achieve your business goals. For right now, consider the “WHO”, “WHAT”, and “WHERE” of your target audience.
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