A few years ago, you could still run profitable Google Ads campaigns without working that much with demographics and audiences. Still, over the year, the medium has become increasingly more expensive. Partly due to increased competition and partly due to increased prices.
So how do you run a successful campaign on high-competition keywords?
You find your audience as cheaply as possible. If you have a large eCommerce site, you can probably build lookalikes & similar audiences, but at the same time, if you have a large site, you might have different demographics for different products.
Let’s simplify this with an example.
You run a company that sells high-end headphones for athletes and runners. Quality products in the higher price range.
Most of the searches are going to be on highly competitive keywords, such as “headphones,” “headphones for iPhone,” or even “running headphones for iPhone” (which still is quite expensive).
Suppose you are going to pay a couple of dollars per click. In that case, you need to have as high a probability of conversion as possible, and the best way to increase that possibility is to make sure you are targeting or at least focusing on the right audience.
Allocate 10% of your budget on a banner, YouTube, Facebook, or similar campaign where you can target your audience based on interests and demographics.
You can look at your audiences in Google Analytics and filter out what in-market interests your best audiences have, and you can do the same for gender, age, location, and on a few other metrics.
Get as specific as possible while reaching as many users as possible. In this hypothetical example, we will only create one audience for simplicity, but ideally, you want to create a few different audiences.
- Ages 18-35
- Interests in marathons, triathlons, cycling, and exercise-enthusiast
- Geographical locations are big cities in Sweden, Denmark, Norway & Finland
This is the audience that is targeted in our display campaign, and that means that it is only going to be shown to users in those geographical locations with those interests that are within that age group.
The goal for this campaign is only to get the session so that we can get that user on an audience list that can be used to modify (increase) the CPCs in a medium closer to a purchase, such as Google Search or Google Shopping. There is no downside with a high bounce rate, and mobile-miss clicks are as useful as any other visit. You are running a data-gathering campaign that only aims to identify users within your target demographics.
If you have a larger eCommerce site with different demographics, you must create an audience in Google Analytics built from sessions from these campaigns. If you think you have a homogenous audience, that is unnecessary.
The next step is to create your Google Search and/or Google Shopping campaign, and there you will either target the audience created from your display campaign or use a bid-modifier to increase the CPCs for users on your list. I recommend the latter, but if it’s keywords with high search volume, remember to set a low base CPC with a high modifier so you don’t spend your budget on the wrong audience.
And there are many more advantages to building a big audience list with relevant users. One is that Google’s automating/smart bidding uses audience lists as one major factor when setting CPCs. The bigger your audience list is, the better your lookalike/similar audience lists can get to name a few.
If you’re curious about automating your ads, you’re in the right place. We’d love to discuss beating your competition to the punch with AI. Contact us today!
