Why Having Control Over Your Audience In Google Ads Is Important

Nowadays it’s impossible to hang up a call with a Google Ads rep without being pushed toward some form of automated bidding. While there have been advancements with these various strategies, fully leaving the targeting decision making to the Google overlords can lead to missed opportunity and wasted money.

Relating the information below to one of our clients in the SaaS space to show how controlling your own audience, demographic, and device targeting can lead to sales doubling and CPA (cost per acquisition) dropping.

Audience Observation & Targeting

Over the past few years, the audience segmentation in Google has become much more robust. From in-market, to affinity, to LinkedIn style, company size & industry targeting, it’s important to observe how these audiences interact with your ads and understand who is showing the most interest in your products or services. Unfortunately, this data isn’t automatically captured when you set up a campaign.

You must manually add these segmentations to begin gathering data and making informed decisions. In this client example we were able to look back on months of data from each of our relevant audience segmentations and begin to implement bid adjustments based off the highest performers. This was just one step toward becoming more efficient.

Spend money where you are making money!

Demographic Targeting (Age, Gender, Household Income)

• It may seem like an obvious targeting option but throughout years of looking at Google Ads accounts, it is shocking how many are showing their ads to every age group without any restrictions. Just the same way we can be more efficient with audience observation and targeting, we can do the same with age. With this SaaS based company, we eliminated 18-24 and focused on older age groups since we were targeting decision makers in a B2B space. We analyzed the data within the other age groups and made bid adjustments based off performance. Once again, spend the money on those who are showing the most interest.
• Depending on the product, gender-based bid adjustments can greatly help increase performance. For example, if you are a clothing company and your focus is on women’s clothing or men’s, you can let Google know to focus the spend on the audience most likely to make a purchase.
• Analyzing household income data is also very important to help increase performance. The key is to look at a large data set and analyze which income brackets are interacting and purchasing/inquiring most for your product or service. Where is money being wasted? Adjusting here is key when it comes to becoming more efficient and spending money in the right places.

Ad Schedules

Setting up an ad schedule is one of the more underrated settings when it comes to being more efficient with your dollar. With this client, we chose to only run ads during business hours M-F while keeping them at a limited budget during the weekends. This is decision was made based off the heavy B2B use of the service and months of data showing these days and hours as the most profitable to focus on.

Device Targeting

Another obvious yet underutilized place to look is your device targeting. A lot of times spend can be split evenly between mobile and desktop, but it is important to analyze the data and truly know your audience. In the case of this client, we found most of their inquiries were coming from desktop and clicks from desktop were more likely to convert at a lower CPA. This doesn’t mean mobile was eliminated, we just decided to bid less for those clicks and focus more on desktop where it counted most.

Key Takeaway

Audience and Demographic targeting options are no secret within Google Ads but understanding and utilizing them correctly can make a world of difference. Combining our audience, age, household income, location, device, and ad schedule changes helped double performance for our client in just one month.

It’s the attention to detail that has become lost in a world of automation and is key to great performance!