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Google Ads Custom Affinity Audiences

Brilliant. So, today the topic I know on the image card says something about GDN, but it's not! It's about the custom intent audience - GoogleAds have made some new changes to the interface as to how you can create these custom affinity and custom in-market audiences, which is used to set up in a different way.

So, let's jump into our GoogleAds account.

So, what you want to do is to go here from tools into audience manager, then you go into custom audiences and then click on the plus button. So, this is where they've changed things around a bit, and they've taken out any mention of affinity, as well as the in-market audience, I'm going to make a name of it. It could be anything, let's say, I want this to be about football shoes or something like that. So, you can name whatever you want and then what you do is you've got two options at the top. You select one of them, selecting this. The only thing that is going to change is over here. Add does a Google search term, or when you select the top one, it was going to say, add interest or purchase intentions.

So, what they've done is the top one is pretty much that affinity audience as it used to be called before and I'm going to go through in a bit more detail as to what that means because not many people know what it is and the Google Support Cente hasn't got a lot of information on it and the other one is people who search for any of these terms on Google. Let's start with this one, what these are. So, this is a long-term interest or a hobby or something you like or love. So, if you like football, you probably go to footballing websites pretty much on a daily basis or to your website of your team who you support. So, Google picks up all the signals. They know more about ourselves than we know about ourselves! I believe they've got over 70 million data points on everyone. So, it's a huge amount of data they hold on us and they have, and they pretty much know what we are going to do or what we are likely to do.

So, that's how they pre-empt these ads in front of us and all of a sudden, you think, you know what I was searching for these, or even sometimes it's weird when you think of a topic. I don't know. They listen in to a conversation or not through the mobile phone or apps like Facebook, Google, but all of a sudden, those ads start to appear as a remarketing ad. So, what this means is anyone who has got any interest. So, for myself, I love cricket. I go to these cricketing websites, at least three, four times a day to check the various scores of the matches and the teams. Google knows that I am in that audience of cricket followers or lovers or in the hobbyist cricket, the same could be applied for golf, cooking, driving, motorbikes, or pretty much anything.

And you can be in multiple affinity audiences because it's not that only like cricket, I also like football, I also like, you know other stuff which Google will then classify me under that audience. Everybody will be under multiple audiences and Google absolutely, knows about us as to what we do, if you are not sure about what this actually means, then you hover the mouse over this question mark bubble, and it says enter keywords describing your ideal customer's interest or products and services they are actively researching to buy. Your ads will reach people with those interests or purchase intentions based on your campaign settings, such as marketing objectives or bidding strategies. So, they rephrased and reworded this description and I'm not sure why they have done it like this, because if somebody is actively searching to buy, then they should go under the in-market audience.

So, I'm a bit puzzled as to why this has been phrased up in the way it has been because that is correct, ideal customers, interest or products or service, which I'm interested in, but I may not be looking to buy, I can't remember the last piece of cricketing equipment I had bought because I don't play anymore, but I follow the game and my teams, right? So, this is where I'm a bit I'm not confused, but I'm intrigued as to why they have done it in such a way because it only causes confusion, I'm not sure about it. I bet lots of people will be even more confused or should I be, should we use them this one or that one? But anyhow if you just look at the top bit, which is people with any of these interests of purchase intentions use that, which is the affinity and the other one, enter search terms your ideal customer is using on Google, your ads will reach more people who search for those and similar terms, only on campaigns, running on Google properties. On other campaigns, the terms will be used as interests or purchase intentions, but what they mean by other terms, they mean by GDN or video where they will potentially use it as interest-based or purchase intentions.

How they classify these signals into purchase intentions is debatable. Unless I put in a buy cricket bat, then absolutely, or cheap cricket bat, or the best cricket bat or something like that. So, if I know that these keywords, which I'm putting on Google and Google know that these are with intent, then obviously I will be justified under the in-market audience, but then all you do is you put in your search terms over here, you can put in as many as you like. So, the more you give them the better it is because then it will have more data to go with. Before, I don't know whether you remember or not on here. They used to say, put in at least fifty keywords or phrases. They don't do that anymore, it's because the algorithm is now getting better and more clever and powerful.

So, it doesn't need a lot of keywords to work out what we are trying to target and what we are trying to create as an audience. So, I still will put in five to ten various keywords over here. So, you know, I can put in brand keywords, football shoes, Puma football shoes, and so on and as I start to put in the words, it's going to give me some more ideas, and this is how powerful the algorithm is now and how good Google is. Look, I've just put in two keywords and it knows it's about football, it's giving me all of these, put them in very quickly and if you put in some more brands than is going to show you some more, some more terms, I've got a fair few. Then, what I can also do is I can also put in people who browse websites similar to, and this is extremely powerful. I made a mistake there.

So, now I'm saying to Google, I also want to find or target people who visit these kinds of websites. Now, obviously, these are big brands. They may not be your competitor, but what you can do, if you are a small business or you have a localized business, where you have got a shop and your target audience is just a ten-mile radius around you, what you can also do is put in the URLs of all your other competitors. So, for me as a business, our competitors can be in the US, could be in China, India, Australia, pretty much everywhere, but I can put them in as well and Google is going to know that, okay, I'm looking for these kinds of visitors.

It's kind of like remarketing to my customer's audience, but not literally in the, you know a hundred percent. What we are saying to Google is I want to target visitors who go to websites like these. So, this is a little tip which I can give you and which I have used lots of times, is when I'm creating these audiences and I want to target all my local audience. I put in all the local digital marketing agencies or web designers or photographers or videographers in this list. So, what I'm telling Google is I want to show my ads to people who go to these kinds of websites. Although, it will be very localized. That's fine because I'm going to pick up a really good segment of the audience, which is a local audience, and if somebody comes across me as a business and they see me, Oh, they're in Leighton Buzzard it's just next door to us.

They are more likely to come to me than go somewhere else in London or many miles away and then they come to my website. They can see, we do lots of videos and YouTube videos and live streams and I do know for a fact that none of my local customers, as well as other agencies around the world, they're not doing this video marketing as aggressively as we are. We are here every day, putting up our content. Very few people are doing this and once they wake up and start on this journey of video marketing, I'll be many miles away from them! Because right now they've got zero videos on their YouTube channel. I've got about 650 odd videos right now. Even if they start uploading videos very aggressively, it will be very difficult for them to catch me up in terms of the amount of content we are putting up.

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