Businesses with a web presence can benefit significantly from Google Ads. Google Ads is an ad platform from Google that displays ads directly in Google search. When using Google Ads, you should carefully choose the right PPC management strategies to maximise the effectiveness of your ad spend. This is because Google Ads can be expensive if you are not careful.
There are a few advanced Google Ad settings that businesses may not be aware of, or settings that they aren’t currently using that could be helpful in the long run. These advanced Google Ad settings include In-Market Audiences, Geo-Targeting, and Ad Scheduling.
In-Market Audiences
In-market audiences take Google’s full data set and use that information to determine if a person is browsing with the intent to purchase an item. For example, if someone has searched for a certain brand of shoe multiple times in a short period, Google may be fairly certain that the person is ready to buy.
In-market advertisers then put ads up for a particular product to move a user from just browsing to actually following through with a purchase. Basically, this feature uses the behaviour of a shopper to determine whether or not a targeted ad will be beneficial or not.
It’s easy to use the in-market audience feature in Google Ads. You can create or go to an existing Search campaign, go to the Audiences tab, and select the blue ‘edit’ icon, which is located on the left side of your screen.
The Google Ads Edit Audiences button
Then, choose your chosen campaign or ad group, select Observation as the targeting method, and select ‘what they’re actively researching or planning’. Finally, you can choose from a list of in-marketing audience categories to include in your Search campaign.
The observation setting for In-Market Audiences
Geo-Targeting
Geo-targeting delivers different ads or ad styles to people depending on their geographic location. If you are advertising real estate, for instance, you might want to advertise differently to someone who is thinking of moving to your site from out of state, versus targeting people who are looking to move within their own locality (and therefore know some necessary city/neighbourhood information).
Geo-targeting is known as location bidding in the advanced Google Ads settings. This tool can be used to focus your ad campaigns on users in specific areas. It can be found at the campaign level under locations in the left-hand menu. By looking at your Google Ads location information, you can see that data and change your bidding for certain locations.
To make the most of this setting, be sure to target smaller locations within your main geo-targeting from the outset. This will make you get data for each location you have targeted within the Google Ads dashboard. For example, if you are targeting France then you should also add in targeting for Paris, even though it would be targeted anyway. If you do this you will then easily be able to see the performance of your ads in Paris specifically and adjust your bidding accordingly.
You could still do this by running reports and then adding the targeting in later (if you didn’t target Paris), but by adding in important geographic subregions from the outset you are making your life easier.
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Ad Scheduling
Ad scheduling is an often overlooked practice, but one that can be highly beneficial to click rates over time. By scheduling ads, you can target the times that more people are online and widen your target audience.
Some companies may choose to run their ads only during their business hours so that if someone is interested, they can be patched through to a human being to get more information. Other companies may have the ability to operate 24/7 customer service lines, so having specific times when you’re running ads isn’t as critical.
By scheduling ads at certain times, you can begin to track when your ads are most effective and which ads are bringing in traffic. Rather than setting an ad schedule and walking away, you should keep monitoring your ad schedule and changing it to be the most effective it can be.
Conclusion
In the end, Google Ads is rolling out new features like in-market audiences, but that doesn’t mean your business shouldn’t take advantage of other advanced features like geo-targeting and ad scheduling. Often these simple tools can be easy to use and highly beneficial to your company, even if it seems like the changes that are being made are small.
Test out the above PPC marketing settings to help your business make more money today!