The search and display advertising landscape is evolving. Simply connecting users to ads with keywords is a start. But as you learn more about your audience, the search landscape becomes more valuable. Google knows this too. Beyond the Swiss-army knife of tools already available in Adwords, there are a few new features to better connect segments of your audience to your message.
Customer Match
Your current customers and leads are often your most valuable assets as a marketer. Google’s customer match is devoted to helping you leverage those groups.
Advertisers can now display ads to Gmail users viewing sites within the Google Display Network (GDN). Facebook’s similar Custom Audience feature has been around for a while now, but Google’s new version comes with a few advantages and limitations compared to the social giant’s offering:
Limitations:
- You need a big list. Google won’t display ads until you have 100 Gmail users. Even then, once you start applying other targeting (demographics, placements, interests – see benefit below) and factor in click-through rate, your audience can shrink quickly.
- Google Display Network is big, but it’s not everything. Google claims it covers 90 percent of Internet users, but that doesn’t mean every site they use. So if you want to display on a specific domain, do your homework first.
Advantages:
- You can reach 90 percent of Internet users! Maybe Facebook isn’t the best way to reach your audience. Maybe you can’t connect ads to a Facebook page to utilize the newsfeed. Customer Match ads won’t cover the whole Internet, but they extend beyond the confines of social media. Think trade media, medical industry, manufacturing. These subjects can be tough to address on social. GDN give much more flexibility in creating relevancy.
- Similar to Facebook, you can combine your emails with a whole host of other targeting parameters. These parameters aren’t necessarily better than Facebook’s, just different. For example, on Facebook you know a user is interested in a topic, but on GDN you can combine that information with placement management that keeps your ads on highly relevant pages when you’re top of mind.
Remarketing for Search and Shopping
Remarketing for search has been around for a while, but remarketing for shopping users recently came out of Adwords beta test. These search-based tools are a silver-bullet if you understand your audience.
Marketing funnel insight
Users search multiple terms in multiple sessions over a long or short span of time. We’ve always known consistent visibility across the process is important, but we never had much ability to control it on an individual basis.
Full creative control
With search and shopping remarketing, we can apply the same marketing funnel rules from traditional remarketing. A user who added items to a cart should see different ads than a user who only viewed a features page. But there’s one additional layer of control that’s always escaped traditional remarketing: keyword control. With full insight into searcher intent, we call pull individuals through the marketing funnel in a couple new ways:
- Review-based searches – Connect individuals with pages devoted to customer reviews when they want testimonials.
- Comparative searches – When users are evaluating your solution against competitors, connect them to a side-by-side comparison. A lot of users will still look for a third-party opinion, but you can remain a part of the conversion.
- Focus on margin – Specifically for shopping ads, we can now be picky about the users and products that use ad budget. Products with lower margins might receive less remarketing dollars so you can focus on areas with more potential.
