Waze is a navigation app. Because of this, it doesn’t take much work to decipher the biggest advantage of utilizing Waze Local.
Ultimately, it brings in direct foot traffic. You drive, quite literally, potential customers to your store. The main aim of any brick-and-mortar business is to get people through the door. Waze Local can target people across the area – the type who might not otherwise realize your store exists – and boost visitor numbers in the process.
As mentioned previously, there are several methods available for putting together a specialized audience type. To avoid making this the longest single piece of content on the internet, the spotlight will be placed on one other option: creating a custom affinity audience.
If this isn’t the type of audience you want to focus on, just keep in mind most follow a similar process. Plus, Google supplies enough helpful pointers throughout that you’re unlikely to hit any roadblocks to slow your progress.
So with that said, here’s a quick look at creating a custom affinity audience.
To begin, log in to your Google Ads account and click on the “Tools & Settings” button. Underneath the “Shared Library” section, you will find “Audience manager.” Click on this section.
From here, you will see two tabs labeled “Remarketing” and “Custom Audiences.” Select the latter one. Now click the blue plus sign, which will bring up two further options: “Custom affinity” and “Custom intent.”
Click the “Custom affinity” button.
Doing so will open a new section. Here, you can set a name for your audience and write a short description. Most importantly, you can input various interests, URL, places, and apps to define your audience. The more searchable details you add, the greater reach your ad campaign will have. This can be both a good and bad thing, so ensure you get the balance right.
As an example, below is what happens when selecting the interests as simply “marathon runner.”
Even with just this one term in place, you are open to a massive custom affinity audience. However, the reach begins to reduce as you start narrowing down your target – which is the ultimate goal with Google Audiences after all. You want to target a specific area and/or customer base with your ad campaign.
This can be adjusted by optimizing the “Audience estimate settings.” Select the country and language you want to target, pick the “Campaign Type” of either “Display” or “Video,” and hit the “Reload” button at the bottom of the section.
You are then provided with an estimate of just how many weekly impressions your ad campaign can potentially generate. In addition, you are given “Top website topics” that can be the focus of your content to drive people to your website.
In addition to this, you can gain additional insight into the audience you’re targeting. Simply click the “Demographics” tab that’s beside “Topics.” You will then be presented with age, gender, and parental status figures relating to your audience type.
Once you have analyzed the stats and you’re happy with everything, click the “Create” button at the bottom of the section. It can then be added to your ad groups.
As with any aspect of an ads campaign, there’s always room for improvement. This is certainly the case with Google Audiences. While setting up your campaign is relatively simple, there’s ample work involved in optimizing it to deliver the best overall results.
In that regard, here are a few helpful pointers in ensuring your Google Audiences are performing to an optimum level.
As a starting point for your Google Audiences’ campaign, you should always place a focus on your most relevant audience types first. Why? Well, by doing this, you have a foundation for the entire campaign. You can look to see if the campaign is effective or not.
If it’s the latter, you may have to search for alternative ways to target your customer base. Yes, flopping at the start isn’t exactly ideal. However, it displays any potential issues from the very start. If you only focus on minor audiences with the campaign from the beginning, it can provide skewed results. This could then lead you into a false sense of security where you think going with the most impactful audiences will change results.
Start inwards with a couple of your most impactful audiences, and then expand outwards once you know they produce effective results.
When you have Google Analytics freely at your disposal, it makes all the sense in the world to, you know, use it to your advantage. By analyzing the facts and figures, you can gain a strong, multi-layered insight into the performance of your ads with Google Audiences.
By obtaining this type of valuable information, you can plan a course for the future. There are several different statistics to analyze. Even an aspect as seemingly insignificant as “Language” can be looked into, where you have the choice to see which languages are performing best, and then include these as part of your ad campaign. This is particularly beneficial when examining the performance of your website in terms of locations.
Just remember to look beyond the base figures. For instance, in the above example, India is one of the top-ranking countries in terms of users. However, the conversion rate is noticeably lower than the other listed options. As a result, it wouldn’t make sense to consider India as an audience target. Australia, on the other hand, has a high conversion rate – making them a prime candidate for additional focus with an ad campaign.
Trying to secure the optimum budget spend on your Google Audience spend is not an easy task. It requires a fair bit of trial and error, and changes beyond your control can affect this element at any time.
Yet if you can hit that sweet spot, you’ll maximize your budget and ad performance all in one go.
To do this, simply play around and adjust your bid for each audience. Continue upping the budget gradually, squeezing as much as you can out of your audience. If the results begin to decline, this is a sign that it’s time to hold off throwing any additional dollars at this particular campaign.
It could appear overwhelming at first, but you should always plan to utilize multiple audiences for your campaign. By doing this, you are expanding your reach across multiple different channels – opening your website up to additional visibility from potential customers.
This is especially advantageous if you want to truly target specific audiences. As an example, you could run a business that sells vinyl records. Instead of just having a Google Audience campaign that focuses on vinyl records, you can have multiple individual ones that each focus on a different music genre. This helps to increase your reach across different search terms, while also remaining relevant to the main subject of your business.
However, there’s also a line you don’t want to cross. Avoid simply setting up an audience for the sake of it. If the market is one that has little relevance or interest in what you’re offering, you are only wasting your precious marketing budget by going down this avenue.
