How to target competitors' website audience in Google Ads?
Targeting the audience of a competitor's site or application is a difficult task, but you can target the visitors of the competitor's site in Google Ads.
Targeting the audience of competitors and showing them the advertisement for products or services may have been the dream of every business before, but now through Google Ads it can be done in less than 5 minutes.
Through the Custom audiences feature in Google Ads and by entering keywords, site addresses and related applications, you can reach your target audience and target them in display ads, discovery and video campaigns.
Previously, when the Custom audience feature was not yet added to Google Ads, we used the possibility of targeting users based on custom intent or custom affinity. Now, with the help of this feature, you can target your audience more accurately.
We want to fully describe the Custom audiences feature and explain how to target competitors' site audiences in Google Ads?
How Google Ads Custom Audiences Work
Google Ads tries to display ads to the right people based on what you have defined as Custom audiences and also based on the goal and bidding system of your campaign, after reviewing and interpreting the available signals.
For example, consider a company that manufactures running shoes. Probably, this company wants to show its ads to marathon enthusiasts instead of choosing a sports fans affinity audience.
Using Custom audiences, the shoe manufacturing company can define these audiences by entering keywords, web addresses, or desired applications:
- Enter interests such as "5km run", "triathlon" or "long-distance runner".
- Use the URL of websites with content related to running, running training programs, marathon nutrition, and other marathon-related topics.
- Import fitness apps (such as Google Fit) that aspiring marathon runners are likely to be interested in.
Custom audience entries
To use the Custom Audience feature in Google Ads, you must specify a series of parameters and enter them carefully to get the right result.
In the rest of this article from the Keyupseo blog, we will explain more about this feature.
Interests and behaviors
Determine the interests of your target audience with the help of keywords. Your ads will be displayed based on the behavior, interests, and purchase intent related to the entered keywords.
Your ads will be shown to users of applications or visitors to web pages related to the entered keywords, as well as to people who have searched for the entered keywords.
When you enter interests or behaviors as keywords, you can choose how Google should interpret them.
- People who have any of these interests or purchase intentions. (This is the default mode)
- People who searched for any of these keywords on Google services (such as Google.com and YouTube).
People who have used similar applications
Enter the names of apps you think your ideal customer might use. Your ads will be shown to people who install and use apps similar to the one you entered.
Note that this does not mean showing your ad in those apps.
People who browsed similar websites
Enter the URLs of websites that your ideal customer might visit. Your ads will be shown to people who browse websites similar to the URLs you entered.
Note that this does not mean showing your ad on those sites.
People who have visited certain places
Enter the types of places where your target customer might spend time. For example, you can enter places like a parking lot, a library, a restaurant, or a café.
Note that this does not mean that your ads will only be shown to people in those locations, but that your ideal audience will be selected based on the characteristics that these people have in common.
Step-by-step guide to creating a Custom audience list
To create a list of Custom audiences, click on Audience Manager from the Tools section in the Shared Library section after logging in to your Ads account.
Click on Audiences in the top menu.
Click the plus (+) button to create new custom audiences.
Enter the Audience name and apply other settings based on what you read above, and finally click on the Save button.
If you want to display your ads to people similar to your competitors' site visitors, create a new custom segment in the custom segments section enter the desired sites by clicking on the People who browse types of websites option, and then save it to the list. Add the desired audience.
Using the Custom Audiences list
For your ad to be shown to the custom list you created, you must add it to your campaign audience list. To do this, click on the desired campaign in Google Ads, and then click on the Campaigns option from the side menu, then the Audiences, keywords, and content section, and then Audiences.
On the page that opens, click on the Browse tab and select Your Custom Audiences at the end of the list. From here you can see all the custom IDs you have created and add the list you want to the campaign.
To create new custom audiences, you can also click on the Custom Audience (+) button in this path.
Note that it is not possible to add Custom Audience to search campaigns.
Types of targeting with audiences
As you can see at the top of the page, when adding new audiences to a campaign or ad group, there are two ways to target audiences.
With the help of the Custom Audiences feature and target audience targeting, you can have effective branding, and over time you will face an increase Google traffic.
Below are the types of audience targeting.
Targeting
This option, which is enabled by default, displays ads exclusively for the selected audience list only. Of course, there is a possibility of Bid Adjustment for each of the lists in this situation.
Observation
In this option, advertisements are not limited to selected lists, and of course, there is still the possibility of price changes for selected audiences.
Audience insights Custom audience information
When creating a Custom Audience, on the right side of the screen, information titled Audience insights is displayed, which is related to the custom audiences created.
By changing customizations such as keywords and list sites, you can view information such as weekly impression estimates, audience age group, audience gender, and parental status. You can also view this information separately by country and language.
Release date : 24 June, 2024
