Selecting Custom Customers…
Personally, I am blown away by how much help Google Analytics can provide to you right out of the box – and one of these fantastic features is custom affinity audiences. An affinity audience is essentially a group of people that share similar passions, lifestyles, habits, or behaviors; and these are often tied to certain products, services, companies, brands, etc. For example, I myself am a huge fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Captain America, Iron Man, etc.) – so because of this, I am constantly served up advertisements and news articles based on the latest shows and production updates. So, one could gather that I am within an affinity audience that is a fan of the Marvel Entertainment properties; make sense?
Important Factors to Consider…
Now that we understand what makes up an affinity audience, let’s look into how we actually go about applying this knowledge. For instance, Google Analytics makes this relatively easy by allowing marketers to either create a custom audience or select one that is pre-configured by Google Ads. For our purposes, we are more interested in creating our own custom audience – as this allows better specific targeting then a preset. As for the factors themselves, I briefly mentioned them earlier, but Google explains it well in this excerpt from an article, “With affinity audiences, you can reach people based on a holistic picture of their lifestyles, passions, and habits. Affinity audiences have demonstrated a qualified passion in a given topic, allowing advertisers to reach the people that matter most with their products or offerings” (Google, 2021). Knowing the passions and lifestyles of our customers is incredibly valuable when we start to look at how we can connect our content with the desired audience; in turn – creating a stronger fanbase and brand all together!
Citation: Google. (2021). About audience targeting. Retrieved February 16, 2021, from https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2497941#zippy=%2Caffinity-audiences