What is an Affinity Audience?
Custom Affinity Audiences are super important in the world of advertising and targeting one’s audience. It allows the marketing team to learn a lot about their audience and who they should be trying to market to. Thanks to help from cookies and other data collection that Google makes easy to obtain, marketers are able to know far more than just a person’s age or gender. They can also get a good sense of their lifestyles and interests as well as what they are in the market for. With this ability to know their audience members more personally, marketers are able to customize their campaigns towards specialized groups. This in turn helps campaigns to gain more interest because as google’s help site puts it, Affinity Audiences allow “ advertisers to reach the people that matter most with their products or offerings.”
How to Get the Most Out of Your Audience Data
Before creating these custom campaigns however, there is alot for the marketing team to consider such as which campaign strategy to use and the audience type. There are many different targeting options that would work best for different information one has collected. If one had a lot of information on someone’s interests or passions they would create an affinity audience based on people with interests relating to their product.
Google is also able to gain information on where someone is in their life whether that is graduating college or buying a home. If you have this information and it fits with the good or service you are trying to sell, then you would use this lifestyle grouping as an audience to base your campaign on.
One very useful data is if someone has been researching and ready to buy a particular product. We call this in market audiences. Marketers can use this to reach out to people that they know for a fact need the product they are advertising for.
Google not only will help the advertisers get the data they need but it also allows them to advertise to people using google with certain keywords or phrases that match what the advertisers might be trying to sell. You can do so through paid ads for this specific audience using the keywords or you can rely on organic search with your keywords.
Google also allows the advertisers to know who has visited their site before and might be someone they can remarket to in a way that might get them to buy something next time they visit.
The last big targeting strategy using the data provided by google is detailed demographics. Google will provide more demographics than just age and gender. Instead you can also use demographics to fit people into groups such as parents. Using all of this information and creating these specialized audiences, advertisers are able to really develop their marketing strategies and targeting to get the best results.