Top 5 tips to reach your audience with Google Ads on YouTube

The power of Google Ads on YouTube is indisputable, considering that videos can show much more than images. Video ads’ popularity is growing faster than other mediums and formats, but it can lead to money burn without good targeting. Google gives you many options to choose from depending on the video ad’s length, format, etc. With its various format options, it helps you to present your brand in any way you want, from Ad Sequence Stories to short striking messages through Bumper Ads. When you have your perfect Video Ad, the next challenging thing is to find the right audience to show it to.

In this blog, we’ll focus on the top five Google Ads tips to set your targeting, reach the right audience with an interesting video story, and lead them to interact with your business. Be sure to check the bonus tips as well! 

Tip 1: Use Interests reports from Google Analytics

Google Analytics is always a great place to start when it comes to defining your target audiences with Google Ads. In the Audience report, you can find lots of helpful information about your audience. It includes their location, language, demographics, the device they used, etc. 

Here we will talk about Interest Report data within the Audience Report. As you may know, when you are creating a campaign within Google Ads, you will find pre-defined audiences from the Google database.

This database is rich with audiences for different industries and product types, but sometimes it can help know how they perform regarding your product. That’s the exact info that Google Analytics Interests Report can give you. By enabling it, you’ll see which types of In-Market and Affinity audiences interact with your website.  

You’ll see how many users and sessions came in by each Interests category, conversions, and revenue. 

Tip 2: Collect Audiences based on an action they’ve taken

Of course, the final conversion is the most desired action for every business owner. 

Whether we are talking about an e-commerce store where purchases are tracked directly online or if it’s a lead generation type of business, in which case sales happen later on offline, their goal will be to make that final conversion. 

Yet again, there is a lot of action that users can take before making that final conversion, and those actions are also part of the purchase journey. We are talking about activities like sign-up to the newsletter, adding products to the cart, account creating, etc. So, some kind of micro-conversions. Actions like these show that the customer has high intent and therefore is relevant for creating a target audience.

To create this audience, you should first create and implement relevant “micro-conversion” into Google Ads. Also, exclude it from the final conversion because we don’t want to mix it with primary conversion data.

Then we simply go to the Audience Manager and add a new Website Visitor type of audience. We choose a visitor of a page with a specific tag and choose the conversion tag that we implemented from List members.

Just give Google some time to collect this audience, and you’ll be ready to go!

Tip 3: Custom Audience Targeting based on Search Terms

Google Search Campaigns and Search Term reports can also give us helpful information about our Audience Targeting. We can extract the best performing keywords and search terms and build an audience based on people searching those terms. 

If you don’t have active Search & Shopping campaigns, then Keyword Planner can help you find and extract high potential keywords based on historical search query data and seasonality.

Google Search Console is a valuable tool to see organic searches coming to your website, and it can also be linked with Google Analytics so you can have that data in one place. An honorable mention for keyword search would be Google Trends, where you can see trending changes in searches for specific terms.

When you have your search terms, you just go to Audience Manager and then click Custom Audiences. There you will have an option to choose between people with any interests or purchase intentions based on these search terms and people who searched the terms you selected. We suggest you test both options!

Another great feature–when you enter the search term on the right panel, you can see demographic and interest insights, which can be very useful in further targeting.

Tip 4: Source/Medium Audience Targeting

There are many high potential sources outside of Google from which audiences can come to the website and convert social media, blogs, other site referrals, etc. 

We can view this data within the Source/Medium report under Acquisition.

This data can be beneficial for targeting, and Google recognizes this. So we can import audiences based on source and medium from Google Analytics into Google Ads. 

We can do that through custom Audience Builder within the Admin Section of Google Analytics. Under conditions, we select Source/Medium and choose the one we like to collect data for.

Tip 5: Similar Audiences

The last Google Ads tip on our top list is to use Similar Audiences. Google creates these by itself after sometime when it has sufficient data, so there is nothing you would need to do here except wait for Google. 

Similar Audiences are created based on the remarketing list you previously defined, and they will be listed among remarketing audiences. A good strategy is to use them to generate new prospecting audiences to interact with your brand.

Bonus Tips

We covered some targeting strategies, but we have mentioned nothing about the Video ad itself. Here are some additional tips that may help you create an eye-catching video ad that customers will remember:

• Include an element of surprise!

Predictable video ads are just noise that customers ignore. Remember, when people are spending time on YouTube, they aren’t in a purchasing mood, and they see ads as an interruption, so surprising them is the crucial factor.

• Make viewers take action!

As we mentioned before, we usually consider users who take action as a “warm” audience that is just about to convert. So inspiring them to take action at early stages is the key.

• Make yourself quirky!

Sometimes, unorthodox content can stand out and lead the customers to think about what they just watched, and overthinking can make them search for your brand again to see what it is about.

Conclusion

Google Ads gives you many options to reach your audiences, and these tips are just a part of it. It’s also essential to separate remarketing audiences from new prospecting audiences. Segmenting your audience is key! 

You can’t show the same ad to someone who doesn’t know your brand and someone who already bought from you. You must follow the conversion path, stages of the customer journey and adjust your message to achieve the sale and a loyal client. 

Start improving your Google Ads strategy today by booking our free audit! 

About the author

Igor Kecman is a PPC Specialist within Google Ads Team in Sellers Alley. He has three years of experience in the Digital Marketing Industry, working with clients from various industries. He specializes in Google PPC Advertising and Amazon DSP (Demand Side Platform), along with site analytics implementation and performance analysis.