Remember the days when you’d set up a generic ad campaign, pick a few short-tail keywords, then throw up some ads on Google AdWords—praying for click throughs and conversions to magically appear out of thin air? Those days weren’t very long ago, but thankfully, they’re gone forever.
Today ad targeting is smarter and more precise than ever before, largely thanks to platforms like Facebook and Google. Marketers can now reach their ideal audience with individually tailored content that converts. The tools at our disposal are robust, and they can surely help us improve our ROI, but only if they’re used correctly.
Let’s take two of today’s most exciting features: Facebook Lookalike Audiences and Google Similar Audiences. Both features take the idea of remarketing lists to a new level by reaching a new pool of untapped users based on information collected about our past website visitors. They are both centered around the idea of creating your own audience, or custom audience.
Here are the key takeaways you need in order to understand the power of each platform and act according to your organizational needs.
Bonus: Download a free guide that reveals how to increase social media engagement with better audience research, sharper customer targeting, and Hootsuite’s easy-to-use social media software.
4 Tips for Using Google Similar Audiences and Facebook Lookalike Audiences
1. Build off your most effective audience
Before you can start the remarketing process, you must determine your best audience. This all begins with segmentation. Who is your ideal customer? You wouldn’t want to find new audiences based on customers who only converted once, refused your upsell, and abandoned your email marketing list down the road.
You want to emulate only your very best customers—the ones who have the highest lifetime value to your brand and will continually come back to purchase your products.
Segmenting the right audience is important regardless of whether you’re using Google Similar Audiences or Facebook Lookalike Audiences. It’s the nucleus of your ad targeting strategy. Without segmenting the right audience, you’ll miss out on many opportunities to improve your ROI.
To ensure you’re targeting the right people, make a list of your top converting customers based on transaction value, engagement with your brand, and lifetime value. Ideally you’ll want data from several hundred—or even a few thousand—customers to input into Google and Facebook (Facebook recommends anywhere from 1,000 to 50,000 of your best customers).
On Facebook, it’s pretty easy to identify your top engagers. See who’s liking your posts, leaving comments or feedback, writing reviews of your brand, and sharing your page with their Facebook friends. These are the users that you want to replicate in your lookalike audience.
On Google, while you don’t have the convenience of tapping into users’ interests the way you do on social media, you can still build a similar audience by importing an email list or converted user list into Google.
You should also explore Google Tag Manager and input remarketing tags on your site and see who’s viewing your product categories. This can magnify your most popular products while hopefully driving more conversions to the products that aren’t selling as fast.
2. Don’t increase your budget too soon
Many marketers make the mistake of increasing their daily spend on an unproven campaign, just because they assume that their look alike or similar audience will come through in a big way. This is not smart.
Any ad expert worth their value will advise you…
