Utilizing existing tools to create PPC audience

5 min readJul 18, 2021

You might not having a budget to make a research to build personas of your audience. Thus this would be a great that you should dig the tools that you utilize and create audience you can target on your ads.

Before browsing this article, I suggest you take a look at these articles.

One of the articles above was written on empathy mapping. Segmentation is a method that may become dysfunctional over timeand creates static segments. I’ve heard that empathy mapping is recommended to create a dynamic audience.

I wrote the other article on how to follow the steps to make a user-oriented campaign. There is also information that you can add to the information here.

In a course I took at CXL, I learned something new about how to find the audience we need to target in PPC through existing tools. In this article, I would like to share both what I learned in that course and my views on this subject.

The audience you want to target will likely not match the audience that will get you the best conversion. Therefore, the question to be considered here should be how do I target the audience that will bring me the best conversion with my current knowledge.

If you have run any campaign before and attracted traffic to your site, or if you have done SEO studies and attracted people to your site, you have good data on determining a targeting audience. Even a Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn account can provide you with extra information when targeting PPCs. So let’s take a look at these data in turn.

CRM

First of all, it doesn’t matter if you have a B2C or B2B company, you should use CRM. When targeting, you can see which segment your existing customers belong to and find an intersection. This intersection point can give you new information about targeting.

Google Analytics

As always, we should mention Google Analytics. Because the main task of Google Analytics is to store the information on your website. You can make this data more meaningful by telling Analytics which data should be collected via Google Tag Manager. Now let’s continue without getting Google Tag Manager too involved.

Utilizing Google Analytics impacts efficiently to targeting one of the best audience. Target the website that send traffic your website and convert the audience into lead. Thus it means your brand trigger something on their heads and this is the one of the best option to be targetable. You should get more people like them. Actually, it’s a remarketing.

Audience -> Interests -> Overview

On this screen, you can see what interests your audience is involved in, so you may have a new idea on targeting in the first data you come across in GA. Of course, the sectors listed here do not show in which segment 100% of the users entering your site are located. By looking at the numbers in the upper right part of the tables, you can see what percentage of your entire audience the segments in that table equal.

Audience -> Interest -> In-Market Segment

Here you can see which market the users coming to your site belong to. Here you can also see from which segment you have more conversions from users in the Transaction field. Filter conversion/transaction and look at segments. Even if you choose the “affinity category” from the Secondary dimension section above, you can get much cleaner data.

Google Analytics gives you a lot of information from which city the user entered your site to which browser he used. Therefore, you can target by browsing the data below.

Affinity Category
Age
Browser
Browser Size
Browser Version
City
Continent
Country
Gender
In-Market Segment
Language
Metro
Newtork Domain
Operation System
Other Category
Region
Sub Continent
User Type

If you take the data here one by one and run new campaigns for all of them, you will burn your money. So what you have to do is melt all the data in a pot and use data that matches as much as possible.

Social media pages

The social media accounts you use after collecting data from Google Analytics can also give you a lot of information. Facebook Audience, for example, is one of the best areas for this data.

“Facebook Audience Insights gives you aggregated information about two groups of people — people connected to your Page and people on Facebook — so you can create content that resonates and easily find more people like the ones in your current audience.”

You can show ads to people who interact with your Facebook/Instagram page. This is not the subject of this article, but I am thinking of writing a blog post about it.

“You can use preconfigured audiences that the Analytics team has developed to cover many of your use cases, you can create new audiences from scratch, and you can import any of your existing segments to use as the basis for new audiences. Once you’ve developed an audience, it becomes available in the accounts you select, and you can put it to work right away as part of a campaign or experiment.”

In addition, you can segment the users on your site with a tag you add to your site on LinkedIn. If you are doing a B2B business, I definitely recommend you to use this tag.

“The LinkedIn Insight Tag is a lightweight JavaScript tag that powers conversion tracking, website audiences, and website demographics. The Insight Tag should be incorporated as a standard component of your website’s pages to enable these LinkedIn Marketing Solutions features.”

From many social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, you can get a lot of information from your users’ interests to their cities. I won’t go into too much detail here because the panel of each platform is different.

You can also use the data obtained from social media statistics in your campaigns, but there is an important issue I would like to point out here: You should not use every data you obtain to open a campaign. It will always make more sense to collect all your data in a pool and then make a decision. Because every data may not be meaningful in line with the goal you want to reach.

Utilizing existing tools to create PPC audience

Written by Emre Can Kartal