How Do In-Market and Affinity Audiences Work?

Learn How In-Market and Affinity Audiences Work

In-Market and Affinity Audiences are a way to help you identify and target your ideal audience. In today’s, highly competitive pay per click marketplace, you need to find the right people to advertise to and at the right times.

Due to the competitiveness, it is imperative you ensure your PPC ad and marketing spend provides the highest ROI possible. By understanding your product, and the types of people are most likely to make a purchase, you’re able to identify the best segments to target with your campaigns.

Some strong prospects may not consistently meet your ideal audience criteria. For example, people looking for new accountancy software may not have a continued interest in accounting. This is when Google’s in-market audiences can be useful. Both affinity audiences and in-market audiences are great sources for finding new customers.

What are In-Market Audiences?

In-market audiences are groups of people who are already interested in making a specific purchase of products or services, or already have specific interests. Google collects data to help them identify these groups. These prospects have already informed themselves about whatever it is they want to buy. Often, they are nearing the decision stage of the purchasing process.

In-market audiences are identified by recent search and browsing history and may not be in the market for long. Once the purchase has been made, they’ll drop out of this segment.

Because they are part-way down the sales and marketing funnel, they have a good understanding of the solutions available. They’re nearing the decision stage, so most of your work has been done – even if they haven’t discovered your business.

Finding Affinity Audiences

Affinity audiences are based around broad interests. Data is pulled together by Google’s analysis of web searcher’s passions, lifestyle, and browsing behaviour.

Someone who regularly watches cosmetic tutorials or browsing websites about how to create different looks would be included in the ‘Beauty and Wellness’ affinity group. As this group is fairly large, it’s broken down into two segments – ‘Beauty Mavens’ and ‘Frequently Visits Salons’. Depending on the behaviour of the YouTube viewer, they may appear in both or just one of these groups.

As a cosmetic brand, it makes sense to target one or both of these affinity groups. But it doesn’t end there. Further parameters can be specified to pinpoint the kinds of people who will see your adverts. Age, gender, household income and even attributes that you’d like people to be excluded from seeing your ads for can be defined.

More specific audience groups can be created with Google’s functionality. This enables you to build custom affinity audiences for your brand.

How do Affinity and in-market audiences work?

Once you’ve conducted a comprehensive Google Ads audit, created your campaign and defined your audiences, Google will ensure the audiences you’ve specified are served your ads.

Due to the different nature of in-market and affinity audiences, different types of Google Ads campaigns should be created for them. It’s more than likely that an audience will be at different stages of the buying process, therefore, slightly different messaging is required. Remember, in-market audiences are on the cusp of making a purchase. Affinity audiences have a general interest in a particular area but may not intend to make a purchase. Get in touch for a free audit and learn how to use audiences effectively. If you have questions such as: What is PPC and how does it work? – you’ve come to the right place! Contact us now for your PPC needs.