Same search query – different expectations

People spend about 21% of their time searching online. When users type a search query into a search engine, they are showing a very clear intent towards a product or a service. This information can be very valuable.

However, a search query can have very different meanings depending on the person who is entering it. At the end of the day, a search query is a way to label your intent, and people can use the same “label” for different purposes and they could expect different results in the search engine even when they’re using the exact same search terms.

Let’s take a couple of examples: when someone who is 65 years old types “cheap hotel holidays” in a search engine, they have very different expectations than someone who is 21 years old doing the same.

Or parents with children don’t expect the same results than someone who is single when typing “best cars 2018”.

But in your search campaigns, you’re using exactly the same keywords for different people. And this is the way you must do it. So, how can you adapt your campaigns for different users? Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to adjust your bids depending on each specific audience? Indeed, it would, and we’re going to explain to you how to do it. There is an easy way to do that in Google AdWords or Bing Ads.

Using retargeting audiences

Currently you can’t target specific age groups or specific interests in Google AdWords nor Bing Ads. What you can do though is use retargeting audiences.

Using these retargeting audiences, you are going to be able to bid according to the performance of different groups of users even if they are using the exact same search query.

First of all, you will need to understand what your best performing users are doing on your site and create retargeting pixels for these actions. For example, you should add retargeting tags for clicks on the “read more” link in a product sheet, since people who click on it are going to be more likely to convert than other who bounce. Therefore, you should review your conversion funnel and add remarketing tags for each main action in the funnel, ordering them from more likely to convert to less likely to do so.

Once you’ve added retargeting pixels to every significant action in your conversion funnel, you need to create audiences for these actions and combine some of these actions. For example, for media companies, we should create an audience with people who get more than 20 pageviews in a visit, who see more than 3 different pieces of content, who click on specific content links or who recommend your content through social media and an audience for people who do everything.

When you’ve created these audiences, you should add them to your search campaigns in observation mode (Google AdWords) or only bid (Bing Ads). This way before changing your bids, you will be able to analyze these results.

It’s important to create and add audiences as soon as possible since you’re going to start collecting information once you create your audiences and add them to your campaigns. No matter if you don’t plan to use them in the short term, at least you start gathering users for your audiences and collecting information of audiences’ performance. This information is going to be very useful in the future.

Now, you can check which of your audiences are performing better and adjust bids for each audience. Results are going to improve since you’re able to adjust bids for specific audiences, reducing bids for those less likely to convert and increasing bids for those more likely to convert.

In a nutshell

• Review your conversion funnel to find specific actions showing that a visitor is more likely to convert.
• Create retargeting tags for each one of these events in the conversion funnel.
• Create audiences for each of these tags and combine them.
• Add these audiences to your search campaigns without narrowing the target nor changing bids to collect information for each of these audiences.
• Finally, when you have enough information for an audience adjust bids according to their specific performance.

We know this is going to improve your campaigns. So, don’t wait to test it. And let us know if you need any help reaching specific audiences, that’s what we do!

Jorge Alonso, Head of Business Development & Strategic Partnerships