Approaches to Google’s In-Market Audiences for Search
Now that Google’s in-market search audiences are available for public use, we wanted to share how The Search Agency thinks through each in-market audience strategy and selection.
The Obvious
One easy way to determine which in-market audiences to apply to your campaign is to look through the list of available in-market audiences and find the audience that is the in-market for your specific product. This won’t work for everyone, but it’s a great option for real estate and auto companies.
The Remarketing List Approach
The Google Ads remarketing pixel provides insight of pixeled audience and how the in-market audience indexes against the general population. In the example below, we looked at the converting audience of one of our B2B clients. We can see that their audience is over indexing on “Business Printing & Document Services,” “Tax & Accounting Software,” “Payroll Services,” etc.
The Google Analytics Approach
Like the “Retargeting List” approach, you can use Google Analytics data about your current website visitors and converters to determine which in-market segments to apply. This can be found in “Audience” > “Interests” > “In-Market Segments.” When we did this for the same B2B client, we found that the in-market audiences driving the most conversions were “Real Estate/Residential Properties” and “Travel/Hotel & Accommodations”.
The Google Search Ads 360 (GA360) Approach
In GA360, there is also an in-market segment we can view. For a high, account-level view of audiences, you can see this in the “Dimensions” tab, or you can drill down deeper on the “Campaigns” or “Ad Group” tabs. Unlike when you view audience reporting in Google Ads, a consumer can be reported in multiple in-market segments, so don’t be surprised when you see your totals equaling above the amount you spent.
Using these approaches, we can determine which audiences we expect to have the largest impact on conversion rates and apply those to campaigns for testing. As always, search isn’t a channel that you can set and forget. We’re optimizing these audience bid adjustments regularly and looking out for any new in-market audiences to apply and test.
