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How to personalise your PPC strategy

There was a time when users would probably be surprised to see their name or recent interests pop up in an ad – but this has become the norm for the majority of advertisers. To drive significant results, it’s important to personalise your PPC strategy and align your ads with your target audience.

When done right, PPC marketing enables you to reach the right person, at the right time and in the right place. That’s as long as you understand your your target audience in terms of their demographics, hobbies and most importantly, where they are ‘hanging out’ online.

There are a plenty of ways to make your ads more personal, but we’ve highlighted some of these below:

Localise PPC ads with geo customisers

You can use ad customisers to adapt your PPC text ads to what a user is searching for and how they’re doing it, based on:

  • Which device they are using
  • Where they are located
  • The date, time of day or day of the week. 

Geo-customisers respond based on a user’s physical location. You can also choose to target based on a location of interest, i.e if you’re offering a product or service in a specific area. This is highly useful for local businesses or advertisers who want to target a certain area.

List-based remarketing

A remarketing list is a group of site or app visitors who are gathered by a snippet of code because they’ve shown interest in your brand, product or service. When creating your remarketing list, you can set rules on when visitors should be added to the list.

This is essentially a list of potential customers who you can retarget with any special deals, promotions, product launches and more. You can target these users on Google and social media.

Target non-converters through social media

It’s not uncommon for users to start their buying journey on search engines like Google or Bing. Whether these are high-intent searchers or users who are just browsing and end up making a purchase.

You can tell what type of customer a user is through their initial search. For example, “new blue jeans”suggests this person knows what they’re looking for.

Then we have searches like “different types of jeans”, which suggests a user is only looking for information or doing research on a topic. This searcher hasn’t shown any clear intent to purchase.

We recommend prioritising those high-intent searchers at this point. It can be easy to lose track of what you’re doing online with countless popups, emails, notifications etc. Instead of remarketing to each site visitor, you can focus on a smaller percentage that’s much more likely to convert and give you a better ROI.

This is where PPC marketers can start to create a more personalised, full-circle experience by remarketing to their site visitors through social media.

Let’s say a site visitor clicks on your product page or puts an item in their basket. If this user doesn’t end up converting – then it’s your time to remind them why they should go back and make a purchase.

So, how do we make this more personal? Social media gives us the added benefit of targeting site visitors based on age range, job titles, location and more. We’ll expand on this below:

Use Twitter and Facebook’s advanced targeting capabilities

The targeting options on the major social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram enable you to target based on interests, behaviours and demographics. Targeting all these things at once can lead you towards small but valuable audiences.

The platforms both use a combination of their own and third-party data providers to know exactly who their users are. This opens up a lot of opportunities for PPC advertisers to create more personal and strategic ads.

Keep these things in mind when creating your audiences:

  • Understand who you are targeting by creating a buyer persona.
  • Use multiple targeting features until you have a solid list of potential customers.
  • Personalise your messaging and ensure your language and tone of voice will resonate with your audience.

Custom Audiences (Twitter) and Customer Match (Facebook)

You can upload an existing list of contacts (emails or phone numbers included) to Facebook, Google and Twitter. Once you’ve uploaded this information to the ad platform – you can start targeting these users with ads. Here’s an example of your options on Twitter:

Targeting through Custom Audiences on Twitter
Targeting through Custom Audiences on Twitter

When uploading a list, it could be users who have downloaded an e-book, subscribed to your blog or filled out a form.

Here’s how it looks on Facebook:

Facebook Customer List Feature
Facebook Customer List Feature

This takes it a step further than keyword targeting as you know exactly who you’re going to be showing your ads to. They’ve also shown an interest in your brand before – so a conversion is highly likely.

When retargeting these users – think about what led them to subscribing in the first place. Which blog post made them subscribe? That’s likely a topic they want to hear more about. Which e-book did they download? Were there any products featured that they might want to buy?

Utilise targeting tools on The Google Display Network (GDN)

The Google Display Network (GDN) lets you target users while they’re browsing other sites. It’s important to use your budget wisely through GDN by targeting the right customers, on the right sites. Here’s how:

  • Contextual targeting: This allows you to only show ads on sites related to your keywords
  • Placement targeting: Choose where you want your ads to be shown and exclude any unrelated sites.
  • Remarketing: Show ads to people who have already interacted with your site or app.
  • Topic Targeting: Choose from Google’s list of topics, which could be anything from agriculture to music. 
  • Demographic Targeting: Target by parental status, gender and age range.

We suggest using more than one of these methods together to build a highly targeted list. Once you’ve found the right target market, you’ll be able to focus on where and when is best to show them your ads.

PPC is a complex but highly beneficial channel for businesses who want to reach their ideal audience. A personalised strategy will undoubtedly bring you more noticeable and long-lasting results.

We’ve highlighted just a few of many targeting opportunities available through PPC marketing. Feel free to contact our PPC team with any questions – we’d be happy to help.