Intent & Context – Reaching Customers More Easily With Enhanced Campaigns
As marketers we’ve always known the importance of knowing our customers, but has that changed now that the way our customers search for products and services has changed so drastically? In just a few short years our connectivity has started to create some chaos. Everyday millions of people are searching for millions of products in what seems like a million different ways. They’re sitting on the subway on their way to work searching their smartphone for a place to take a client to lunch. Or on the couch at home after dinner searching there tablet for a great deal on a new car. Or they may be at work on their desktop searching airline tickets for an upcoming vacation. This creates seemingly billions of opportunities for your advertising to reach potential customers. Fortunately the basics of marketing and advertising remain essentially the same, the methods have just changed.
The key to a successful ad campaign still lies in relevance. As it always has been, the more relevant your ad is to what your potential customer is searching for, the more likely it is that that advertisement will convert into a sale. Because Google has recognized the dramatic change in the way people are searching for things, and created their all-new enhanced campaigns for AdWords, it’s now even easier for us as marketers and Pay Per Click managers to reach as many potential customers as possible.
It’s all about the insights. Google AdWords offers you a number of ways to create reports to see what is and what is not working in your AdWords Campaigns. And if you regularly use Google Analytics, you’re rewarded with and even greater plethora of information. This information is your greatest tool as an advertiser. You can sort this information to discover when people are searching for your product, how they’re searching, (mobile, tablet, or desktop), where they’re searching geographically, and even what the average age and gender of these potential customers are. Now it’s not really anything new to target certain customers by age, gender, location, time of day, etc., watch any episode of AMC’s drama about 1960s ad men, Mad Men, and we can all relate to the character’s struggle to figure out how to best reach their target audience. Play the spot at dinner time or in the afternoon? Are women more likely to respond to a print ad in black and white or in color? What has changed is now with AdWords enhanced campaigns you can now combine intent and context more easily. Instead of targeting just by location, or just by gender, you can target a variety of insights to achieve your ultimate advertising goal.
With Google AdWords enhanced campaigns you can now make bid adjustments to help you better target insights that are much more likely to lead to a conversion. So if your business is flowers and you know the majority of your customers are male, search for flowers between 9am-12pm, and are in certain vicinity to your store, you can increase your default bid by certain percentages on these aspects to increase your ad’s chances of serving. You can also decrease your default bid by certain percentages in areas where you find your ad has a less likely chance of succeeding. So now instead of spending hours creating separate campaigns that target different devices, different geographic locations, different times of the day, it’s all neatly contained in the new enhanced campaigns. If the ad men of the 1960s had seen this coming, I’m certain they would have celebrated with a round of drinks. Or two.