How to Custom Target (and Poach) More Car Shoppers with Google’s New Affinity Audience Ads
On October 7th, Google started rolling out a new way for marketers to custom-target potential customers through the Google Display Network—an immense group of websites, blogs, news sources, and Google services like Gmail and YouTube that feature Google ads.
This new targeting feature is meant to complement the existing targeting options: In-Market Audience and Affinity Audiences. In-Market Audiences let advertisers reach qualified customers who are actively researching, shopping for, and comparing the types of products you sell. Affinity Audiences work similarly to how TV-style audiences do. This targeting strategy lets advertisers reach consumers who have shown a qualified interest in a particular topic (like luxury vehicles). Affinity Audiences are intended to reach lower funnel consumers who are enthusiastic and brand loyal. However, there used to be only two types of Affinity Audiences available for automotive marketers: “Motorcycle Enthusiasts” and “Luxury Car Shoppers.”
In the past few weeks, Google has given advertisers the ability to customize their Affinity Audiences, which is a dream come true for the Pay-per-Click team at Strathcom. With Custom Affinity Audiences, you can now define exactly which audience you wish to reach and start designing your own Affinity groups through URL and interest targeting.
How Do Custom Affinity Ads Work?
This is an example of a custom affinity audience created inside the AdWords interface. Google will gather the websites and interests to create a custom audience that includes the top interests and demographics of the audience members. The audience above is for “RAM Pickup” and would be ideal for a RAM dealership wishing to promote their pickup trucks.
Draw Customers Away from Your Competition
With the ability to add URLs to your custom affinity ad audience, you can siphon off shoppers interested in a rival car brand or dealership. All it takes is creating your own in-market segments filled with URLs for those competitor manufacturer or business websites. And best of all, adding URL targeting allows you to build themes of visitors based on the content on those websites, whether they have actually been visited or not. How deliciously cunning!
Benefits of Custom Affinity Audiences
- Great way to boost the amount of qualified clicks and conversions generated from display advertising
- Customize your ideal audience for a particular sales event or promotion
- Capture the attention of brand loyal customers and get those customers to visit your website
- Reach your ideal customers by defining the exact type of websites they had previously visited
- Maximize your ROI for display advertising by creating the perfect audience for each vehicle line you carry
Like a black hole growing in mass, Google Custom Affinity marketing will help you pull in more car shoppers who would’ve otherwise escaped your influence. Ready to launch your conversion numbers into yet unexplored space? Strap in and contact our PPC team today.
