Google, now considered the most powerful search engine on the planet has developed and introduced “and” logic to enable advertisers, in this case insurance brokers, to build layered audiences for Search. The new “combined audience” option gives you the opportunity to create audiences (personas) by layering demographic, affinity or other elements available in Google Ads to target audience.
Creating a Combined audience
In order to create a Combined audience, you need to follow the following simple steps. First of all, go to the “Audiences” page in Google Ads and click “add new audience”. Then click on the “browse” tab, you’ll see a drop-down list where you’ll find the “Combined audiences” option. The following screenshot will help you understand more clearly.
Now, after clicking the “combined audience” tab you will see the audience builder pop-up. This is used to customize your requirement in-order to create the perfect ad that targets the right audience and meets all your requirements. A screenshot of such an example has been shown below.
In this image, a simple example audience of parents with school-aged children has been created. It targets those parents with school going children who are in-market for water activity equipment and accessories. As shown in the screen shot you can also use “OR” logic to add more audiences and you have the option to exclude any category as well. Such as current customers. The “AND” function in this particular add ensures that the ad being generated is shown specifically to in-market parents with school-aged children. Detailed customization of these ads can be done by adding detailed demographics, remarketing lists and life events.
This functionality really allows you to drill down to specific audiences, which then allows you to bid more aggressively on broader keyword searches. There is a vast number of ways we can apply this to the insurance industry. The in-market audience section has a number of insurance buckets we can chose from such as home insurance, travel insurance and car insurance which are a great targeting method on their own. However, combining these with other in market audiences such as vehicle types, makes and model of cars or even people in market for specific holiday destinations gives you that extra refining edge.
One thing that needs to be kept in mind is that combined audiences must have at least 1000 members for privacy reasons. Google will not allow any audience that does not meet the threshold and will automatically pause them. Estimating the size of your audience isn’t difficult as google will show you the audience estimate in the audience creation window. Another way of estimating the audience size is to hover over the audience name after you save it to get the estimated size. For the ad shown in the screenshot above, google will display the following information: “Impressions (weekly) 100M-500M. Estimates based on United States, English, All types.”
Why You Should Care
For several years now Google has been working on and introducing advanced audience targeting options. Adding the “combined audience” option to Google Ads has taken advertisement to a whole new level. This has given advertisers the ability to target specific population which they know, through research, will be interested in their product or brand or whatever they are trying to market. The effects of this feature have been clearly described by a Digital Marketing consultant named Steve Johns. He was the among the first people to test this feature and his result showed 20% conversion rate for a combined audience which is a significant improvement and a step forward in the field of advertising.