Targeting Your Audience

This week I will be discussing information from Module 2 of AdWords Fundamentals Study Guide entitled: Setting up an AdWords Campaign.

A first step to a successful campaign is ensuring your ads are being viewed by the correct audience. It is extremely important to know who your audience is and what their behaviors and tendencies are in order to create effective ads. By uing different functions within AdWords you can easily reach out to your target market!

Location and language targeting is a helpful option that allows you to choose specific geographic areas to display your ad, for instance in America and English only. In addition, device targeting allows you to choose if people may see your ads of devices or only desktops (time of day or device type). This may be helpful if reaching out to a specific audience such as the elderly that are more comfortable searching the web using a desktop than a phone. 

One type of targeting that we are all very familiar with is managed placement targeting. This allows you to choose where your ads will appear on websites your audience is accustomed to visiting. For example, if you have a natural makeup line and you notice your audience often visits a vegan recipes website, you may want your ad to appear on that site. 

Keyword Targeting is using different match types to trigger your ad for different phrases your audience may search. Exact match, for instance, will narrow the possibility of the ad appearing, appearing only to a specific target audience. There are also negative keywords that can be added. Negative matches will exclude your ad from appearing when certain keywords are used in a search. Below is a helpful chart from this Adwords support page:

Match type	Special symbol	Example keyword	Ads may show on searches that:	Example searches
Broad match	none	women's hats	include misspellings, synonyms, related searches, and other relevant variations	buy ladies hats
Broad match modifier	+keyword	+women's +hats	contain the modified term (or close variation, but not synonyms), in any order	hats for women
Phrase match	"keyword"	"women's hats"	are a phrase (or close variation)	buy women's hats
Exact match	[keyword]	[women's hats]	are an exact term (or close variation)	women's hats
Negative match	-keyword	-women	are searches without the term	baseball hats