Affinity audience in targeting

Target audience is a key element in any advertising campaign. Regardless of the quality of the goods or services you promote, what traffic you manage to organize to a particular site, your ads will not give the desired result if they are shown to the wrong buyer. As a result, you spend money, time, but do not get the desired conversion rates. In order to ensure high efficiency of the launched advertising campaigns, guarantee a stable flow of orders, increase the level of business income, marketers use dozens of different targeting tools. This is what will allow you to target ads to a specific category of users, those who may be interested in your products or services.

One of the truly effective targeting tools can be called Affinity audiences, that is, targeting the interests of users. It can be used in advertising systems such as Google Ads, Display & Video 360, attracting exactly those people who will obviously find your product useful. According to this method, advertising will be shown to users based on their hobbies, interests, preferences. The relevant information is determined automatically in accordance with their behavior on the network, analysis of those sites, pages that they visited. As a result, you get the opportunity to most accurately target advertising to those people who are highly likely to interact with it, and you will get buyers.

By and large, targeting by interests will include analysis of user behavior, audience segmentation by thematic groups, and then demonstration of the corresponding advertisement to each of them. That is, you will target only those people who are represented in a specific category, excluding empty spending of funds.

In today's review, we will dwell in more detail on such a targeting option as Affinity audiences. In particular, we will get acquainted with its features and tell you what tasks it is worth using for. We will talk about how interest targeting works in the Google search engine. We will highlight the main advantages, as well as the key differences between Affinity audiences and its closest analogue In-market audiences (targeting interested buyers). We will tell you how to launch a corresponding campaign in Google Ads and how to correctly measure its effectiveness. We will highlight a number of limitations characteristic of interest targeting. The information provided will allow you to independently launch the most effective campaigns, getting the most out of them.

What is Affinity audiences: getting to know the concept

In literal translation, the phrase Affinity audiences sounds like “related audiences” or “audiences by interests”. This method involves segmenting all users into separate groups that share a common hobby, interests, and behavioral factors. Thanks to this, a business can focus on the most accurate target audience, directing its advertising campaigns to where they will be positively assessed, where they will be useful.

To form Affinity audiences, a comprehensive analysis of the long-term interests of the audience is used. In particular, their habits when browsing Internet resources, interacting with this or that content, entering search queries, etc. are taken into account. Thanks to this, it is possible to ensure an impressive reach of users. Those who are likely to be interested in certain services and products offered by the company.

Let's say you have an online store for children's clothing. As a result, your related audience is the parents themselves. They are the ones who will most often visit online sites where children's clothing is sold, watch relevant videos with current trends, and study information about new products that appear in this niche.

For what purposes should you use interest targeting?

Affinity audience is far from a new direction in modern advertising. It has become quite widespread in practice due to its ability to solve a wide range of problems facing a particular business. In particular, interest targeting allows you to:

• Build good awareness of the brand in society, as well as the goods or services that are supplied to the market. As we have already said in the example with children's clothing, here the targeting will be set to such an audience as "Parents", they will be shown ads indicating the advantages of certain products, lines. And when parents really face the need to buy clothes for their children, then from the total mass of online stores they will choose the one they have already heard of.
• Attracting the audience that is obviously interested in your products. Alternatively, an online coffee and tea store can direct its advertisements to the audience of "True coffee connoisseurs", promoting the corresponding drinks through video advertising or reviews, revealing their features, taste characteristics.
• Maintaining good loyalty from the target audience. Alternatively, you can use interest targeting to offer regular customers additional discounts or bonuses on the products that a particular person has purchased most often. If you see that among your customers there is someone who orders shaving foam with a certain frequency, then direct an advertisement for a new line of such products to them, offer a discount. There is a high probability that your ad will interest them.
• Promotion of promotions, special events. Alternatively, a seminar on working with artificial intelligence should be targeted at the audience of "Information Technology", because housewives who are far from this topic are unlikely to be interested in your offers. And this way you will have the opportunity to attract as many visitors as possible.
• Testing new products, sales markets. Alternatively, if you plan to release a new strategy game on the market, then your advertising should focus on those people who will be interested in this particular direction. You will clearly not interest those who prefer adventure games or logic puzzles with your offer.
• The ability to build a convenient, quick integration with other marketing strategies. Using interest targeting in practice together with retargeting will allow you to significantly increase the effectiveness of the ads you launch, while focusing on the audience that has already interacted with your site or application.
• Higher effectiveness of the launched advertising. You can demonstrate new products to interested parties, make offers that will encourage them to buy, and reveal the benefits of the product. This is what will help increase views, and along with this, clicks.
• Improving social interaction. Alternatively, an Internet portal that specializes in travel services can additionally encourage its audience to leave reviews, so that they share their own impressions on the same social networks or on other sites.
• Personalization of content. You will be able to make individual offers to a particular audience segment, taking into account individual interests and preferences. Alternatively, if we are talking about a streaming platform, you can give recommendations on the content that will be interesting to a specific person.

As you can see, Affinity audiences can be used in various directions and will be useful for almost any online presence. The main thing is to implement everything correctly in practice and avoid common mistakes.

Features of interest targeting in the Google search engine

Today, the Google search engine has independently formed a huge database of so-called related audiences. The platform is constantly working on collecting and updating information. Huge amounts of user data are constantly analyzed here, which is useful both for the search engine itself and for those marketers who will launch targeted advertising here. In particular, such specialists will be able to gain access to a large audience without spending their own time and effort on performing this work. Among such diversity, it will be quite easy to choose those who will have common interests or behavioral characteristics.

All work with Affinity audiences through the Google search engine will consist of 3 key stages and will be carried out in the following sequence:

1. Collecting data on the user audience. The search engine independently collects data on clients from various sources. As an option, these can be lists of sites viewed by a particular person, search queries entered by him, features of interaction with the content presented on the site, studied portals and individual pages. Moreover, information from social networks, mobile applications, as well as all other sites associated with the search engine, be it YouTube video hosting or the Maps service.
2. Analysis of information on user behavior. Modern Google is This is a truly advanced system that, among other things, uses advanced machine learning algorithms in its work, in particular, when analyzing large volumes of collected information. In their work, such algorithms are able to automatically identify certain similarities in the behavior of the user audience. Here, such moments as the duration of a person's stay on the site, the frequency with which he visits pages with a specific type of content, the search queries he enters are mainly taken into account. This is what will indicate a fairly stable interest in a certain topic or in a particular product.
3. Grouping the audience into separate groups by interests. This is what ultimately allows you to obtain segments of users with similar interests by analyzing behavioral information. As an option, those users who study information about certain countries, regions, visit sites through which you can book hotels, apartments, or train or plane tickets will be classified as travel lovers. Category “Confectioners” will include those who are keen on cooking shows, who are constantly looking for recipes, and who watch thematic YouTube channels. In the "Beauties" category, you can safely add girls who constantly follow trends in beauty and fashion, buy trendy skin care products, cosmetics, and so on.

Working with Google will be convenient for marketers also due to the fact that the search engine will regularly check the relevance of the collected information, making adjustments to it literally in real time. This is what will allow marketers to constantly be aware of the latest trends and interests of their customers and, accordingly, make changes to their own strategies. You will be able to change the targeting parameters, the content of your ads, the style of presentation and take a number of other measures that will allow you to achieve the best results in practice.

TOP advantages of using Affinity audiences targeting in practice

Interest targeting, which involves showing ads to an audience that has shown attention to a certain product category, a particular product or a topic in general, gives excellent results in practice. And this is not surprising, since the focus is directly on the hobbies and needs of a particular buyer. In practice, Affinity audiences targeting has a number of more than significant advantages. Here are just the main points:

• Excellent relevance indicators of the ads you launch. This is due to the fact that your ad will be shown to those people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services. This means that the final conversion will be quite decent and will justify the investment, and will receive positive feedback.
• Improved user experience. The modern audience is so tired of annoying advertising that some people have simply stopped noticing it, while others experience only irritation when viewing advertising. In the case of using Affinity audiences targeting, you can avoid all this, since the audience will be shown only the material that a priori will be interesting to a particular person. That is, such advertising will be more pleasant and unobtrusive in perception, will stimulate to interact with the application or the site.
• Maximum efficient use of the advertising budget. This is ensured by eliminating the waste of funds on displaying ads to the wrong audience. That is, ineffective display of ads that do not generate conversions is completely excluded here. This is what allows you to optimize advertising costs within each of the campaigns launched.
• Simple, convenient and effective personalization. You will be able to create ads that will resonate with your audience. Thus, when creating personalized ads, you will be able to directly use the name of the person you are addressing, their place of residence, identified interests, preferences.
• Increased audience loyalty. People to whom you will display your ads as carefully and unobtrusively as possible will definitely remember you and contact you to make a purchase if such a need arises. Moreover, you will get loyal customers who will return to you with orders again and again.
• Higher conversion rates. Compared to regular advertising, which is mostly focused on a broad segment of the audience, here you specifically influence those who will be interested in your products and services. And the return on investment from interested people will always be more impressive.
• Ensuring the widest possible coverage of the target audience. Here you will focus not only on people who are specifically looking for your product, but also on those who could hypothetically be interested in it. This is what will significantly increase the number of people your business can attract.
• Precise targeting. When setting up Affinity audiences targeting, you will be able to focus not only on interests, behavioral factors, but also on geographic indicators, demographics, income level and many other characteristics, making appropriate adjustments to your own strategy.
• The ability to analyze the effectiveness of launched campaigns literally in real time. This means that you can make changes to your own strategy as quickly as possible, increasing its effectiveness and avoiding mistakes.
• High return on investment. Such a parameter as ROI can be called one of the most important in any advertising campaign. It is this parameter that indicates how effective your strategy was and the investment was justified.

All these advantages allow us to confidently say that such a targeting option as Affinity audiences is a truly advanced and effective tool for promoting a brand or individual products or services. This is what will allow you to create optimized advertising campaigns and ensure the highest possible audience engagement rates. And it would be inappropriate and unwise for absolutely any business to miss such opportunities, regardless of the market niche it operates in.

Differences between targeting by interests and targeting by interested buyers

At the very beginning of today's review, we talked about the fact that the modern market offers a huge variety of targeting technologies. This is what allows marketers to target a particular audience segment depending on the specifics of the upcoming tasks. But from all this diversity, we can highlight 2 technologies that are often confused even by experienced marketers. In particular, we are talking about Affinity audiences and In-market audiences, that is, targeting by audience interests and by interested buyers. Both of these options are available today when working with Google Ads, but they still have a number of fundamental differences that you should definitely take into account before starting work.

To make it easier for you to navigate this specificity, let's look at a number of key points that became the basis of each of the technologies:

1. Who is it aimed at? Affinity audiences are aimed at users who have common interests and hobbies. But In-market audiences targeting takes into account only those people who have already decided on the goods and services they need and are at the stage of considering the possibility of placing an order.
2. Formation of data for launching targeting. In the case of Affinity audiences, a study of the audience's behavior on the network is carried out, long-term interests are determined. At the same time, In-market audiences are based on the direct identification of interest in the purchase itself.
3. Breakdown into categories during segmentation. We have already mentioned above that in Affinity audiences these can be “Cooks”, “Coffee lovers”, “Beauties”. That is, these are all manifestations of interests of certain people. In contrast, In-market audiences targeting can attract a person who would like to buy a refrigerator, a house, a laptop or any other specific product.
4. Types of advertising campaigns that can be launched based on these technologies. The purpose of ads based on Affinity audiences targeting will be to familiarize the audience with the brand, its products, services, attract attention based on individual interests, preferences. In-market audiences advertising campaigns are always aimed at stimulating sales, performing conversion actions.

As you can see, the distinctive features here are quite significant. This means that it is important not to confuse Affinity audiences and In-market audiences, because the goals pursued will be completely different: in the first case, you are simply working on your reputation, attracting the attention of the audience, while an increase in sales will already be observed as a consequence of the work done correctly. In the second case, you are already talking about sales from the very beginning and stimulating people to place an order.

Creating a Custom Affinity audience in Google Ads: a sequence of actions

We would like to draw your attention to the fact that at this stage you must already have compiled a portrait of the target audience. You should have a good understanding of who your business is targeting, what interests this or that person has, be well versed in their behavioral factors, and know people's hobbies. But let us repeat that this should be the target audience, that is, people who will be a priori interested in your products and services.

Now you can go directly to the main settings of Custom Affinity audience in the Google Ads service. There is nothing complicated here, something that every marketer could not handle on their own. In particular, you need to do the following:

1. Log in to your personal account on the Google Ads service. Here you need to find the "Tools" section, and then select the "Audience Manager" tab. Here we find such a tool as “Audiences”.
2. To create a new audience, you need to click on the icon with the “+” sign. In the new window that opens, enter the name of the custom Affinity audience. There are no special requirements or recommendations here, the only thing is that in the future the departure could easily identify the corresponding audience segment, based on the specified name.
3. Pay attention to the “Special segments” column. Here you need to select the “New segment” option. Here we also indicate the appropriate name for our segment, and also write down interests, behavioral factors, based on the analysis of the portrait of the target audience. You can also add search queries, visited sites, used programs, type and essence of content that may be interesting to your audience.
4. Check the entered data, making sure that it is correct, only then you can click the "Save" button, finally recording the necessary parameters in the program.

This completes the settings, and you can use the created Custom Affinity audience when preparing your advertising campaigns. That is, you just need to pull up the appropriate values at the stage of setting up targeting.

Measuring the results of targeting by audience interests

The effectiveness of the work will largely depend on how correctly you managed to collect a portrait of the audience and perform all the settings. Regular monitoring, which also involves measuring the results, will help you understand whether the advertising campaign you launched based on targeting by audience interests will be effective. Here it is important for you to understand what parameters and criteria will be relevant for a particular ad.

Here are some recommendations that will allow you to keep under control the effectiveness of your advertising campaign, configured taking into account Affinity audience targeting:

• For convenience, use the analytics tools that are initially built into the Google Ads service. In particular, you can set up conversion tracking, which will allow you to measure user actions after people interact with your ad.
• Pay attention to key performance indicators. Most of these are click-through rates (CTR), cost per click (CPC), the number of completed conversion actions, as well as the cost of a single conversion (CPA), and many others. You yourself determine the set of characteristics that will be most important for a given advertising campaign.
• Evaluate the results dynamically. That is, you should understand whether there is growth in the main indicators or, on the contrary, a decline is emerging. This is what will allow you to make timely adjustments to the launched campaign, thereby eliminating senseless spending of the advertising budget.
• If you use several targeting methods in parallel, then compare the results achieved for each of them. This will allow you to understand how effectively Affinity audience works with your audience and evaluate the need and feasibility of its subsequent use.
• Never ignore such an indicator as return on investment. We have already said that this is one of the most key parameters for determining how profitable the launched campaign was for you. That is, here it is important for you to divide the received profit by the invested funds. If in the end you get a figure greater than 1, then you did everything correctly and then you can calculate the profit itself. If you get an ROI less than 1, then you made serious mistakes somewhere and the invested funds did not justify themselves.
• All the data that you receive during the research must be used to optimize the launched advertising campaigns, that is, you must analyze the results and, based on them, make appropriate adjustments as quickly as possible, thereby achieving maximum efficiency. That is, it is important for you to put the information you receive into practice.
• Make it a habit to track the results with enviable regularity. This way, you will be able to promptly respond to negative moments, identify current trends and immediately adapt to them. This is what will allow you to maintain high stability of your advertising campaign and, as a result, will become the basis for excellent efficiency.

As you can see, these recommendations are quite simple to implement. They will not require much time and effort from you, especially since the most labor-intensive part of the work associated with collecting the relevant information will be automated thanks to the Google Ads service tools.

Are there any limitations to using interest targeting?

Practice shows that, despite the relative simplicity of Affinity audience targeting, marketers still make some mistakes due to ignorance. Now we will try to eliminate them by highlighting a number of key limitations in the use of this technique:

1. It is very important to choose the right audience segment by interests. After you launch your advertising campaign for them, you will no longer be able to make any changes.
2. You will not be able to use Affinity audience in advertising on YouTube video hosting dedicated to rather sensitive topics, including prohibited ones. That is, you cannot use this method to promote alcoholic beverages, drugs, gambling, etc.
3. You will not be able to use Affinity audience, interested buyers and other targeting methods together, where the “AND” operator is present. The only thing that will allow you to combine them is the “OR” operator.
4. It is not possible to use special segments by interests when working with the so-called “negative” targeting. Here we are talking about settings that allow you to exclude certain categories of users from the general flow.

Otherwise, there are no serious restrictions on the use of interest targeting.

Let's sum it up

Affinity audience is a truly unique targeting technology in many ways, aimed at people who have common interests. This is what allows you to set the most subtle settings when launching advertising, thereby increasing its accuracy, efficiency, ensuring good engagement from potential buyers, increasing loyalty and brand awareness. To launch such a campaign, you need to create a portrait of your target audience and make the appropriate settings in the Google Ads service, and then - monitor the results and adjust as needed.

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