One of the biggest buzzwords in digital marketing today is audiences. While the concept of target audiences has been around for as long as marketing itself, the evolving digital landscape has changed the way that brands reach their customers online today. Audiences have existed in other channels for digital marketing, but it is still a developing targeting method in metasearch.

So What are Audiences?

Audiences are a way to segment your campaigns and group users together with similar behaviors and interests. For example, an audience may consist of group bookers or weekend trip bookers. Using audiences is a more surgical approach to targeting customers.

Audiences for Google Hotel Ads

In 2018, Google made audience segmentation available in Hotel Ads. While Google offers many types of audience lists across its various advertising products, there are currently three categories available for use in Hotel Ads: remarketing lists, customer match, and similar audiences.

1) Remarketing lists – Remarketing, or retargeting lists, are curated through third party sources. These lists may be comprised of users who have interacted with your brand in the past but have not purchased or visited your site in a while. These users can be grouped together by their similar behaviors and may have a higher intent for purchase because of their past searches.

2) Customer match – You can also create audience lists through customer match. This process utilizes your CRM list. By utilizing your customer base as audience lists, customer match allows you to re-engage with them in Google Hotel Ads.

3) Similar audiences – Similar audiences are based on your current audience lists. It combines users in your existing lists who have similar characteristics and behaviors as customers. Because these are users you may not know about directly, this can be an effective way to prospect for new customers.

Benefits of Using Audiences

Audience targeting allows you to meticulously choose where to increase your bid multipliers, maximizing your media spend.

Higher relevance for the end user – Your ads will only show your users relevant content, focusing on the experiences they are more likely to book.

Better results for the advertiser – You can be more efficient in your spend and target those who are more likely to convert. Leveraging audience bid multipliers is an efficient and smarter way to bid, driving more bookings. Audiences can help you identify the valuable groups of people you would like to target and by doing so, aid you in achieving your business goals.

How to Get Started Using Audiences

If you have a pre-existing Google AdWords (Ads) account, you can link your current audiences to your Google Hotel Ads. Currently, Google Hotel Ads allows up to 50 audience lists to be applied to your campaigns.

Which audience lists should I use?
Start with the audience lists that have a large enough volume to target and optimize. Very detailed audience segments may not have enough demand to allow for the impact of the leveraged bid multipliers. Apply the chosen audience lists to all campaigns and start collecting data.

What should my bid multiplier be?
To start, set your audience lists at the minimum bid multiplier (0.01% increase). This will have little to no impact in CPC but will allow you to collect performance data on your audience lists.

How do I know which audience lists to increase the bid multiplier?
It will be worth testing the increase of your bid multiplier if the audience lists performed better than the non-audiences.

With the increased adoption of audiences in metasearch, it will become imperative to curate audience lists to best fit your goals. By thoroughly leveraging your audiences, you can expect to maximize your return on investment. To learn more about how to set up audiences and hotel campaigns in Google Hotel Ads, download our free guide.