PPC advertisers have had two weapons in their arsenal: search and social. Search is, by definition, an expression of intent: users are telling you exactly what they’re looking for. When search advertisers choose the right keywords, they usually get great results from search.

1. Getting Started with Audience Targeting in PPC
PPC advertisers have had two weapons in their arsenal: search and social. Search is, by
definition, an expression of intent: users are telling you exactly what they’re looking for.
When search advertisers choose the right keywords, they usually get great results from
search.
The problem with search, though, is two-fold. You don’t know anything about the searcher
aside from what they searched for. They could be a potential customer, someone looking
for a job, or a kid doing research for a high school paper. Also, the search universe is finite:
it’s limited to people actively searching.
Social, on the other hand, has great reach. People are on social media all day long, talking
about a variety of topics. And we tell the social sites everything about ourselves: where we
work, what we like, whether we’re married with kids, etc. It’s easy to get pinpoint audience
targeting with social. What’s missing is the intent – we have no idea whether our audience
is in the market for our products and services.
Remarketing emerged over the past few years as an answer to the dilemmas posed by
search and social PPC. We already know something about the people who visited our
website. If they came from social, we know a lot about them. Layering that audience
information on top of search data is powerful.
So how do you get startedwith audience targeting?
 Put remarketing codes on your website
Most PPC platforms now have a remarketing tag. Install the tags for the platforms you’re
using: Google remarketing is done through Google Analytics, although there is also a
native Adwords code you can use.
Bing Ads uses Universal Event Tracking, or UET.
Facebook and Twitter also have tags that can be used to create remarketing audiences.
 Start gathering data
Once the codes are installed on your site, you’ll start to gather data that will be used to
create audiences. Every advertiser should create a minimum of two audiences: all website
visitors and converted visitors.

2. With remarketing, you can combine audiences to create a custom combination, or you can
exclude audiences from targeting (also known as negative audiences). For example, you
can create an audience of visitors who did not convert. This is a prime target for
remarketing and is the simplest way to get started.
Go advanced
Targeting non-converting visitors can be highly effective if you have a simple product or
offer. But what if you’re promoting multiple products and services? It probably makes
sense to create an audience for each product or landing page, or at least groups of products.
You’ll also want to think about your customers and what offers make the most sense. Here
are some potential ways to create granular offers:
• Show the user the product originally viewed, with a discount or time-based offer. Creating
urgency is a great way to convince on-the-fence prospects to buy.
• Show the user a complimentary product or service. Maybe the person chose not to buy
the sunglasses they were looking at, but they might be interested in a nice hat. Incidentally,
this works for converted visitors, too – it’s the online version of “would you like fries with
that?”
• Show the user a content asset related to the product or service. For products with long or
complicated sales cycles, users often need additional information. Offer that to them via
remarketing.
For ecommerce advertisers with large product catalogs, Google offers dynamic
remarketing, which automatically creates ads based on your product feed. It’s a great way
to scale your remarketing efforts.
For B2B advertisers, time-based remarketing is often highly effective. You can serve
content to users tailored to their buying cycle. Let’s say your buying cycle is 90 days long.
You can create 3 audiences with different durations: 30 days, 45 days, and 60 days. For the
45 day audience, exclude the 30 day audience, so you’re only reaching users who’ve been in
the market more than 30 days. For the 60 day audience, exclude the 30 and 45 day
audience. Each audience can receive content that becomes progressively more urgent in
nature, coinciding with the buying cycle.
For social PPC, custom audiences can be used in countless different ways. Audiences can be
segmented based on demographic data, with content specific to each group. Facebook also
has Lookalike Audiences, which algorithmically matches similar users to your custom
audience. Lookalike audiences can be a great way to expand your reach to a relevant group.