InMarket Audiences: How to find consumers in research mode

Google originally released InMarket Audiences in 2014 for Display and YouTube. A few years later, in 2018, Google released InMarket Audiences for search, and Bing followed suit this summer. So why should marketers care?

InMarket Audiences allow advertisers to find users who are currently searching for products or services similar to yours. The users are identified based on their past search behavior.

Actions that Google and Bing look at to establish past search behavior are clicks and the resulting conversions, as well as the content of the sites and pages that they visit.

These users typically have not been to your site before, making them valuable in helping you achieve your new customer acquisition goals at an efficient CPA or return on ad spend (ROAS).

Google has included over 170 InMarket Audiences and has been adding additional audiences over time. Some industries that are included are: apparel & accessories, auto & vehicles, baby & children’s products, beauty products & services, business services, computers & peripherals, education, employment, travel, software, real estate and sports & fitness.

InMarket Audiences enable advertisers to capture users who are actively researching or planning in different audience segments that Google and Bing have established.

Adding these audiences as bid-only or looking at the audience insights tab allows you to have a better understanding of the consumers interacting with your brand.

Application of InMarket Audiences

InMarket Audience segments can be found by going to Campaigns, then Audiences. You will then select what they are actively researching or planning (in-market); once you click and expand the audiences you will see all of the ones you can apply.

In order to see performance on these audiences, you will need to apply them as bid-only layers on your current campaigns, just as you would regular audiences (remarketing, similar audiences and customer match). Once you have enough data, you can make bid adjustments based on those segments.

There are a few things that you should keep in mind before you apply these to your campaigns.

If you have multiple audiences layered on, that user can only be in one audience. Google will decide what audience they are in should that user click or convert. The audience with the highest bid adjustment will come first if the user falls into multiple audience buckets.

It is important to have higher bid adjustments for remarketing audiences or customer match audiences over other audience buckets because these users have shown particularly strong intent.

It is especially important if the user that you are remarketing to has already reached a lead page/has added to cart or initiated checkout.

We have talked about the importance of applying audiences to your campaigns as bid-only to learn more about the consumer you are interacting with and push on stronger performers. It can also be important to pull back on poor-performing users that you don’t want to advertise to so aggressively.

Analyze current performance

Advertisers can currently look at audiences in the Audience Manager tab, then in Audience Insights. Advertisers can view the audiences that Google deems most relevant to their business. Google gives the top 10 audiences for your business and applies an index, which is a comparison of the InMarket Audience to the general population.

You might be surprised by some of the audiences that Google deems relevant. You might be expecting users to fall into a certain bucket, but they are actually falling into different InMarket Audiences. In order to get a full initial read, you could apply all InMarket Audiences to your campaigns — then, after your initial performance analysis, start to narrow down to your largest InMarket Audiences.

In past testing with a few advertisers, we have seen reduced CPAs and improved CVRs when compared to non-audience visitors.

Future optimizations and testing efforts

Some ideas for future tests of InMarket Audience would be launching them as “target and bid on” campaigns that contain broad keywords. If you have a product or service that has search queries that could be seen as business to business or personal, this type of campaign could be a good option for you. InMarket Audiences can help qualify those searches and lead to a reduction of inefficient spend.

We have seen much success in using InMarket Audiences to gain incremental leads at a lower CPA than new site visitors. Before implementing these campaigns, we used the relatively low-volume similar audiences for search; adding InMarket Audiences has allowed us to more quickly scale accounts.

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