Google Ads Observation Audiences

Key Takeaways

a few years ago we created a video going over targeting and observation audiences within Google ads While most of the information in that video is still true it's still a little bit out of date so we wanted to refresh the video but focus on observation audiences since that is most likely the common type of audience you will use within search and shopping campaigns this video will go over what observation audiences are where you can find them within the campaign settings whether you're creating a new campaign or editing audiences in a current campaign and then we'll also show you how to update those settings within Google ads editor before we look at how to add observation audiences within Google ads I first want to cover when you may want to use observation audiences within your campaigns first is when you don't want to limit the reach if you go back and watch the video I mentioned in the intro when you add audiences as a targeting layer your ads will only show to users within those audiences but there could be many many other users out there who are searching for your keywords or searching for keywords related to products for just one example of how targeting could limit the reach think about all the different options there are for in-market audiences hundreds of options well if you say I only want to show my ads to two in-market audiences think about how that could really limit the amount of people that you're getting in front of now clearly you can do this for specificity reasons if you're trying to focus on a very specific intent that makes total sense however if it doesn't matter to your business about who's searching for the keywords then observation would be the way to go because then your ads are still going to be eligible to show to anybody searching for those keywords next you can use observation audiences for bid adjustments in certain cases it depends on which bid strategy that you are going to use within your campaigns and we will talk about that in the video the same goes for the next one is that if you want to give your bid strategies more signals to use so those last two points we will talk about within the campaign setup and the last reason you would want to use observation audiences is really to get a better understanding about who is making up your audiences not only can this help with bid adjustments like we just mentioned you can also see if previous users are coming back and searching for your campaign to see if they're going further down the funnel but possibly this can give you new information about who your target audience is to then later on maybe use those audiences in different top of funnel campaigns to get more users to come back and search so now let's hop into Google ads and we'll show you where the observation audience lives when you're creating a campaign for the first time within Google ads I started to create a new search campaign I'm already a few steps in because I'm down to the campaign settings but within the campaign settings we see the audiences section so let me scroll down to that specific section and by default observation will be the recommended setting and this is the setting we will typically leave it as because we don't want to narrow our reach we will only switch to targeting if we do want to run a very specific campaign like rlsa or remarketing list for search ads so go ahead and search for the audiences that you would like to add to the campaign just for the sake of this demo I'm going to include everything that showed up after I typed in advertising into the search field most of them look like they're in Market audiences and yep pretty much all of them are in Market audiences so then I would click next and then Google would have me finish the rest of the campaign setup which would include my keywords and ads budget review everything and then publish the campaign live so now after your campaign is live let's look at where we can review observation audiences pulling open a different tab you can see I am in a specific campaign but choose whichever campaign you want to review within your account and then you can go ahead and choose audiences and the first section you will see will be audience segments from there you can click on the drop down arrow for show table and here we will see the 14 audiences that we added to this search campaign notice within this audience segment section there is a specific column for targeting setting and there we see its observation we're just getting information about how these audience segments perform within this specific search campaign besides the setting it's letting you know which level the audience was added you can add observation audiences at the ad group level as well but if I'm just getting information about how these audiences perform I'll typically start at the campaign level next let's look at bid adjustments for manual bid strategies after your campaign is running you're collecting information that you can review Within These columns you can click on the edit pencil within any of your audience segment rows and then based upon performance choose to increase or decrease your bids for each specific audience segment so hypothetically if this business education audience is performing very well for this campaign because remember the audience was added at the campaign level I can then choose to go over add in my bid increase and then save it but as I just mentioned you can do the flip side if you still want to gain information with a manual bid strategy I could decrease the bid on certain audience segments if I still want to track their performance within a campaign but I don't want to exclude the audience completely you're getting some performance from it but it's not as great as the campaign average now in the slides I talked about early in the video I mentioned that you can also use observation audiences to give Google signals that is going to be available for your smart bid strategies when Google takes more control and you're not always allowed to add bid adjustments to certain areas of the account when you're not allowed to make bid adjustments Google will still use the observation audience layers to help feed the bid strategy to further try to meet your goals so with a manual bid strategy I'm much more comfortable adding in larger varieties of audience segments because I'm still controlling the bid on most of those but whenever I'm using smart bid strategies I'm much more specific on the audiences I'm adding to those campaigns to try to keep it as relevant to the target audience I'm trying to reach as possible so understand observation audiences will work differently depending on which bid strategies that you have in place for your search or shopping campaigns I cancel out of this understand for going back up to the top you can always edit the audience segments within your campaigns you're not stuck with them forever if I click on the edit link I'm going to choose campaign because that's where all of our audiences live in this example and it's pretty much the screen that we saw when we were building this search campaign I can choose to remove any of the 14 audiences that I selected within the setup but I always have to keep in mind that within this campaign I'm just watching these 14 audience segments there's going to be a lot more people out there searching for the keywords within my campaign that fall outside of the 14 segments so for whatever reason if I wanted to change my targeting settings from observation to targeting then I'm telling Google only target users who are categorized in one of these in Market audiences and that would vastly limit my reach because any audience that you use for a search campaign needs to have 1 000 cookied users within the past 30 days depending on your industry it might not be a big deal it's also depending on what type of audiences that you are adding to your search campaigns but for now I've only included in-market audiences here you can add many more audiences besides just in-market audiences some of the most common audiences that we layer on to search and shopping campaigns are remarketing campaigns when I'm running YouTube advertising campaigns for clients we love to see if people who've seen specific ads come back and search so when we do that I don't want to add these users as targeting I don't want to Target my search campaigns to previous YouTube users so I would switch back to Observation because I just want to get information on how people are coming back and searching for my brand or my products after they've previously interacted with one of my video ads same thing with a website visitor remarketing audience depending on the amount of users within an audience we like to create segments of people who visited from other channel campaigns and we'll do this based upon URL parameters we can create audiences off of people who visited from any Facebook ad layer into our search campaigns to see if people who saw our Facebook ads are coming back and searching for the brand name or one of the products and services so you do need a good amount of volume in that initial top of funnel website visitor audience to be able to see if they've interacted with other Google search ads later on so one way for us to try to prove the value but we don't want to Target these users specifically we just want to gain the information and that's where we need to choose the observation audience setting so for now I'm going to leave everything as is and save again but if you're someone who prefers to work within the Google ads editor interface you can adjust the targeting settings from editor as well let me open up editor and I've already gone ahead and highlighted the one campaign where we've added the 14 in-market audiences with an observation setting when you head to the manage section with an editor click on keywords and targeting scroll down a little bit until you find audiences I'm sorry audience segments and depending on how you've had your view formatted I can click and drag this over because I had the targeting setting column hidden you can go ahead and add additional audience segments here add it at the ad group campaign level I'm just going to choose something for now let's add all of autos and vehicles doesn't make sense but it's there gonna click OK and just like we did within the main Google ads interface observation was the default setting if you would want to change any of these at any point whether it's from observation to targeting or targeting observation highlight whichever audiences you'd like to change my audiences are set at the campaign level so I would need to click on edit campaign Flexible Reach and within this targeting icon section that should pop up you can scroll up and down a little bit so sometimes I might send you all all the way to the top pretty much sent me to the campaign settings there's our audience segments it's observation then you would want to click and change it to targeting or back to Observation whichever one is working for you but I'm not going to touch this because I do not want to change it but that's pretty much the basic of observation audiences for Google ads we essentially add them to any search or shopping campaign that we may be running because we'd like to have the additional information within our campaigns even if we're not using manual bidding to have better control over the audiences we still like to see how they are performing do we feel that we are really getting in front of the right user even if we're not targeting specific audiences we may see within the audience segment report that certain audiences are performing very well if that's the case we may consider a display YouTube or Discovery campaign take the audiences that we see working really well from our search and shopping campaigns and then try to get more users who fall within those audience categories because we received that information by looking at our observe Asian audiences and then also sometimes we'll see that some of the audiences that we are reviewing just flat out aren't working it could give us certain ideas of things to exclude from future campaigns as well if you have any questions on how we use observation audiences or if you are running into any setbacks while using them please let us know in the comments below thanks for watching our video we really appreciate it if you liked it give us a thumbs up below if you really liked it maybe think about subscribing to the paid media Pros YouTube channel and you'll get alerted every time a new video drops if you really really liked it you can help support the channel by checking out some of the t-shirts that we're wearing on our merch shelf as well as looking at the super thanks button all right