Making your YouTube ads more visible to your target audience is vital for promotions, but can be a challenge. One tool you can use here is custom intent audiences. Let’s find out what they are and how you can take advantage of them.
What are custom intent audiences
Custom intent audiences are a newer targeting option provided by Google AdWords. It works by showing your YouTube video ads to people who have used your selected keywords to search for similar products. According to Google, the option lets you go beyond pre-determined audience segments and go after people who are actively looking for products like yours.
The option also lets you take advantage of the growing trend of consumers using both regular searches and video to learn about products. In fact, 80% of buyers frequently switch back and forth between the two when doing their research. This video demonstrates how easy it is to create custom intent audiences for this purpose.
The ad targeting option works similarly to traditional search-based campaigns. This lets you apply the same strategies used for such campaigns, like:
- Choosing the right keywords: You can use custom intent audiences to further take advantage of successful keyword lists that you already have for search campaigns.
- Segmenting your audience traffic: Using a simple but definite segmentation strategy makes it easier to see the differences in your ads’ performance. Making one ad group for your brand and another for generic product searchers is a good start.
- Track your conversions: Custom intent audiences are designed to generate direct responses. This means you need to diligently track the actual conversions you get from them.
- Set up the right bids: Tracking the conversions you get from these audiences helps you not only choose the mode of ad bidding, but also decide how aggressive you can bid.
Following these tactics will make it easier to set up a custom intent audience-based campaign and integrate it with an ongoing search campaign.
Custom Intent Audiences’ unique attributes
Despite the similarity to search campaigns, video ad campaigns targeting custom intent audiences have unique attributes you should know. One of these is that they are not dependent on whether people clicked or engaged with your ad. Your audience lists are instead built based on your target audience’s original search efforts.
This makes custom intent audiences useful for retargeting audiences that did not respond to your initial search ads. Custom intent audiences can also help you capture new audiences, as they will even target audiences who use search terms semantically similar to the ones you assigned.
Another unique thing about custom intent audiences is that they work better with larger ad groups. This is because bigger groups provide the algorithm with more data to refine your targeting. You would also want to try using a larger number of keywords to better capture all the possible audiences for your video ads.
Different ad formats
Custom intent audiences will effectively work for different ad formats, but the ones that you should consider are:
- TrueView for action ads
- Standard TrueView ads
- YouTube Bumper ads
- TrueView for reach ads
These ad formats can be used for different marketing objectives, giving custom intent audiences greater versatility.
Using custom intent audiences for YouTube ad targeting can take some time to get used to. Once you become familiar with it, this option will give you greater flexibility in how you target and engage potential customers. Explore and learn how you can effectively incorporate it into your greater ad campaign.