Typically, when I kick off a display or YouTube campaign, I try and start out as specific as possible.
First, my targeting usually leans towards remarketing, customer match or placements, but many times I cannot use targeting this specific. I might not have a big enough audience for hyper-targeted remarketing. I might not have a large enough email list. Or my placements may not be going to where I thought they would be.
My next step is usually to create my own custom intent and affinity audiences in an attempt to continue my goal of staying as close to my target user as possible. But, eventually, we hit a point where we just flat-out need to expand our reach to get in front of more people. This requires using the broader targeting options we have in Google Ads. So where do you begin?
If you’re looking to grow your awareness, hold off on spending a ton of money on persona studies. Start by using the free data we have in Google Analytics. Here, I’ll share one way I like to dig into the data to find out what targeting options I should be trying out for my awareness campaigns. And I’ll show you how you can use this to broaden your reach, too.
Getting Started with Audience Reports
The Audience reports in Google Analytics can give us a ton of information about a good percentage of our users. (I’ll get to why I didn’t say “all users” really soon. Just hold on a second.) For the sake of this post, I want to focus on just one part of the Audience section, and that is the Insights report. To get there, select “Interests.” Then, click on the “Overview” page.