I believe we are live. Please give me a moment. I'll make sure everything is working fine and we shall get started. Okay. Brilliant. Everything seems to be working fine. Let's get the show on the road. Hello. My name is Uzair and welcome to today's YouTube livestream. Every weekday at five o'clock UK time, I'm live here to answer any questions you may have about Google Ads, digital marketing, or pretty much anything to do with advertising, promotions and online sales.
It could be offline as well. I also go through various walkthroughs and tutorials and trainings in the Google AdWords or Google Ads, or should I say now, Google Ads interface. I try to pick up a different topic every day so that you take your know-how knowledge and expertise to the next level and in doing so also take your business along at the same pace.
Today I've got something very exciting, one of my favourite topics in Google Ads, and it's all about targeting your competitor's audience. It's a sneaky little way of getting yourself in front of your competitor's audience without breaking any laws and it is completely... as per Google's guidelines, policies, you're not doing anything illegal or dodgy or anything like that, in fact, it's all above board!
First of all, let's go into my Google slides and get the bullet points on there. If you have any questions, please put them in the comment box on the right-hand side and I'll come to all the questions towards the end of the session. The topic for today's live stream is Google Ads Custom Intent Audiences - what it is, how to use them and why you should use it.
I'm going to cover all of these things and also show you very quickly how easy it is to go into your Google Ads interface and set up this intent audience and target play for your campaign and then you can see what sort of results you are getting. What this allows you to do is to target people or audiences who are currently researching specific keywords, subjects, topics, or products, and if they go to your competitor's website, then you can put your competitor's website URL in your targeting and say to Google, "Hey, I want to target these audiences or similar visitors who go to these kinds of websites." What you are not doing is basically pixeling your competitor's audience.
It is kind of like a lookalike audience. What you're not doing is... technically is not the exact audience which goes to your competitor's website, but they are lookalike or very similar. Those audiences who are looking for a product service like your competitor's. They are one of the hottest audiences I would say you need to target because you can cut out all the wastage straight up and go straight after that audience which your competitor's websites attract.
I'm going to refer custom intent audiences to CIA!!! We want to become like the agency where we are spying on everybody, without them even knowing about it! You can run these audiences on the Google display network, discovery, Gmail and video, all four channels and there's a tremendous amount of traffic, unlimited and unimaginable amount of traffic which one can handle.
How does it work? Well, the custom audiences automatically choose the right audience to best fit the needs of your campaign based on your campaign goals and bidding strategies. The system will interpret all of these signals and choose an audience that is focused on either the reach, consideration or performance. You have absolutely the right audience and that is the biggest problems or issues many people have when they're running campaigns on the Google display network or YouTube, Gmail, et cetera, because you might attract that unwanted, irrelevant clicks to your website and that was it.
That it's going to eat up all your budget by clicking on your ads and then bouncing off within a matter of seconds but these audiences, you will find that the level of engagement is there, interaction, and they are spending time on your website and you can track all of these through Google analytics. Once we have that data for those metrics, then we know that is our right audience.
Don't just look at the number of conversions straight up. You need to look at these micro goals, which I've talked about previously, and then you can say, "Okay, now I'm getting all these highly engaged visitors to my website. What can I do to make them convert?" What should be the call to action, your offer, and how you present that offer on your landing page and then what you want to do is to test your different ads and creative.
The ones which work really well are the RDAs - the responsive display ads. What you can do is you can throw in a bunch of images, some videos up to four or five headlines. I can't remember correctly and about four description lines, and then Google is going to mix and match all of these, put these ads and whichever combination is performing the best, is going to keep on pushing that one out, because Google is in the business of clicks and we are also in the business of attracting the right click.
When you have the right audience and the right ad in front of that person you are going to get better or higher results. This is a problem many business owners have, especially the smaller ones and right now in these difficult times, money and budgets is tight for everyone. What you can do is, you can start off with a simple campaign, which I will show you in a second where you don't need a lot of budget or money.
You can start off with a small budget because comparatively to the search network, the clicks on the Google display networks are fairly cheap, already cheap. I should say. Although you cannot compare like for like, compare the search network to the display network. What we are trying to do is to get some very engaged visitors who are looking for your product or service, but on the Google display network.
The clicks are pretty cheap compared to the search network and it's a great way to build up your remarketing list, because if you don't have a bigger budget and you don't have a lot of organic traffic to your website, you are going to struggle with the remarketing list, so for remarketing on the Google display network, you need a minimum of hundred and on the search network, you need a thousand.
How do you build your list up at very low price? Here's how you do it. I'm going to give you an example of a very modest $10 a day budget. Now I appreciate $10 is $10. When we don't have it, we don't have it, but when you need to run ads, you've got to have some kind of budget, and this is how we go about it.
Out of the $10, we're going to put 70% on the cold traffic and 30% on the remarketing. Let's say we put $7 a day towards this campaign where we are going after the cold or the new visitors to the website, then you can bid about 50 cents or equivalent in your currency. You should be able to get some decent clicks for this 50 cents, or quite often it could be a bit lower as well.
If we have $7 a day, times 30 days, that's $210 we have spent on in the month and if our CPC is around the 50 cents mark we get 420 visitors. You're now building up that list. Although it is not massive, at least it is something rather than a handful of clicks, which you might get on the search network.
Now you've got those visitors, you start remarketing at a lower $3 a day budget. What we do is now you want to bid aggressively and you double up your bid because you know that these people have been to your website and then you can segment those out however you feel it's best. You bid a dollar a day, and then you've got your monthly budget of around three times, 30 days, 90 days and you start to see what happens.
If you can afford to do 20 or $30 a day, then these numbers really go quite high and then you start to get a decent amount of traffic. I'm not saying that this 420 is not good. You only need a handful of these visitors to convert and as soon as you get those conversions, you are going to get that confidence to be a bit more aggressive.
I wouldn't say you gamble more. This is not gambling at all, because we are calculating each and every cent we spend on advertising and you're not throwing blindly, you know, hard earned cash, and then you start to remarket and see what happens if you haven't had the budget or the remarketing audience before, now is the opportunity and this is how you do it.
You can start small and then all you do is keep on increasing that daily budget from 10 to 15 to 20 and you will start to see that you are getting a fair amount of traffic. Here's how you can also double charge your marketing by remarketing on the search network. Once you hit that 1000 audience, you can bid aggressively on those people who have then gone back to Google and started to search again for those search terms and keywords.
RLSA means Remarketing Lists for Search Ads and that is one of the most, I would say not the most, but the bottom of the funnel traffic, where people are still looking for the product or service. You build, you use the custom intent audience to build up your remarketing list for the search ads and for obviously the GDN remarketing.
The way you can also do that is you can segment out the most engaged visitors to your website. So let's say if someone spent more than three minutes, a session, or viewed 75% of your video, and this is why video marketing, or even having a video on your landing page is critical. If somebody clicked on my video and they viewed 50 to 75 or 100% of that video, I know they were very interested in what I had to say and talk about, but they did not quite convert.
I need to go after them and remind them that I'm here. You can do this as well, where you can remarket according to the audience segmentation. I should have also added over here, Instagram. You can go after Facebook on there as well, because they have been to your website. All you need to do is to make sure that you have put in your Facebook pixel on your website.
Once you put that pixel in, Facebook is also going to start tracking those visitors and then you go onto Facebook, set up a new campaign for remarketing, website visitors, or whatever the segmentation you want to go after, and you can run. Now you've got Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, remarketing audience at a fraction of the cost. These visitors to your website, these are not junk visitors, and you'll be able to see that very easily.
If they are bouncing off after five seconds, then you know that this is a junk traffic and not very good, you can easily set this one up as well. Then what we are trying to do is to set up a multi-touchpoint marketing strategy. Wherever they go, you can reach them and reach out to them. YouTube as well, with the TrueView for action, you can use those same people and you can use your competitor's, name, brands, products, and also throw in some relevant keywords.
The keywords which you may have used in the past on the social network, and you know that they work. You can throw them in to set up your custom intent audience. How do we go about creating this? So let's first go to Google and see what we've got. I've seen some comments and questions on here, so please put them in as we go along...
Okay. I'm going to go and search for, let's say aerobics classes near me or something like that, or fitness. What I would do is I would take the URLs of all of these, because these companies have spent a fair amount of time, effort, money, and resources to be on page one and they are very active online. They want to attract a good amount and good quality traffic.
All of these, at least 10 and also the ads. Right now I don't have any ads, but those advertisers are also your competitors, because they are advertising in your area. Take those URLs. You go to your Google Ads account, go to your tools and settings, audience manager. Then you go to custom audiences, and this is very easy and takes a matter of minutes.
You've got two options: affinity, we don't want; custom intent, yes. I'm going to call this competitors CIA. You've got two options-Google search or in-market. In-market is what people are actively searching for and now you enter keywords and URLs related to products and services that this audience is actively searching for. If I put in aerobics classes... as soon as I put one in, Google has given me a lot of other ideas in here, and then I can add them.
I want to put extremely relevant ones. Let's say, I'm not offering yoga aerobics, then I will not put them in here. Probably we'll make another customer, a custom intent audience for yoga classes near me and then if I've got different classes for yoga, then I'll use that audience. Anytime fitness class schedule, group fitness, aerobics dance, dance. I'm not sure what that is, but I'm just going to keep adding them for now.
Water, if we don't do, don't want to do that. I will just keep on adding. Zumba is a competitor. Aerobics, workout, personal trainer, bootcamp I don’t want If I'm not offering these classes, fitness workout, and cardio is good... Just like we keep our set of keywords very tight in a traditional search campaign. We are doing exactly the same thing over here.
Exercise fitness, exercise group... Okay and then you'll just put in a handful of any time fitness.com...Throw in a handful of keywords as many as you like. It really doesn't matter. Now as soon as I put in that, anytime fitness, see Google has given me some more ideas because this one is a 24-hour fitness. Now we can see the algorithm working very creatively and cleverly.
Now I can, in fact, there's so many on anytime fitness, I can create an ad group just on its own but you get the gist? You also go in here and see, I mean, obviously I have not put in the locations yet. All you do is once you've created this, you then create an ad group and then you link that audience with the custom intent audience whichever ones you're going after.
This is how easy and quickly it is to set up a custom intent audience. Okay. I'm going to go into the chat now and see what you guys have put in as your questions. Hariharan, hello there. "I created an audience list of my visitors for my certain page and I found it shows 50,000 users at the membership duration of 10 days.
I just imported the audience to my ad group, but still it shows too low for the ad group. How to get it solved?. I have around 50,000 users in my list, but it doesn't show in Google Ads. I have linked my audience lists in the audience manager also still it shows less than 1000." I think there might be some problem either with the setup of the tag and also don't go for the 10-day audience.
Go for the 30 days at least and see what happens and make up a new audience of 50,000 users you have. Are you seeing 50,000 or more visitors at any one time, or let's say during the last 30 days in Google analytics? Well, that is the key. If you're pulling in the list from analytics, then you need to make sure that it is showing in there as well.
If you still are having problems what I would suggest you do is to just email the support team at Google. Usually you can phone them, but right now they're closed. Their support by email is also very good and they usually do reply back to me at least in a day or two. Try that, but without looking at your campaign, I cannot offer any other suggestion other than to set up.
Check that the tag is set up correctly. Google analytics and Google Ads have been linked properly, and you have exported that audience to Google Ads and what you can also do and also obviously the 30 day visitors. Don't go for 10 days, go for 30 days. If it starts to run, then what you can do is then you can make an ad, another audience which is 20 days and then you subtract it from the 30 days.
You're only going after the 10 day audience for the first 10 days once they've been to your website. I hope this helps. Mike, thank you, my friend. Yes. Its all Ninja tactics over here to chop your competition and your competitor's in half! Okay. Hariharan. "Is it legal to use the competitor's keywords for our campaigns? I don't think so because it is not possible to put the competitor's brand name for our ad group." Oh yeah.
Everything is fair in love and war, my friend and business! You cannot use the trade terms in your search ads or in your ad copy. What we are doing is we are setting up a competitor. If you are selling iPhone you can put in all the iPhone makes and models in your custom audience list and target those people who are searching for iPhones on Google.
Yeah, it's absolutely 100% legal and above board. Hello, Akash. Okay. Yes. I'll try to help you. "My display audience is showing very less data. I have users around 900, but it's showing around 300." Again I think this is a similar problem which Hariharan had. It's probably not populating in his account. Give it a day or two. I'm not sure how quickly you are looking at this data, but it should, and it will start to populate.
If not, absolutely give Google an email and ask them, but make sure that you have got all the tags and link both the analytics and Google Ads account properly. I'm sorry. I'm not much of a help right now other than to double check or create a new audience and see if it works better. Okay. Raj, "I have a different question about click bank for affiliate marketing, any tips for Google Ads and click bank is a good platform for affiliate marketing?" Yes, I've got the biggest tip for you.
Do not use affiliate links in your ads. Your account will get suspended. The best way to do that is to create a website or a landing page and you can put in your affiliate links over there, but not in the ads. Wesley, "Would you use placement targeting on a YouTube discovery ads with keywords." You're going to narrow your targeting too much with keywords as well as placements.
Placements are kind of like your exact match keywords. Now let's say a placement as of today has got a lot of traffic, but each day more content keeps being put up on Google and the internet so the older content gets less and less traffic. Eventually it's going to die out. You don't want to be just targeting that placement and you will find that your clicks will keep going down as well.
If you want to target placement then what you want to do is to keep on putting more placements in your ad group so that you're replenishing your old ones with the new ones. Hariharan, you’re saying you found your setup is perfect. "I have done it perfectly." Okay. I'll take your word. "I need only the last 10 days of my audience to retarget to my ad group." Are you saying that you're getting 50,000 visitors every 10 days or probably more?
Without looking at your campaign setup, it's impossible for me to take a guess even, or wild guess. Raj, "How can we use those audience, which we had run ads?" I'm not sure what you mean by that. You run these, you link these audiences to your ad groups or campaigns. I would say ad groups because you will have, let's say custom intent audience for iPhone, for one ad group, custom intent audience for Samsung as another one.
The iPhone ad group will have ads about iPhone. Samsung one will have ads about Samsung, so that the relevant click, when somebody's searching for Samsung phones, you're at your Samsung phones and when they click on it, they go to your Samsung landing page. Paramjit, "My call ads not getting any impressions. I'm using broad match." Okay, that's fine but keep an eye on your negative keywords because broad match will get you very irrelevant or broad clicks.
I should say. Bid up. Call ads are the most expensive and the best converting as well. If you're not getting any impressions, keep bidding up and keep going up until you start to get the impressions. Okay. That is it for today. Everyone, thank you so much for being here with me today. Hopefully I'll be here tomorrow, same place, and same time and if you enjoyed the session, then don't forget to hit that little like button and the bell notification button so you'll get a notification every time I go online.
Till then, stay safe and thank you very much for being here and I'll see you hopefully tomorrow. Bye for now.
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