8th Week Review-Learning From CXL Gowth Marketing Course

Finding your target audience in existing tools

Not everyone has that budget to do persona study, most of the companies would never be able to afford a massive persona study. So we have to dive in with the tools that we already have, giving us insights of who our audiences are.

We don’t know who should we target at, it depends on lots of other things, but the good news is that there are some different places we can go to kind of understand who we should be able to target in the first place.

Be a strong believer in the top of the funnel, discovering how we can initially engage with our users the first time that going to give us a better understanding of who that user is if someone is not familiar with the brand at all, how that user’s mind be triggered. It is going to be a lot more valuable if we are focusing in down to someone who has interacted with my brand.

In Google Analytics, head over to the referrals report, if there are other websites who are sending traffic to our website already, and users are performing and interacting a lot, we need to know which one of those referral traffics are really going to be important, that we can utilize in display.

Sort by the most conversions or revenue, the traffics that are from referrals and converting are extremely valuable, we can utilize that traffic a lot more. From an audience perspective, we can create audiences from this referal traffic and do remarketing. From a display standpoint, doing potentially direct placements for these ads and try to get in front of those new users, or just overall just basic awareness. By using Custom Affinity Audience going to help us reach the potentially new users/audience.

Another way we can go is the interest section of Google Analytics. Get an overview of Affinity & In-Market Segments that give us a better understanding of the entire audience. In-market segments are in the active mode of potentially wanting to buy something at that moment, In-market audiences are from in market people, they are actively researching, looking, and based on the indicators they are giving to Google or Bing, these platforms have decided that these people are mostly likely in the market for something they want. Do a wide data range to get a ton of data, when we click on one category, the first thing that it’s going to default to is the user’s age, but we have more options, including browser, city, language, user type and so on.

Warning here, analysis paralysis, don’t really put put a ton of time.

We know what the user likes, while we’re testing out new ads to our new users, but what do they actually want. Site search will help answer this question, look at what people are searching for on the website, we might find differences, don’t assume the audiences like what we like. How can we utilize this? We can create audiences off of search terms and remarket to those users who searched the terms.

- Free social tools also have great information

Social channels will help you find audieces for either your specific account or the entire channel itself, using insight tools in each channel to find audience patterns within or across every channel.

• Facebook audience insights
• Utilizing the linkedin insight tag
• Pinterest audience insights

Creating good retargeting audiences

Google ads allows us to create audience from:

• Website visitors
• App users and engament
• Youtube users and engagement
• Customer match

Website visitors is the retargeting list that’s most heavily used, but this comes with inherent flaws, 1) 90 days is too long 2) Not all none-converters are created equal.

GA is our best analytics assset when do audience building. Keep in mind, if we want to use analytics audience to try to do full channel with Google, just really check eligibility. If the eligibility not meet your goal purpose, we need to change the audience definition.

Let’t looking at all the different ways that we can create audiences to speak to differently, by finding ways that we can segment them outside of just some of the timing. Open GA, go into the admin section down in the bottom left, in the second column of options in the menu, we can find audience definitions and audiences, create new audience, then it will show you a list of different user lists(pre-built lists)that are already available, but the real power of this platform comes in Create New, and it ‘s all bring up big audience builder that has quite a few things going on in the first screen, on the left you can a number of different main menu pieces, and each of them has different parameters within it.

But what about the people who don’t come to our website? Nowadays people spend time on social platforms, people watched our Youtube video, liked our Facebook page, but they are not in our basic retargeting lists based on site visit history, they are called engagement audiences, there’s a lot of different engagement out there from Facebook, Youtube, GA, even pinterest.

1. Page engament
2. Some ad types are designed to keep user on the platform,
3. video engagement, we can create lists for similar videos / group them in categories of videos for better segments. for example: DIY videos, before and after, brand awareness, make sure the audiences know what we are doing, so it’s important to know where that piece stands for the different percentage of what’s going on.
4. Prompts for retargeting lists

• What actions are desired on your site
• What are your conversions actions
• How long would someone need to stay on your site to understand your product
• Are there pages that indicate a greater chance of purchase
• Are there multiple stages to your purchase cycle
• How long is your sales cycle
• What constitutes a large purchase
• Do you have repeat customers or only one time buyers
• Do you need to target people within certain timing windows
• How engageed is an average customer on your site
• Who are your target personas

Building Audience: Exclusion

First is looking at cookies and customer uploads.

• Dynamic lists
• Tracking Hiccups
• Cookie Length
• Cross-Device Tracking
• Uncoventional Customers

Poor engagement:

• Job hunter
• Quick bounces
• ..

Prompts for negative retargeting lists

• What actions are undesired on your site
• What actions are undesirable on your site
• Who are your visitors that have converted
• How short of a video is too short?
• Are there pages that indicate a lower propensity to purchase
• What constitutes a small purchase
• Did this person return the product
• How long until you determine someone is no longer interested
• What constitutes a poor visit to your site
• Who are your people outside of your target personas

One Prompt can have target and exclusion lists. Always think 2 sides. Be able to kind of have the mirror of each prompt.

And then ask ourselves these questions, who are the most valuable visitors? The least? What segmentations can you create in your audiences for targeting and exclusion?

Keep size and segmentation in Mind

• If your list is too small, there’s no discernable pattern
• If your list is too large, there’s no discernable pattern
• On Facebook, you can make a Lookalike from any size audience
• On Google, they will automatically create similar audiences for you once a pattern of behavior is detected.

A customer list is a great place to start. But what about further segmentation?

• Age/Gender
• Industry
• Geography
• Device purchased From
• Channel purchased From
• Return vs One Time Customer
• One Department vs Many
• Shipping Preferences
• Many, many more.