How We Target the Right Audience for Your Google Ads Campaign

The difference between an ineffective Google Ads campaign and one that’s leading to conversions often comes down to who’s seeing the ads. At City Ranked, this is controlled through audience targeting. 

Our job is not to get you the most clicks – it’s to get you the best clicks. Irrelevant clicks blow your budget and leave you with nothing to show for it. This is a quick rundown of how City Ranked’s team uses audience targeting to ensure you always appear in front of the right leads, simultaneously keeping conversions high and maintaining healthy ROI.

• We conduct thorough market and keyword research to identify opportunities
• We consider searcher intent to define your ideal target audience
• We use exact match keywords to reach out directly to purchase-ready consumers whose search intent matches your offering
• We strategically deploy broad match keywords at the early stages of a campaign to help us gain actionable insights
• As your campaigns progress, we refine and scale them to ensure you’re always getting the right amount of leads every month

Why Is Audience Targeting Important in SEM?

Operating a paid media campaign can be a bit of an abstract notion. Ostensibly, you’re bidding on keywords. But in reality, who cares about winning keywords? What you’re actually vying for is the attention of a person who might be interested in your products or services. Some will argue this is merely a numbers game; the more people who see your ads, the more leads you’ll generate. To an extent, this is true. When hundreds of people search every day for a given keyword phrase, it is a bit random which bids you win and which you lose.

But you shouldn’t think of Google Ads or paid media campaigns as a game of chance. City Ranked’s search engine marketing team knows how to cut through the noise and optimize your bid strategy, removing random chance as much as possible and tilting the odds in your favor. The difference between a successful Google Ads campaign and one that wastes your budget often comes down to one critical factor: audience targeting. 

Define Your Audience by Defining Your Goals

The most important part of targeting is deciding what to aim at. That’s why Google Ads campaigns should start with clearly defining your goals. It makes success repeatable and trackable, and when success is repeatable and trackable, scaling becomes so much easier.

Let’s say that you own an HVAC company. This spring, your goal is to book as many A/C maintenance and replacement calls as possible before summer weather kicks in. We start with keyword research and market research, and synthesize that information to develop a comprehensive strategy for targeting an audience in your area looking for those services.

We’ll use “intent-based” exact match targeting with aggressive bids so you get high-quality leads that are close to making a decision.

Or maybe, that’s not your goal – maybe you’re already booked solid for the rest of spring. But you still want to drive traffic to your site for brand awareness. In this case, we might use a less aggressive bidding strategy with broad matching to win “top-of-funnel” searchers. Broad match also leverages Google’s advanced AI to identify valuable user “signals” so it better understands search intent. This means Google can determine if a user is actively in-market for your services or shares characteristics with previous customers who’ve converted on your ads.

Or, you may want to run both types of campaigns at the same time. The point is: they’re your goals. You decide what you want to happen, and we’ll help target the right audience.

What Is Searcher Intent?

Context is an important thing. However, with search engine marketing, there’s only so much context available. 

Imagine, for example, a person searching for “house painting.” What are they really looking for? It could be many different related topics, and their intent could range from informational to transactional. 

“House painting services,” or “tips for painting your own house,” or “interior house painting,” or “exterior house painting,” or maybe even where to find a nice painting to hang inside your house? How does Google (or another search engine) know which page to send them to? And how do we make sure we target the right audience for a given campaign? Our goal and Google’s is the same – make sure we’re sending the right people to the right page. Non-relevant traffic helps nobody. 

• For example, if Google’s data says that 70% of “house painting” searchers are looking for home exterior painting services, they’ll mostly show home exterior painting services on results pages. 
• However, if Google knows that you’ve been searching for home interior painters, if you search “house painting,” they’ll show mostly interior house painters to you.

Creating Your Google Ads Campaign

When working with geographically restricted campaigns or areas with lower search volume, we strategically employ broad match keywords as a foundation for the campaign. This approach ensures your ads will appear in front of the widest possible audience. 

To maintain quality and relevance, we also simultaneously develop comprehensive negative keyword exclusion lists. This prevents your ads from appearing for searches that might be technically related but lack proper intent or relevance.

Refining Paid Campaigns for Maximum Performance

As our broad match strategy uncovers unique and high-converting search queries, we systematically add these as exact match keywords. This refinement helps the system focus more resources on what’s working, creating a campaign structure that’s constantly improving. This allows us to discover the maximum relevant traffic volume while maintaining profitability — essentially letting the market tell us what works rather than limiting ourselves to initial assumptions.

For specialized services like consulting work or campaigns with more modest budgets, we take a more concentrated approach using primarily phrase and exact match keywords. While this approach generates lower overall volume, it delivers highly targeted impressions to users further along in the sales funnel who demonstrate clearer purchase intent. This precision targeting helps maximize conversion rates when every impression counts.

We can also decrease the budget at any time if needed. For example, if you’d rather focus your time and attention on a new service vertical, you can let us know to dial it back.

Do Campaigns’ Performance Improve with Time?

It can go both ways. With ongoing refinement, yes, performance often does improve. This is because, as we operate a campaign, we gain invaluable data that allows us to home in on what’s working best.

However, with a hands-off approach, you may notice an immediate boost when the campaign is first launched, then over time, interest and effectiveness fade.

What Are the Different Types of Keyword Matches?

• Broad Matches: The most flexible match type. Your ad may show up for searches that include misspellings, synonyms, related searches, and other relevant variations. For example, if your keyword is “women’s hats,” your ad might show when someone searches for “buy ladies hats” or “women’s accessories.” (Use cases: Broad match targeting is ideal for low-volume keyword phrases, low-population geographic areas, and capturing top-of-funnel traffic.)
• Phrase Matches: More targeted than broad match, but still flexible. Your ad appears when a search includes your keyword phrase (or close variations of it) in order with additional words before or after. For example, with the phrase match keyword “women’s hats,” your ad might show for “buy women’s hats online” but not for “hats for women.” (Use cases: Phrase match targeting is great for capturing many different variations of high-traffic keyword phrases. It can also be extremely useful early in campaigns to ferret out longer-tail keywords searchers might be using for your product or service.)
• Exact Matches: The most specific match type. Your ad appears when someone searches for your exact keyword or very close variations with the same meaning. For example, with the exact match keyword “[women’s hats],” your ad might show for “women’s hats” or “ladies hats” but not for “women’s red hats” or “buy women’s hats.” (Use cases: Exact match targeting is perfect for high-volume searches, highly-populated geographic areas, and well refined campaigns that you know are likely to convert).

Got Questions About Audience Targeting for Paid Campaigns?

Remember playing “Pin the Tail on the Donkey” at your friend’s birthday when you were a kid? You’d get blindfolded, spun you in a circle, and pushed toward a poster of a donkey on the wall. Well, running a Google Ads campaign without audience targeting is a bit like playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey. 

You might successfully hit your target, but it’s unlikely, and even if you do, it’s not really scalable. Because the next time you go to pin the tail on the donkey, you’ll still be dizzy and wearing that blindfold, and you won’t have anything more than a vague notion of where the donkey is even located. With audience targeting, it’s like taking off the blindfold. Suddenly, you know exactly where the target is located, which makes it so much easier to see the clear path forward.

Got questions about search engine marketing, audience targeting, keyword match types, or Pin the Tail on the Donkey? Let’s talk! Reach out to City Ranked today and let us help you find the path to sustainable success with your Google Ads and other paid media campaigns.