How to Create a Lookalike Audience in Google Ads

Disclaimer: Use the data about your existing customers to target similar audiences and increase sales.

Before you can sell a product to someone, you must first find that person and persuade them that they require your product. In the past, you might have gone out into the street and yelled to passers-by about your new service. In the modern world, there is no need to be that embarrassing. You just need to explore the possibilities of online advertising and marketing. According to Statista.com, there are more than five billion Internet users worldwide, which is 65.7% of the population. 4.95 billion of them, or 61.4 percent of the world's population, are social media users. As a result, your target audience is almost certainly someplace online; all you need is the right technology to find them.

What exactly is Google Ads?

In our blog, we share information and experience regarding different marketing issues, programs, and tools. Google Ads is a must-have, modern, and easy-to-use platform for both experienced marketers and inexperienced newcomers. The functionality of the tool covers a wide range of possibilities, such as creating online advertising, setting the target audience and traffic channels, and allocating the budget for each ad. Users monitor the effectiveness of the campaigns after they are launched and, if necessary, provide relevant optimization.

What is a lookalike audience?

Advertising with Google Ads starts with creating campaigns. However, before moving on to creating ad campaigns, you need to know who your audience is. Why is it important? Because once you've closed the first few random sales, you'll need to find your next customers, and you'd better know where to look. A complete customer profile provides marketers with information such as potential clients' age and gender, interests, and "pains," which leads to a specific choice of websites. A twenty-five-year-old unemployed woman will most likely use a different set of web resources than a forty-two-year-old full-time employed male. As a result, as a marketer, you should consider various sorts of content and channels through which to put adverts for your target market. Usually, the scope of characteristic features of the target audience allows advertisers to create a portrait of a typical client. This portrait is then used in the process of developing catchy ads.

The technology of machine learning embedded in the Google Ads platform allows users to generate those portraits of a typical client faster and more conveniently. The audience similar to those customer profiles will be a lookalike audience for your product or service. In other words, the lookalike audience comprises people who are potentially interested in your product. Marketers can use that audience to target ads more precisely and increase conversion rates.

Important note: starting in October 2023, lookalike audiences will be available for optimization only in Demand Gen campaigns. Google is getting rid of the ability to target people based on their online activity due to privacy issues. However, Performance Max campaigns will still use the functionality of similar audiences. It will be done automatically, though. That means that Google takes more tasks off your hands, allowing you to concentrate more on other important issues, such as offers, creatives, and ad copies.

Call tracking as a means of expanding your audience

If your business involves communication with customers over the phone, you must be using a call tracking software platform. It usually provides companies with virtual phone numbers that are allocated to online and offline ads. The analytical data about the inbound calls is stored safely in the call log. This data is a box of insights regarding possible campaign optimizations as well as customer details. Depending on the settings of ad campaigns, call tracking platforms may show the customer route, keywords browsed, and other metrics that can be successfully used to characterize a common customer. Therefore, this data can be loaded into CRM systems and tools and used for targeting customers similar to the existing ones.

Benefits of creating lookalike audiences

• Wider brand awareness: more people will get acquainted with your product or service, boosting the likelihood of larger earnings.
• Higher conversions: a lookalike audience has something in common with your existing clients. Thus, they are more likely to buy from you.
• Technological advancement: lookalike audiences are made by artificial intelligence. Therefore, there is no chance for a human mistake. The data is analyzed by a computer, which provides you with insights for relevant further optimization.
• Easier management: once the target audience is determined, the hard part of launching advertising campaigns is over. You can concentrate on campaign optimization, probing new traffic sources, etc., leaving the target to well-developed tools.
• Reduced costs: probing the market, displaying your ads to the wrong people on the news feeds, and paying per click is blowing the budget fast. With the audiences set automatically, there is a significant money saving.

Wrap up

Building lookalike audiences that will come to conversions enables marketers to automate part of the tasks, increase sales, and focus on more challenging issues. However, efficient targeting depends on how well you know your clients. Therefore, a thorough analysis of the first closed deals and the first generated leads should take place to create a detailed customer profile.

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