Similar audiences (PPC)

About similar audiences for search 

Remarketing allows you to reach people who have already visited your site and connect with an audience that’s already interested in your products or services. You probably also want to find new visitors for your site, which you can do by finding people who have similar search behavior to your existing remarketing list members.

Benefits

• Find and target people similar to your site’s visitors
• Simplify finding audiences to target
• Get new potential customers

Find step-by-step instructions on how to add similar audiences for targeting:

Add similar audiences to your targeting – Google Ads Help

Similar Audiences are essentially Facebook Lookalike Audiences for the Google Display Network (GDN), YouTube Ads, and Gmail Ads. The theory behind lookalike models is that people who exhibit certain characteristics or perform certain actions (i.e. sign up for a trial, 

purchase a product, etc.) will tend to have some commonly identifiable traits that the ad platforms can parse. This theory has been proven true: the lookalike model has been such a success, in fact, that it’s become one of the primary targeting methods for Facebook advertisers.

And although Facebook Lookalike Audiences tend to get the most attention when discussing lookalike modeling, Google Ads has a comparable but extremely under-utilized targeting method of their own: Similar Audiences.

In order to create a Similar Audience, you must first either build a Remarketing List in Google Ads or a remarketing audience in Google Analytics.

You can create a new Remarketing List in Google Ads by clicking on the red button in the top left of the “audiences” section of an account shared library, which gives you the following options in a dropdown menu:

To create a remarketing audience in Google Analytics, go into the Admin tab and select the property view in which you want to create your remarketing audience. From there, click “Audience Definitions” > Audiences and you’ll see the options below:

Once you create an audience in Google Analytics, it will populate in the shared library for the linked account in Google Ads.

In the Google Ads shared library audience section, you can see a full list of both existing Remarketing Lists and the auto-generated Similar Audiences that accompany them. Here’s an example of a remarketing audience, “GP Converters”, and a Similar Audience built from it: “Similar to GP Converters.”

There are a few things to notice here. First, you’ll see that the estimated list size for each audience is subdivided by columns according to the type of campaign: YouTube, Display, and Gmail only Display.

You’ll also notice that the Gmail only Display column says “unavailable” for both GP Converters and Similar to GP Converters. This label indicates that there are no converters eligible for remarketing on Gmail because of the privacy restriction mentioned above. An “unavailable” label will also show when there aren’t enough members in the Remarketing List used as a seed audience to build a Similar Audience.

How to Add Similar Audience Targeting to Google Ads Campaigns

Using Google Ads Editor

To add a Similar Audience to a campaign or ad group using Google Ads Editor, follow these steps.

1. Select the campaigns or ad groups you would like to add Similar Audience targeting to. Reminder: you can layer bid-only Similar Audience lists to existing campaigns or ad groups, but you should create new, audience-specific campaigns or ad groups for “target and bid” Similar Audience lists.
2. In the lower-left “manage” window, select “Keywords and targeting”.

3. Select “Audiences”. You will then see your existing audiences for the selected campaigns or ad groups.

4. Click the “+ Add audience” button in the top right and select the Similar Audience you wish to add.

5. For a “bid only” Similar Audience, set a bid adjustment based on the conversion event the seed audience is built on and where that conversion event lies in the funnel, or set a 0% bid adjustment if you’d simply like to gather data. For a “target and bid” Similar Audiences, choose the max CPC bid for the audience.

Using the Google Ads Web Interface

To add Similar Audiences using the Google Ads web interface, follow these steps.

1. Go into the “Display Network” tab and click the red “+targeting” button in the top left.
2. Select the relevant ad group (currently it’s only possible to add exclusions at the campaign level, not targeting).
3. Choose “interests & remarketing” in the targeting section of the next page.

4. Next, select the “similar to Remarketing Lists” option if you’re building a Similar Audience off a pixel, or the “similar to video viewers lists” option if you’re building a Similar Audience off of video viewers.

Important Note: Although there’s an option on this page to create a “similar to customer email list” Similar Audience (selected in the screenshot above) or a “customer email list” remarketing audience, Display campaigns can’t target these audiences. Currently, customer email lists can only be targeted on Search (RLSAs), YouTube and Gmail. If you go into the shared library audiences for the account, you’ll see that the Display column is marked “Unavailable” for customer email lists

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5.  Google will automatically populate the list with Similar Audiences built from eligible Remarketing Lists that can be applied to the campaign or ad group you’re currently in. Select the audiences you’d like to add from this list, which is shown below:

6. Finally, choose either the “target and bid” or the “bid only” option and hit save.

Similar Audiences Best Practices

As with Facebook Lookalike Audiences, Similar Audiences are great for prospecting since they tend to perform better than standard interest-based audiences, in-market audiences, and other audience targeting.

A Similar Audience works a lot like remarketing. As with remarketing, a Similar Audience will probably have less reach than other prospecting audiences. But what’s sacrificed in reach is offset by relevance. Of course, the quality of a Similar Audience depends on the event/audience it’s built from and where it lies in the funnel. For example, a “similar to cart abandoners” audience will be much more qualified than a “similar to site visitors” audience and therefore probably merits a higher bid.

It’s a good idea to experiment with the size of a source audience, since the output Similar Audience size can vary on a case by case basis (seemingly without a clear pattern). This is a clear contrast with Facebook Lookalike Audiences, which scale as a percent of user population in the target country – a 1% Lookalike in the US, for example, has a size of 2 million regardless of how large the seed audience is (although the quality of Facebook lookalikes is impacted by the size of a seed audience).