By Ed Murphy on 12 Jun 2017
One of the most frustrating elements of digital remarketing is seeing killer conversion rates across low volumes of traffic - first world digital marketing problems, right? Google has rolled out Similar Audiences for Search remarketing in AdWords, which means you can now efficiently scale your remarketing lists with high-quality users.
What are Similar Audiences for Search?
Similar Audiences for Search let you find more people who are just like your most valuable customers. This feature scans your existing remarketing lists for search ads (RLSAs) and finds new customers who’ve shown similar search behaviour to your best customers. Remarketing with Similar Audiences isn’t a new completely new concept having already been rolled out for the Google Display Network in 2016 and is also similar to Facebook’s ‘lookalike’ audiences.
The benefits of Similar Audiences for Search
Adopting Similar Audiences for Search brings two key benefits:
The power of Google’s machine learning
Similar Audiences leverage Google’s powerful machine learning to automate the process of finding new potential customers, scaling your RLSAs and saving you valuable time.
Scaling with quality
Google’s machine learning allows you to scale your remarketing lists quickly but also to scale with quality. By trawling through trillions of users, Google can identify new and qualified traffic based on their search behaviour. If these new users don’t convert immediately, once you have the remarketing tag on your site, they’ll be added to your standard remarketing list.
How it works
To get up and running with Similar Audiences for Search, you’ll need to have an RLSA with at least 1,000 users. Once you reach this criteria, you can press on with getting your Similar Audience list up and running. Adwords then looks at a short period of time from when people are added to your remarketing list to understand their search behaviour. Then, through machine learning, Google automatically finds new users based on this information.
How do Similar Audiences for Search perform?
We were eager to see just how clever Google’s machine learning brain is and let AdWords create a Similar Audience for some of our online retail clients’ remarketing lists.
We took one remarketing list with a 20% conversion rate as the foundation for Google’s machine learning-generated Similar Audience. This machine-generated Similar Audience did have a CTR 37% lower than the original list and a CPC one cent higher. Things changed once it came to conversions, with Google’s automated list attracting shoppers generating a conversion rate of 28%; 40% higher than the original list.
In terms of the account’s overall conversion rate, Similar Audiences were 20% above the average conversion rate. Even more impressive, was that for every euro spent, these Similar Audiences generated a whopping €73 in return.
The Wolfgang Essential Takeaway
Similar Audiences for Search scales your remarketing lists efficiently, adding high performing users to your targeting. This increases your opportunity for an impressive ROAS without a massive amount of pressure being added to your workload.
