How to conduct audience research for paid search

Paid search isn’t generally at the top of marketers’ minds when they think about audience planning, but it’s a vital part of all campaigns. 

Though paid search is a “pull” instead of a “push” marketing channel, there are still plenty of audience signals to implement when building and optimizing PPC campaigns. 

Search is a unique channel because customers tell you who they are in their search queries and path to purchase journeys (i.e., YouTube > search attribution paths). 

Conducting audience research is a huge variable in campaign preparation, mid-flight optimization and post-campaign analysis. 

For this article, we’ll focus on Google Ads, but the same concepts apply to anywhere else you may be running a search campaign.

Pre-build research

Outside Google Ads

The first half of audience research in the pre-build state takes place outside of Google Ads and lives within your organization. 

• Who is your target audience? 
• What are you trying to tell them? 
• Have you conducted research or focus groups around who they are and what resonates with them? 

Start here. Once you know your target customers and have a good sense of the language you think will connect them to your brand, you can apply these learnings to your search campaigns.

Inside Google Ads

When starting to build a campaign, you’ll use the existing knowledge about your audience to set campaign-level targeting, like what devices your customers usually convert from (using Google Analytics or another source of truth) or which countries you can sell in/ship to. 

Have you formerly had a poor mobile experience, but the site has been updated and you can’t wait to send users there? 

Are most of your customers in the United States, but you’ve earmarked a media budget to expand into Canada? 

Even setting a location target or device target is noting where your audience is and how to best reach them. 

From there, at the campaign or ad group level, you’ll be prompted to apply audiences for “Observation” or “Targeting.”

You will not be able to conduct any meaningful research if you do not apply these. 

Applying an audience under Observation mode means you’ll be able to gather insights about that segment, but you will not be narrowing your potential reach. 

Observation is a great option for all campaigns to pull reports mid and post-flight to see how different audiences engage with your ads. 

If you choose to use Targeting mode, you’ll only serve ads to people who are both on that list and searching for your keywords or product. 

Targeting is a helpful way to designate different ad copy for a specific segment, such as returning customers or loyalty club members who get different perks than new customers.

Google’s support pages outline in more detail the different types of audiences that can be applied:

• In-market.
• Affinity.
• Custom segments.
• Detailed demographics.
• Life events.
• First-party segments.

Mid-flight analyses

Mid-flight audience management all counts as consumer research. 

Audience performance

Tracking the performance of prospecting (in-market audiences, affinity audiences, demographic details, etc.) and remarketing lists will show you how your targeted customers react to your messages. 

You can find this detail by going to Campaigns > Audiences, keywords and content > Audiences. 

The table can be viewed from an ad group, campaign or account-level perspective. In this view, you will also find demographic information.

Is one affinity audience converting three times better than another? See if you can apply that learning to another channel or to better inform copy or creative. 

Is an in-market segment getting nearly zero impressions? Consider if you can reach that group another way or recalibrate your expectations of that ad group or target audience.

Audience insights and indexes

Another in-flight audience optimization is to check your audience insights (Campaigns > Insights and reports > Insights > scroll to Audience Insights card) to see which audience segments are indexing the highest with your current converters. 

These can be massive insights about your customers that you otherwise may not have known.

In the screenshot below, it’s great to see the high affinity indexes for “Frequently dines out” and “30 minute chefs,” both of which indicate our customer prioritizes convenience and efficiency. 

This learning can be applied to our next category of mid-flight research, which is an ad copy or creative test.

A/B testing

Using this same example, you might want to explore designing an A/B copy test that highlights your brand’s speedy delivery services, your lifetime guarantee, free returns or something else that may resonate with this audience.

Search query reports

Search query reports, or SQRs, should be run regularly during every campaign’s flight. These tell you exactly what searches are triggering your ads to serve and can be found by going to Campaigns > Search terms. 

The cadence of checking these reports should be set by the amount of data coming in. If your campaign is getting ~100 searches per day, you’ll only need to check it once a week or once every other week. 

If your campaigns generate thousands of searches an hour, it’s a good idea to check your SQRs daily to ensure you’re negating anything brand unsafe in the first week or two of a flight and then weekly from there.

SQRs are critical for market research. 

• How are your customers searching for your products in a brand campaign? 
• Are they frequently misspelling your top-selling products? Are they looking for how-to videos? 
• Are they existing customers looking for support or how to access their account? 

These are all interesting behaviors for you as a marketer to know about.

• How do customers’ queries match your business in a non-brand or competitor campaign? 
• Does one of your product categories have a sky-high click-through rate that you weren’t expecting? 
• Maybe a new product launch is getting super high engagement but no purchases? 

These insights will help you inform your greater landing page experience, customer support and other marketing channels. 

Post-campaign readouts

Some campaigns will run indefinitely, while those with a firm end date will be analyzed after completion.

Audience insights from a search campaign can greatly benefit other marketing channels and guide the next version of the campaign.

A few things to consider in a post-campaign read-out are:

Did your target audience behave the way you expected them to? 

Perhaps your remarketing audiences performed less effectively than your prospecting segments. Does this mean that folks who already purchased something are less likely to buy again? 

This is probably true for things like SaaS, credit cards or other big purchases, but would be interesting to find out for a CPG or retail item.

If repeat customers are few and far between, are they dissatisfied with what they purchased?

On the flip side, if new customers are trickling in at a snail’s pace, how can you change your messaging or approach to make sure they see the value of your brand?

How did your creatives perform?

It’s unlikely that all of your ads performed at similar click-through rates, conversion rates or had the same ad strength.

For search ads, check the effectiveness of your text ads and all your assets. Which sitelink was most popular? Did the ad highlighting a promotion blow its counterparts out of the water?

For Performance Max campaigns, which asset group had the best engagement? Was it the one you least expected? Did you test lifestyle images vs. product images and see an interesting breakout of volume?

What did your search query reports and audience insights reveal?

In other words, what did you learn that you can apply to your next test iteration? Are 90% of your customers based in California?

Do you need to make sure your customer support team works PST hours? Did most clicks come in for a query that should have been negated? Are people looking for your loyalty program being sent to the wrong landing page?

Make audience research an ongoing effort

Customers who come in through paid search are letting you know who they are, both through the demographic data we have about them and through the searches that they complete.

Google’s audience targeting has gotten stronger every year in terms of in-market segments, affinities, and the indexes we can read about compared to the types of conversions happening.

It’s incredibly important to analyze audiences in search campaigns continuously and consider every facet of reporting as audience research for your brand and cross-channel learnings.