We all know Google is the king of gathering data on its user’s intent but have been slower to understand their overall interests on Search. It was only a matter of time Google would improve their Ad machine algorithm with the data they already had to combine interest and intent on Search.

The two new audience types are:

Audience Types are Affinity Audiences for Search and Seasonal Event Segments for In-Market Audiences for Search and Youtube.
In Affinity Audiences for Search, there are over 132 segments are available across 12 categories.

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The new Observation setting along with the affinity audiences is like facebook’s extended audience reach. It allows Google and yourself to observe how it does with some bids and on some content. In some cases, you may want to observe how ads perform when a customer matches specific criteria, yet you may not want to restrict your ads to only show with that criteria. The “Observation” feature allows you to monitor and set custom bids for criteria without restricting your reach.

Now combining intent keywords and what interest people are into you can expect to see even higher conversion rates. According to Google, Volkswagen recently used affinity audiences to achieve a 250% increase in conversion rate when compared to its non-audience traffic.

In Seasonal Event Segments, a new feature of in-Market Segments, Google has taken its data to understand peoples behavior to certain times of the years, such as Valentine, or Mother’s day and say this person goes out and buys flowers for their love and for their mom and places them into this Seasonal Category for in the market for flowers during these time periods. This gives ecommerce marketers with another tool to reach the right audience at the right time.

Google provides an example of how this new targeting method can be used to reach people with timely offers:

“For example, Toyota used the Black Friday and Christmas segments to focus on shoppers actively looking for their next car. By using these segments the brand saw a 67% increase in conversion rate and a 34% reduction in cost per conversion.”

You can download the in-Market Segments here

Is this enough for facebook only advertisers to try come back to Google, it should be as Google now understands who’s excited for black friday and whos not, and if they are in the market for XYZ widget. Both of these new Audience types should be in your Google Ads account shortly if not already.

Feel free to contact me for a free Google Ads Consult here