Start by looking in the audience insights report in Google Ads. Google shows you which in-market and affinity audiences have a high index. For example, a 14.5x index means your converters are 14.5x more likely to also be members of a particular audience. Audiences with a high index may be a good target for your campaign.
In-Market Audience observations also allow you to get creative and test not only audiences that you know are more inclined toward your company, but also outside-the-box ideas. For example, you’re running a campaign targeted toward wealthy people looking to retire soon.
You can try out In-Market segments like “Cruises” and “golf equipment.” If you start seeing visitors with that profile, you can make bid adjustments to tell Google to prioritize them when displaying ads based on your standard keywords. You don’t have to adjust your terms to accommodate these audiences. If you aren’t seeing any interest from those segments, you can pause them, or even leave them on indefinitely, without having spent an extra dime for the learnings.
A very important point to keep in mind when observing In-Market audiences is to make sure you acquire a significant amount of data before acting on results. Often times looks can be deceiving and you might see an audience converting and clicking like crazy right out of the gate. The best bet is to collect enough data to prove they are actually a qualified audience to bid up. Make sure you’re basing your decisions to execute more broadly, on statistically significant data.
For example, we started leveraging audience-based bid adjustments, and after 2 weeks of data, we made a slight bid adjustment of +25%. After another 2 weeks of strong performance from this audience, we adjusted to 50% and saw performance continue to rise.
Any audience that might be even slightly relevant is worth testing. Remember, you can gather learnings on the audience segment without adjusting its bid, by using the observation setting.