Allow Your Budget To Work Smarter!

This week, I wanted to share some tips with you on how you can tighten up your advertising budget by using audience insights from Google Analytics. 

We’re all guilty at times of not referring back to a campaign report as most of us don’t have the time and it ends up at the bottom of the pile and before we know it, we’re running the next campaign without applying any of our learnings.

To make things easier for you, at the beginning of setting up a new campaign, we can run through some simple steps using our audience data in Google Analytics that can be built into a new campaign. This data can be applied to campaigns running on Google Ads, Google Shopping, YouTube, Display Advertising, Bing Ads or any social media advertising platform including your favourites; Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Targeting by gender

If you have a limited advertising budget, one of the best places to start is by narrowing down your audience by gender. Take a look at the graph shown below from one of my customers. You can see that over 76% of their traffic is from males so why not make your budget work smarter by targeting just males.

Targeting by Age Group

It’s then worth taking a look at the age groups arriving on your site and applying that logic to your targeting settings. From the data below, you can see that the majority of traffic is from age groups; 25-34, 35-44 and 45-54.

Before ruling out the remaining age groups, it’s important to evaluate each age group's performance on the website, whether it be lead generation, completed transactions, time on site etc.

As you can see from the highlighted data below, whilst volumes of traffic aren’t as high as the other age groups, they are delivering completed transactions so before applying the logic to your campaigns, evaluate your data sets to see if they are worth keeping in your audience settings.

Targeting by Country

The next tip is to build your campaigns where your target audience is located. The first step is to choose the right countries and from the example data below, we can see the majority of the audience is based in England.

Like all data sets, we need to dig a little deeper to ensure we’re not missing any opportunities. For example, Scotland could have a really high conversion rate so make sure you evaluate your data fully before applying the logic to your campaigns.

Targeting by City

Running campaigns targeting all of the UK is a quick way to blow your budget. Search volumes and population sizes of some of the major cities will spend your budget before the day is out so take a moment to understand where high quality potential customers are based. It’s also worth considering your delivery costs – the further your products have to go, the more expensive it will be to your customer.

By high quality, we’re referring to users on your site that contact you directly, buy from you, spend lots of time on your site or visit lots of pages.

Your data will kick out hundreds of cities at you so you need to sort by your primary goal. For this example, I’ve prioritised the data to be sorted by transactions so that I can gauge where potential customers are. By setting your campaigns to 10-20 of your priority cities, you’ll make your budget work smarter and last a lot longer!

With the exception of London (probably the same for most websites) you can see the majority of sales are coming from North of Birmingham. 

Targeting by Device

The final tip for you is to review the devices in which your users are visiting your website.

Looking at the data below, 77% of users are coming from mobile so why not build a mobile only campaign?! Be sure to check the conversion data on other devices before excluding them but this one was a no brainer.

In summary, nothing I’ve stated will be new or groundbreaking to you but it’s so easy to forget these simple steps in building a campaign that is tightly targeted and will make whatever budget you have work smarter for you.

I hope you found this article interesting and if you need any help reviewing your campaigns, you can contact me directly at info@glrdigital.com and I’ll be happy to help you turn underperforming campaigns around.