Target Micro-Segments in Google Ads with Compass

Google Ads offers a powerful way of reaching your target audience. However, like any tool, the performance of Google Ads marketing campaigns can vary widely. Does your ad spend on the platform maximize your impact? How confident are you that you're reaching the right people at the right time and sending the message you want them to hear?

If you're relying solely on the advanced audience targeting of Google Ads, you might not be reaching the right people. Google Ads uses generic interest categories and relatively broad demographics to choose who sees the ads. This means you're paying to get your ad in front of people who are unlikely to be interested in what you have to offer. Micro-segmentation offers much more powerful and precise ways to reach your target audience.

Compass Marketing Intelligence helps you leverage your first-party data to run more impactful and effective web campaigns. By taking the information you already have about your customers and how they interact with your website, you can build detailed profiles and use them for hyper-targeted marketing campaigns.

The Challenges of Traditional Google Ads Segmentation

Google Ads segmentation lets you narrow down your marketing campaign targets based on more than just keywords. Using the platform's behavioral targeting Google Ads features, you can target groups of people based on their behaviors, interests, search intent, and demographics. These features can greatly improve your ad campaign's performance.

However, the limited audience segmentation options only target broad demographics. For example, if you run a martial arts school, you might want to target people searching for certain martial arts-related keywords. However, you don't want to show an ad for your beginner's classes to an experienced practitioner. Google's Ad segmentation tools can't differentiate at this level, leading to wasted ad spending.

The tools also show the same ad to both existing customers and first-time visitors. This approach wastes money on ads that won't appeal to one of those groups and could also harm your brand. Showing repeat customers a huge new customer discount could alienate them. Running different campaigns for different types of customers will get a better response.

Consumers have learned to see through traditional "one size fits all" advertisements and want higher quality ads. Compass Intelligence helps you offer a more personalized experience, making customers feel seen and understood. By merging data from all of your channels, you can get a comprehensive view of customer tastes and behaviors. You can then use that data for AI-powered advertising, designing eye-catching experiences for every customer.

Introducing Compass Marketing Intelligence: Your Key to Hyper-Personalization

Compass Marketing Intelligence helps businesses unify customer data from multiple channels and sources to help improve their marketing campaigns.

Compass brings together data from your website interactions, previous ad engagements, and app usage so you can get true insights into how customers behave and what piques their interest. Using Compass Marketing Intelligence, Google Marketing Platform Data can be visualized and processed quickly and efficiently. Compass is an AI-powered solution that connects your Google Marketing Platform data to Google Cloud, where it can be utilized to optimize your ad campaigns, generate marketing strategies, and view detailed customer insights.

The power of first-party data for retargeting and customer retention should not be underestimated. Compass Marketing Intelligence utilizes Vertex AI to help businesses access these strategies.

According to a recent Forrester report, only 42% of marketers believe their companies can convert their first-party data into insights to help them meet their customer needs. Compass Marketing Intelligence uses AI and Machine Learning to enable anyone to effectively utilize the data they're already collecting. You don't need to have a data science, statistics, or artificial intelligence background to get powerful insights out of your data or build sophisticated audience segments.

Unlocking Micro-Segments with Compass Marketing Intelligence Through Propensity Models

Traditional audience targeting is relatively one-dimensional. Google Ads relies on limited data for its audience segmentation, so it's difficult to build true audience profiles. When you have access to first-party data, you can build more insightful audience segments and better understand what drives your customer base.

Compass Marketing Intelligence helps you build first-party propensity models so you can predict a wider variety of customer behaviors. These models help predict the likelihood of a customer making a purchase, submitting a lead form, or even engaging in more negative actions such as churn. Armed with that knowledge, you can target customers for first-time buyer discounts, retargeting, or other messaging.

Compass achieves this by tracking metrics, such as:

• Page views
• Time spent on site
• Content engagement
• Heatmaps
• Product views
• Cart activity
• App activity
• Email open rates

Compiling the information from these metrics creates a detailed picture of a user's engagement level. From there, your business can predict whether that user is likely to convert. Each action gets weighted and scored based on a detailed algorithm, which improves the precision of the predictions.

The true power of Compass comes from more than per-user predictions, though. Individually, customers can be unpredictable, and any statistical model has limitations. However, when you bring the data together to create audience segments based on the previously mentioned scores, you can create high-performance advertising campaigns.

For example, you might break down customer groups into high-, low-, and medium-propensity converters. The high-propensity converters are most likely to make a purchase, and they can be shown ads aimed at people with a strong purchase intent.

In contrast, medium-propensity customers aren't quite as far along the conversion funnel. They're interested in your product or service, but they require a little more nurturing before being presented with a sales pitch.

Finally, there are low-propensity converters, who are the least likely to make a purchase (or who are more likely to churn if they're already customers). These individuals require a rather different kind of messaging to rebuild their engagement with your brand.

Compass Marketing Intelligence can process information from your app or website and update these segments dynamically, moving a customer from one segment to another as their behavior and preferences change.

The Benefits of Hyper-Personalization Through Micro-Segmentation

Micro-segmentation provides significant improvements over traditional customer segmentation. You'll see:

• Better conversion rates due to focused retargeting efforts on those most likely to convert.
• Increased ROI by tailoring both bids and messaging based on the likelihood of customer conversion.
• Enhanced user experience. Micro-segmentation helps you better understand your users. When users see ads tailored to their interests, they're more likely to respond positively.
• Reduced ad fatigue, because only interested customers see your ads.

Using Ad Segmentation in Your Industry

Micro-segmentation can be applied in almost any industry. It's a useful addition to standard retargeting techniques across multiple e-commerce situations, helping you re-engage the customers who abandoned their carts.

Compass can help you identify high-propensity cart abandoners so you can present them with time-sensitive, attractive offers to bring them back to your store. Medium-propensity buyers can be shown product recommendations based on their interests.

Similar practices can also be used in the service industry for lead generation. High-propensity users who have viewed relevant pricing pages can be shown lead generation forms or contact forms. Depending on how far the potential customer or shopper has moved through the sales funnel, they might be shown specific high-value content to drive conversion. For B2B clients, case studies would be used.

By customizing content in this way, you can avoid the distrust or frustration that often results from aggressive sales pitches being shown on landing pages. Micro-segmentation helps you tailor your marketing to match the user's conversion propensity.

Compass Helps You Get the Most Out of Your Data

To stand out in today's noisy and crowded marketplace, you need to personalize your advertising materials. Compass Marketing Intelligence revolutionizes your first-party data when it comes to propensity modeling, saving you time and money and increasing your return on ad spending.

Take the next step toward smarter advertising. Contact Further to find out more about implementing Compass for your Google Ads campaigns, and start turning clicks into customers.