12 Jan Google Ads releases industry & dimension in search audiences
Today while I was working on some campaigns I realized that Google Ads has released the possibility of selecting the size of the company and the macro-sector of activity of the user to target search audiences.
This is very interesting, despite the fact that no official announcement has been made (or I missed it), and is probably a first response to the much more detailed BtoB targeting offered by Microsoft-LinkedIN.
To set the new targets just edit the audience segments and enter the demographic targeting section “Who they are” & “Employment” and you will find the options now available (3 ranges for the size of the company and 9 macro-categories for the sector).
Regarding company size you can select:
- from 1 to 249 employees
- from 250 to 10.000 employees
- over 10.000 employees
Regarding industries at the moment you can select:
- construction
- education
- finance
- healthcare
- hospitality
- manufacturing
- real estate
- technology
I have checked the possibility to set these options in many accounts active in different geographic areas and so probably the feature has been released globally, but only for search & video based campaigns (Search, Discovery, Shopping standard & Video, at least at present time).
If you’re wondering how Google can identify these audiences, despite not having the data that LinkedIN has or not being able to track its users like Facebook does, they haven’t given any further detail.
However, once you have isolated the search data of a certain group of medium-large companies certainly belonging to a specific sector, a multinational with Google’s analysis power is certainly able to derive recurring search patterns identifying its operators. In my opinion it’s the same process they have used to identify high-income people search behavior.
It is clear that this type of analysis can hardly give reliable results on “family” computers or PC used by many different people who work in completely different areas. But these are relatively limited cases within BtoB sector.
As for the company size, it is quite simple to derive it from the type of connection. If your traffic passes through a public server owned by a company that is not a connection provider, it is very likely that you work for a large company. Vice versa if you rely on a mass provider, you are probably in a SME.
It goes without saying how important these new audiences can be for Business to Business campaigns. Have you already tried them? Have you checked how they work?
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