Improved Affinity Segments Targeting on GDN

Google Improves Targeting on the Google Display Network with Affinity Segments: 

Google has recently introduced Affinity Segments in AdWords. Using 80 unique lifestyle segments such as Golf Enthusiasts and Avid Investors, advertisers can now more easily reach their target audience online based on their interests.

The new Affinity Segments take into account the kind of pages a user visits, together with how long they spend at the site and how often they visit, relating interest categories with each user’s browser.  Segments look at the user’s lifestyle, rather than just one particular interest, allowing advertisers to target users who are likely to be interested in your brand on a much larger scale.

It is also possible to further target ads by setting custom bids on the affinity categories. For example if you sell beautiful high end clothing and want to reach people on shopping websites, you can add both the “Fashionistas” and “Luxury Shoppers” Affinity Segments to your adgroup. If you think that “Luxury Shoppers” are 10% more likely to buy your high end clothes than a regular “Fashionistas”, it is possible to set your bids 10% higher for the “Luxury Shoppers” Affinity Segment. If advertisers have added topics and demographic targeting to the adgroup, bid adjustments can also be set for these.

Along with helping advertisers increase the scale of their audience, Affinity Segments can also help advertisers who are used to buying offline audiences. The new segments are similar to TV-style audiences, making it easier for advertisers who are perhaps more familiar with TV advertising or who are running a concurrent TV Campaign to reach audiences online in a similar way as they would offline.

The 80 Affinity Segments cover a wide range of topics from Sports Fans to Bargain Hunters, but don’t worry if you cannot find a segment to fit your brands needs when setting up your audience. You can get in touch with your Google Account Manager who can create a custom segment for you. At the moment it is only possible to set up a custom segment via your Google Account Manager, advertisers do not have the ability to do this.

As Affinity Segments are relatively new, there is not a great deal of information currently available detailing the results companies have seen using these audiences in their campaigns. Google has reported that Mazda Canada saw impressive results using Affinity Segments. For its Mazda6 line, Mazda Canada reached 10X more users than it had with previous campaigns by targeting the Technophiles Segment across the Google Display Network.

At Space and Time, we achieve excellent results using the Google Display Network and are always looking for ways to improve the performance of our clients’ campaigns. We have therefore decided to test Affinity Segments. We have created two adgroups on the Google Display Network. One has been set up to target niche interests using the ‘other categories’ section and the other adgroup has been set up using Affinity Segments.  We are very interested to see whether Affinity Segments will drive a larger scale of high quality traffic to the website or if the closely targeted audiences from the more familiar ‘other categories’ will prevail. 

We will share the results on the blog in due course, so stay tuned!

For more information on Affinity Segments take a look at Google's Think Insights page.