Take advantage of competitor success with Custom Affinity Audiences

Your competitors are spending lots on marketing.  They’re doing the research, eliminating the bad traffic and their efforts (and spend) are resulting in qualified traffic on their site.  Why not take advantage of that and show ads to their already warmed up traffic?  You can with Custom Affinity Audiences.

Generally speaking, Custom Affinity Audiences allow you to create an audience that is more specific to your target market.  You can set interest terms or URL’s of sites you believe your target market is interested in.  That audience should, in turn, be interested in your services.

Refine it even more and reducing those interests and URL’s to your competition exclusively.  Now you’re piggybacking on the efforts of their entire marketing spend!

It’s important to remember that your competitors have the same problems you do.  They have traffic and a large part of it doesn’t convert, even a 2% conversion rate is considered great.

That leaves 98% of your competitors traffic unfulfilled!

Can you provide what they couldn’t – it’s certainly worth a shot!  And here’s how to do it…

Step 1 – find your competition

Load up auctions insight report.

Here you’ll find a list of all your competitor urls here.  Create a list of the competitors and keep an eye out for sites that just don’t qualify.

Step 2 – Create your Custom Affinity Audience

Label your audience something that makes sense to you (and yes,I like labels).  The Description field is especially useful when there are multiple people running or accessing the account.

Enter the URL’s of all your competitors that you found in the auction insights report.

The preview will give you a breakdown of the audience – it’s good to double check this audience is in line with what you’d like to be targeting and that it’s large enough for the effort.

Step 3 – Create your campaign!

Just a few notes on this:

• make sure your exclusions are set up correctly.  Negative keywords and geotargeting should be applied at the campaign level, otherwise you may be sending ads far outside your circle of influence!
• This is an audience that needs the clearest and best offer you have.  They didn’t convert for the competition, so you want to give it your best shot!

Now you’re showing your ads to an audience that your competitors have spent heaps to single out of the crowd.