Every activity involved in running a campaign - from creative development to bidding strategy to demographic targeting - relates in some way to three primary goals: create the right message target the right people and deliver the message to those people at the right time. Google provides a handful of tools designed to help you achieve each of these goals, and today we're going to focus on a tool designed to optimize goal number two: targeting the right people. This segment might seem most overwhelming when you're new to Google Ads (the Google Display Network reaches about 90% of internet users, after all. The audience you're gaining starts in the billions). As such, Google gives you several powerful features designed to help you find the audience that's right for you, including the one we're going to look at today. This is called affinity. Affinity gives you the power to segment the people who see your ads into Affinity Audiences (and Custom Affinity Audiences). These are groups of users selected based on certain characteristics that make them attractive to marketers: their interests, shopping behavior, lifestyle and consumption habits. By targeting your audience based on these criteria, you can ensure your ads are shown to Employee Email Database the right kind of people and tailor your campaigns to achieve several important goals: Generate brand awareness Expand the reach of your ads Meet your high-end marketing needs What are affinity audiences? An "affinity" is defined in the dictionary as a "liking" of something. If you like ice cream, for example, you have an affinity for it, it's as simple as that. It can also be defined with a little more complexity, as an “attractive force that attracts one entity to another”. These two definitions pretty much sum up Google Affinity Audiences. They group consumers by what they like — their interests and hobbies — and what catches their attention — the places they visit on the web and the time they spend there. By compiling affinity audiences, Google gathers small, learnable insights like this about each user. They track the sites they visit frequently, the topics they search for, the time they spend with different types of content, and what their search patterns look like. Affinity audiences also identify the ways in which a person's passions manifest as consumer behavior. Does an individual frequently shop, dine out, visit trade shows, or attend live events? This is the type of person who acts on their affinities by spending money - an interesting qualification if you are a marketer. You choose the affinity audiences you want to target during the initial setup of your Google Ads campaign. They were originally only available for video and display ads, but have been expanded in recent years to also include Search, Gmail, Discovery and Shopping campaigns. The group of people that make up an affinity audience is a relatively large, predefined set of users. In fact, they are all listed in an official spreadsheet. They tend to be divided into very general interest groups which are also divided into more specialized subsets. For example, if your business manufactures and sells a rejuvenating avocado-based moisturizer called Mean Green Face Cream directly to consumers, you could create a Google Ads display campaign that targets the following affinity audiences: being Beauty and Wellness/Beauty Mavens (which features influencers and aficionados)Beauty and Wellness Trade Shows/Frequent Visits The decision of which of these groups to target depends on which segment of the marketing funnel you are focusing on. If you're just in the early stages — perhaps your avocados are still grown — and trying to establish brand awareness, you might want to target a more general audience with Beauty and Wellness. If you're trying to get your product into the hands of influencers to pitch to their Instagram followers, Beauty and Wellness / Beauty Mavens might be the audience for you. If you've just sent a case of Mean Green to select salons in major cities, you may want to target beauty and wellness salons/frequent visitors. Although it is difficult to measure elements