Affinity Segments

Demonstration

Introduction

Just as a quick refresher, affinity segments in Google Ads are tools that allow you to connect with your audience based on their passions and the things they care about. Affinity segments let you boost brand awareness and increase product consideration among individuals who express keen interest in what you're offering. For example, if your business is selling camping equipment, you could target passionate campers by combining an affinity segment such as “outdoor enthusiast” with broad camping-related keywords. This technique of layering additional audiences helps you to reach consumers who are actively looking for camping gear and also have a deep fondness for outdoor activities.

If you're familiar with consumr.ai, you'll know it excels at pinpointing the most effective interest segments by leveraging insights from various data. The purpose of using affinity segments in a consumr.ai campaign is to glean from these insights and forge high-performing, actionable segments for use in Google Ads campaigns. It’s again worth noting that data-driven targeting tends to outperform methods based on intuition.

How to get there?

Comparable to other marketing efforts, you have two strategies for pinpointing search themes:

• You may either leverage or identify an existing behavior or insight into intent,

• Or, you can proceed directly to the section for activation and opt for the 'create campaign' button found in the top right area of the website.

Selecting a Platform and Campaign Type

As you begin to create a campaign, a dialogue box pops up prompting you to choose two fundamental options to initiate the campaign setup. Given that our focus is on building an affinity segment for Google Ads, you will need to select 'Google Ads' as your platform of choice. Following this, a set of options will be displayed asking for the campaign type; here you should choose 'affinity segments' as indicated in the provided screenshot. After making your choices, click the 'setup' button to move forward.

Plan presets

As you proceed to the next stage of formulating your campaign strategy, it's essential to incorporate intelligence that enables this module to learn and create campaigns that resonate strongly. You'll be pleased to find that the affinity segment form here is less complex compared to those used in mentor campaigns, Google's custom segments, or combined segments. Selecting appropriate insights for this plan is crucial because of its simplicity.

On the left side of the form, you will find a sequence of steps outlined to guide you through the completion of this campaign plan. These steps are more concise compared to the comprehensive campaigns we have previously constructed using consumr.ai.

Note that as we're creating audience signals or affinity segments for Google Ads, it's best to gather behavioral insights from consumr.ai. The screenshot displays a dropdown list of potential insights.

Keep in mind: only one insight is allowed per campaign.

Navigate to and use the dropdown to see your campaign name automatically filled in, which you can customize according to your taxonomy. While not used in activation, this name helps save and later retrieve the campaign within consumr.ai.

After making your selections, press the button at the bottom to initiate a new draft plan.

The Draft Plan

Please note that the design of this plan differs slightly from our usual formats, but it's intentionally made to look this way. The initial dropdown menu will display the insight that was previously chosen in earlier steps. Nonetheless, you have the flexibility to modify the insight if needed. Right above the dropdown is a checkbox labeled “search using audience,” which you can use if you fail to recall the exact name of the insight you've crafted before. By checking this box, you have the option to pick either a third-party interest or your own first-party audience. The system will proceed to identify new insights based on your choice and list them in the subsequent dropdown for selection. Should the system be unable to locate an existing insight based on your input, it will offer to generate a new insight behind the scenes and include it in the following dropdown. This allows you to choose the newly created insight and helps the system improve its functionality.

Behavioral Signals

Upon choosing the appropriate insight, the section will absorb the knowledge embedded in the insight and fill itself with the acquired information.

The screenshot reveals the age range, gender, key interests, and relationship status. In a behaviour report, these three data points provide behavioural insight.

When you've grasped the concept, click the “begin activation” button below to initiate activation. Alternatively, if you prefer to delay activation, you can conclude the process as is.

Activation settings

As with every campaign on consumr.ai that offers the capability to implement changes across the advertising platform, this feature also comes with a similar activation settings form which requires completion or confirmation by the user. We will briefly go over each field:

Select Type

The screenshot depicts a dropdown with three choices:

"New campaign" for creating and activating a new campaign based on a seed campaign, either replacing or adding segments according to consumr.ai suggestions.

"Existing campaign" to select and enhance an existing campaign with new segments, updating or supplementing the current audience signals.

Further steps include:

Select Account: Choose the ad account for segment activation.

Seed campaign: Pick your template campaign here.

Campaign budget: Set the campaign's budget within the constraints of the chosen date range from the following field.

Date range: Decide on the active period for the segment addition.

Name of the segment: Label your segment for easy identification on the platform.

After completing the form, hit activate. A success message confirms a successful push to the ad platform, while a failure message provides reasons and necessary corrective actions.