Bing recently announced the launch of Audience Segmentation, a new addition to the Segmentation feature to help advertisers get deeper insights into audiences from Remarketing for search, In-market Audiences, and Custom Audiences.
Before we jump in to reporting, let’s walk through a quick recap of those three available audiences.
Remarketing for search audience let you recapture customers who have previously visited your website. This allows you to reach back out to high-value audiences with optimized ad copy, meaning they have an increased ROI.
With In-market Audiences, you can find curated lists of users that have been found to be in-market for a certain purchase category. Bing Ads has created these lists and they are available directly in the interface. You do not need to build or import your own lists.
A custom audience is a type of remarketing list that is generated by using first-party data to create user segments. Here are a few examples of Custom Audience segments that can be used as a remarketing list: purchase history, renewal period and lifetime value.
Now on to something brand new…
Gone are the days of running multiple reports and mashing them together in able to get the full picture of your audience targeting performance. We will now have comprehensive audience reporting in a single view.
Let’s say you’re selling running shoes online. The marathon is coming up and you want to reach people who are either ready to buy or are loyal customers. You’ve been focused on Remarketing for search to reach your loyal customers with good success and recently added In-Market Audiences to your existing campaigns, to reach people in the market for athletic shoes.
It’s been a couple of weeks and you want to know how it’s working out. Previously, to report on your audience performance you had to run Audience reports and Ad group reports and manually combine them, which took some time. Now you can see the performance lift of each audience against a common baseline of non-targeted users using the new “Audience Segmentation reporting.”
The data shows that both your Remarketing for search audiences and In-market audiences have significantly out-performed users not in any audience segment. You may then decide to increase the bid boost appropriately for each of these lists in order to increase your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
Getting started with Audience Reporting via Audience Segmentation
The Audience Segmentation feature allows you to split your ad group performance data either by audience category or audience name to help you see how ad groups are performing with Remarketing for search, In-market Audiences or Custom audiences – and compared to non-targeted users.
Start with the Audience category to view data grouped by audience targeting feature type. This will show you how Remarketing for search, In-market Audiences, Custom Audiences compare with one another – and to users not in segment.
A new row called Users not in audience segments is automatically created for you to view performance of those users not in any associated audience segments. Compare each of your audience category performance with user not in audience segments to identify which audience category is performing the best.
Then drill down by selecting Audience name to view performance of each audience to further analyze and identify top or poor performing audience within each category.
With this data in hand, you have a better idea on how your targeting strategy performs in action and can recognize new opportunities and areas for improvement. Here are a few areas to explore:
- Increase your bid boosts for those audience segments with strong performance.
- If you’re using a 0% bid modifier or creating new associations, Bing suggests starting with 15% for Remarketing for search and 20% for In-market Audiences to utilize the benefits of audience targeting.
- Expand your audience targeting coverage – associate your audience lists to additional ad groups, or if using In-market Audiences, identifying additional segments your business aligns with.
- Review and refine remarketing list definitions where performance is lower to ensure how you’ve defined the list is correct.
A few additional notes provided by Bing…
- As part of our global rollout, some Bing advertisers will start seeing this feature today, and everyone will have this new feature by early February.
- The Audience Segmentation option is available on 6 tabs: Account Summary, Campaigns, Ad Groups, Ads, Keywords and Ad Extensions.
- You can download the data for offline manipulation through “Download” from the toolbar.
- The “Users not in audience segments” line item is only generated when audience data is available for the selected criteria (i.e. campaign, ad group).
- Data is available starting Jan 5, 2018 to use the Audience Segmentation feature; to report on your audience targeting performance prior you can utilize existing audience reports.
