In this 10 part series, we are exploring simple steps you can take to get your digital house in order – before you start paying for advertising.

Last week in Step 5, we covered ‘Excluding Referrers’.

Now lets move on to Step 6.
 

If nobody notices your ad, everything else is academic

– Bill Bernbach

Setup Website Audiences

Website Audiences are segments of website visitors that you can ‘tag’ for future advertising purposes. When we start advertising for clients, we often need to build these audiences from scratch. This is fine – except it takes time for these audiences to build, typically at least 30 days.

You can save yourself this time and give yourself a running start by building these audiences *before* you need them. There is no harm (or fee) in building these website audiences – even if you never use them, so you may as well build them today and let them start building in the background.

Above: Note how several audiences have been built out that each serve different marketing purposes

Suggested audiences to build are:

• All Users (who visited in the last 30 days)

• All Users (who visited in the last 365 days)

• All Users (who visited in the last 540 days)

• All Buyers (who purchased in the last 30 days)

• All Leads (who converted in the last 30 days)

Tip: The original reason for building these audiences was for Remarketing purposes (which is still a valuable reason to use them). However technology has come a long way and an extremely powerful second reason for building tightly defined website audiences is for lookalike purposes. For example, if you create a segment of your highest Lifetime Customer Value users, you can then ask Google to create a ‘lookalike’ audience of these people, to help you find more new prospects who are similar to your current best customers.

Now that you have setup useful audiences, stay tuned next week for the next step in Before you pay for clicks: Part 7.