Today’s PPC is all about targeting the right audiences. The last thing you want to do is waste money and resources on audiences who won’t be interested in what you have to offer. Thankfully, you can easily choose which audiences to target and which to avoid.

When developing an audience strategy, it’s important to identify audiences worth avoiding as much as it is to target the right audience. You can use negative audiences to reduce the amount spent on ads and further optimize your ads to appear in front of consumers who are more likely to make a purchase. The following are some of the audiences that you may want to exclude from your PPC campaigns, depending on your goals.

Existing Customers

In many cases, you won’t want to target current customers. In fact, you may want to avoid targeting them in all of your PPC campaigns. You can exclude existing customers in Google Ads by uploading a list of customer emails and excluding these from your ads. If you utilize a web-based login for your products, you can also develop a retargeting audience that avoids targeting those who have accessed certain pages that indicate that the visitor has already become a paying customer.

However, you may want to continue targeting existing customers in other cases. For example, you can segment customers to avoid marketing a certain product to customers who have already purchased the product while promoting other products by placing them in other campaigns. E-commerce businesses can also keep track of past customers to increase recurring revenue and bid based on how those audiences are shopping.

People Looking for Work

Another potential audience to avoid is job seekers. If people looking for open positions are somehow landing on your product or service pages, you’ll be wasting expenses that should go toward attracting customers rather than applicants.

You can find and redirect job applicants by developing a URL-based audience in Google Ads to be used for your website’s “careers” page. If you would rather link to a job posting on another website such as Craigslist or Indeed, you may be able to pixel the site or track clicks via a Google Analytics event, which will help you build an audience to exclude from the rest of your campaigns.

Audiences Not in Retargeting Campaigns

If you’re targeting audiences through a retargeting campaign, it’s important to exclude audiences in other non-retargeting campaigns, which will help ensure your ad messaging and data are sufficiently segmented based on your respective audiences.

Considering running a targeting campaign on social media? People who visit your website through that campaign will be added to a retargeting audience and receive different ad messaging, but they’ll also be included in the original targeting audience. In these instances, you should exclude the retargeting audience from the original campaign to avoid potential duplication.

Past Converters

Depending on your business goals, you’ll want to either target or exclude past converters, those individuals who have performed a conversion action such as submitting their contact information via your “contact us” page. In some cases, you might have a multi-step sales funnel to keep track of people until they make a purchase at the bottom of the funnel.

When prospects first make contact with your company, you’ll likely offer some kind of incentive in exchange for their contact information, such as an ebook download or a free product trial. Once the individual has submitted a contact form, you can add them to a retargeting list that adds those who land on a subsequent “thank you” page.

The next step would be to exclude past converters from the asset campaign and add them to another campaign for another call-to-action that carries them farther along the sales funnel. In the process, you will be able to avoid duplicate messaging and annoying your audiences while guiding them through the buyer’s journey.

People Seeking Help

If a visitor is browsing your website’s support pages, they’re likely current customers who are in need of help, whether they want to troubleshoot an issue or have specific questions or comments. In any case, these support-seekers aren’t shopping for new products, so you should exclude them from retargeting campaigns by building an audience based on domains connected to support pages on your site. On the other hand, as with other campaigns, you may want to target some of these customers. If someone is looking for help with one product, you may be able to upsell and promote a specific add-on or accessory. 

Minimize Wasted Ad Spend by Avoiding Negative Audiences

When managing your ad campaigns, excluding the audiences above can help you make sure your ad spend is used appropriately. Avoiding the audiences you don’t want to target will help you effectively optimize your campaigns to maximize engagement and sales.