When running search ads, it can be a bit tricky to decide which approaches will give you the best bang for your buck. The amount of options can be overwhelming, and you don’t want to waste your time, energy, money, and other resources on ad approaches that won’t give you the results you need.

One tool that can be extremely useful and well-rounded is Google Ads’ “similar audiences,” which will help you not just increase your visibility, but increase it among users who are more likely than average to be interested in your business.

What are Google Ads’ similar audiences, and why do they matter?

Most marketers and small business owners running online ads are familiar with “lookalike audiences” on Facebook and other social media platforms. If you’re not familiar, lookalike audiences are a setting for whom you serve ads to; as the name implies, the users in a lookalike audience are similar in behavior and/or interests to others who interact with your ads and site.

Yet, while most of us are familiar with lookalike audiences, we often overlook Google’s “similar audiences” when considering PPC advertising — instead opting to focus disproportionately on remarketing. These similar audiences function much the same as social platforms’ lookalike audiences: Google assembles a group of users who show the same behavior or interests — as demonstrated by their search habits — as others in your audience lists.

It’s probably intuitive, but these audiences are so valuable because over the relatively large sample size you’ll get a disproportionate amount of people who act like other users that have been interested in your products or services in the past. Ergo, if they act like another group of users, and that group of users interacted positively with your brand, they’re more likely to too.

Creating a similar audiences and how they fit in the PPC conversion funnel 

To create a similar audience, Google Ads starts by assessing the characteristics of one of your existing remarketing lists. From there, it auto-generates a corresponding audience.

Screenshot of Similar Audiences set up in Google Ads

What makes this feature especially helpful, however, is that this list will evolve and grow automatically as audience search behavior changes. This allows you to not have to be constantly tweaking it to try to keep up with your audience’s interests and behavior.

Where do these audiences fit in the conversion funnel? Generally, the model goes (at its most basic):

• Top: Awareness-focused, so dealing with broader keywords to attract people unfamiliar with your brand, business, or products
• Middle: Consideration-focused, so keywords including your brand or otherwise non-branded keywords that are still relatively specific
• Lower: Action- or consideration-focused, most often remarketing towards former site visitors

With similar audiences, the funnel is inverted in a sense. That is, although users in a similar audience are new to your business, they’re based on past users with an implicit interest in what you have to offer.

In terms of performance, you can expect certain traits from similar audiences. For example, neither click through rate nor conversion rate will be as high as for standard remarketing campaigns. On the flip side, you’ll typically see better directional engagement with ads from this more “qualified” audience.

Screenshot of audience options on Google Ads

How do these benefit your business’ marketing?

By using similar audiences in this way, you’ll both expand the volume of your conversion funnel and nurture a user base that’s interested in what you have to offer. This leads to higher conversion rates all out of a larger overall group of people interacting with your ads, products, and brand.

Along with this, it also lowers your ad costs. That’s because the higher volume and higher quality interactions lead to more data on conversions, which give you better insight to direct at bidding strategy that will improve the efficiency of your advertising budget.

Altogether, utilizing this tool will give your campaigns — and future marketing efforts in general — a leg up in multiple aspects. You’ll expand your visibility, improve the quality of interactions, and generally build a good foundation with which to move forward.