How To Use Google Ads Audience Data To Fuel Meta Ads Conversions

Today I want to share a secret strategy that will teach you how to stop wasting time on underperforming Meta Ads. You will learn how to use Google Ads audience data to create high-converting ad sets on Meta Ads that drive real results.

By using your own data from Google Ads, you will be able to target demographic and interest groups that you know are already interacting with your ads, taking the guesswork out of your targeting.

All you need to get started is an active Google Ads account.

Finding Demographic Data To Use In Targeting

You can do this at account, campaign or even ad group level. For the sake of brevity, I'm just going to show you account level today, but drilling down further to the campaign and ad group level can make sense in some instances, especially when you have a broad product range.

For example, if you sell guitars and you also sell baby clothes, the converting audience for both of those products will vary wildly so it wouldn't make sense to target them in the same way.

Here's how to find them.

1. Login to your Google Ads account.
2. Click the "Audience, keywords and content" dropdown.
3. Click Audiences.
4. Select a large date range for a broader view, 30-60 days should be enough to get an accurate view and avoid the natural peaks and valleys you would see from week to week.
5. Scroll down to Demographics and click the "Show table" dropdown.
6. Toggle it to account view (note, this is where you can see the campaign and ad group views as well).

By default, the demographic we can see is set to age. At a glance, you can see how each age group is interacting with your ads. 

In the example in the video, we can see that the 65+ cohort has the lowest cost per conversion, but the 25-34 cohort has the highest Return on Ad Spend.

If you click Gender at the top, you can see the same information for Males and Females.

Likewise, if you do the same and select "Parental status", we can see all of the same information but broken down by whether the user is a parent or not.

All of that information can help you massively when it comes to creating high-converting ad sets on Meta Ads, because you already know which demographics are responding the best to your offering.

Finding Interest/Intent Data To Use In Targeting

Demographic targeting is really important, but if you want to really improve your results, you should be pulling in intent and interest data from Google as well.

Google Ads has a feature called "Audience Insights" that used to show you how much more likely certain intent and affinity audiences were to interact with your ads or convert. 

However, in the last year or so that has stopped working and now it's just blank for most accounts.

But there's still a way to gather that valuable data, even if you have to add it yourself first.

1. Login to Google Ads.
2. Click in to one of your campaigns.
3. Click the "Audience, keywords and content" dropdown.
4. Click Audiences.
5. Click "Edit audience segments" and select "Campaign".
6. Make sure "Observation" is selected and add as many interests as humanly possible. Start with the ones you feel are relevant for your business, but the more you have in there, the better.
7. Once you're done, click "Save".
8. Select all of your newly added audiences, and click "Edit" then "copy".
9. Select a new campaign and paste your segments (ctrl + v on Windows command + v on Mac).
10. Select all of the campaigns you want to add your segments into and click save.
11. Now click "All campaigns" in the top left corner.
12. Click the "Audience, keywords and content" dropdown.
13. Click Audiences.
14. Scroll down to "Audience Segments" and click the dropdown.
15. You will start seeing data for all of the segments you have tracked.

It's not retroactive, but once you have set up your new audiences to be observed you can start getting some really useful data after a few weeks.

When you combine it with the demographic data from earlier, you will have an incredibly strong base to start testing new high-converting ad sets on Meta Ads.

If you want to learn more, follow me on LinkedIn or follow 3B1 on YouTube for regular insights and strategies.

Written by Christian Donovan, Director of Performance Marketing at 3B1.