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Alan Coleman, CEO
Today, I'm going to talk to you about how you can target the traffic of any website in the world and get really creative in how you win new customers. This targeting feature available from Google AdWords. It's called Custom Affinity. Essentially what it allows you to do is plug in a domain, a sub-domain or even a webpage. As long as the people who have been visiting those web pages are logged into a Google account, you can now target them. The possibilities of how you get more customers like this are almost endless. Let me give you a couple of examples we've been doing.
We recently had a large client who sells mobile phones and mobile phone plans. They had an interesting situation where they had a competitor leave the country, shut down leaving 40,000 people without a mobile phone provider. What we could do was we could take the URL of that competitor's website. Once the announcement was made they were leaving, all their customers jumped on their website. We then captured them as an audience, and we could target those people via the Google Display Network and on YouTube with a message to switch to our client. It was a really successful campaign.
Another thing we could do was not just target the competitor's website, but the news story. When it came out in the national news, we could take the URL of the webpage of the news story, plug that in. Once again, people, who had demonstrated they're interested in this story by going to the news story, we could then advertise to those people when they're on YouTube and on the Google Display Network.
A third use, which I love, is not just about advertising against your competitors, but it's looking for complementary businesses. You can take a business that you think, oh if people are interested in that, they might be interested in me. You can whack their domain into the Custom Affinity section in Google AdWords and get a message in front of those. This, unbeknownst to you, might have happened to you quite recently.
If you have recently watched a Moz Whiteboard Friday or you have recently watched one of L2's Winners or Losers videos, the reason you saw an ad for this video is we're targeting you. We're saying if you're interested in those videos, you might just be interested in ours as well. I hope that's the case.
Just to finish up, one of the reasons why I love being a digital marketer is there are so many options available to us. Sometimes it feels like the only limit to how we communicate with our online audience is our imagination. I think this innovation of Custom Affinity is a really good example of that. I'd love to hear what you think about it, any questions, comments, the feedback, the hashtag for the feedback is Wolfgang Bites. I'll be on Twitter all day Wednesday, so I hope to talk to you there. All the best.
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