Personas and PPC Campaigns

What is a Persona?

A persona is a fictitious customer profile that is created for the purpose of understanding who a customer is so that they can be properly, demographically targeted.

The average PPC Campaign has at least 2 touch points with the consumer (the Top and Mid or the Mid and Bottom parts of the consumer funnel). This can get pricey! To prevent over spend to the wrong people, we only want our ads to be shown to potential customers who are very likely to make a purchase. To do this, we need to understand who they are and where they hang out online.

Whether you are an established business or a new business, there are 3 main elements to creating a persona that you need to understand:

Basic Demographics

Basic demographics are just that, the high level, very basic attributes of someone who would be interested in your product:

These high level attributes can cut your audience down by millions, saving you a ton of money!

Interest Demographics

When coming up with interest demographics, think in terms of what someone who needs your product or service would be interested in.

For Example:

Here are some good questions to ask yourself about your customers to help you with this:

Behavior Demographics

Both Facebook and Google AdWords have ways of knowing which of their users are more likely to exhibit behaviors like:

How to Create a Persona Profile

Let’s create a Persona Profile for the ideal t-shirt customer for Aquapparel. This will show you how creating Persona Profiles will help you achieve a positive ROI for your products or services.

For this persona we are defining a potential t-shirt customer for Aquapparel’s Ego vs Eco shirt. The platform that I am going to use is Facebook since at the time of this course’s creation, this platform has one of the most user friendly audience targeting interfaces.

Basic Demographics

The first thing that we are going to do is build out our Basic Demographics. By default, Facebook targets everyone in United States, ages 18 – 65+, all genders and all languages. Based on those Basic Demographics, our audience size is currently this:

Our estimated average CPC cost for Facebook Newsfeed, Right Hand Side and Instagram Feed ad placements is $3.78 per click. $3.78 per click, not bad right? Wrong.

For reaching any and everyone on Facebook who may or may not be interested in buying an Eco vs Eco Shirt from an environmentally focused brand – anything over $0 is paying too much per click.

So let’s narrow this audience down a bit. I know that the majority of the people who watch my YouTube videos the most are 13 to 34 year old males. The majority are located in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Since our objective is to get a sale, this persona’s house hold income is going to be $50k or above.

Without even entering Interest Demographics, my audience size is reduced significantly to this:

Interest Demographics

Now we will enter the Interest Demographics to narrow our audience even smaller. So who would be interested in purchasing this shirt? A male who is interested in watersports, aquariums, marine life and who is eco conscious. Let’s break it down even further:

These water sports are on the more eco-friendly/enjoying nature side:

People who visit public aquariums learn all about our environment, marine life and the environmental issues at the aquarium. So let’s target these guys who are interested in some super eco-friendly focused aquariums in our geo-targeted states:

Let’s get even more granular and add in some more Interests to really narrow it down:

After I entered these in, here is where our current audience size is at:

Behavior Demographics

In Facebook you can target a very helpful Behavior Demographic: Charitable Donations. This will tell you who has financially backed a cause which means that they are really passionate about it. For Aquapparel, we are not looking for donations, but this will help to further identify people who are really passionate about the environment and wildlife. With that said these are the types of charities that these guys would have donated to that I want to target:

So our final audience size is this:

My estimated suggested bid is now $3.18:

So let’s do some math:

Based on the first set of numbers without creating my persona an targeting my audience, I would be paying $3.78 per click. If my budget is $1,000 that’s about 264 clicks. Let’s say that my conversion rate is 10%, that gives me 26 sales.

By creating a persona and targeting my audience, I am going to pay $3.18 per click. At the same $1,000 budget that gives me about 316 clicks. Since we have much better targeting, let’s double the percentage for conversions to 20%. This gives me a total of 63 sales.

My Men’s Ego vs Eco shirt is $24.99, so:

No Persona/Audience Targeting:

Aquapparel Eco-Friendly Persona:

As you can see, the numbers for this example speak for themselves. Aside from product margins, etc. you see that I would have made a $500 + ROI just from targeting my audience based on the persona that I created as opposed to a -$350 ROI from doing nothing at all.

Now that you see how creating a Persona Profile decreases your CPC costs, how much should your budget be?

In the next blog post in this series, I explain how to determine your PPC budget.

How Much Should I Spend? How Do I Determine My Budget
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