Advertising and customer experience – these two concepts may sound mutually exclusive.

Nowadays, when marketers think about customer experience programs, they rarely think about the impact of advertising.

This is a big problem.

According to a recent study, nearly 70% of consumers say they don’t trust advertising. Another 42% of consumers say they don’t trust brands – and for good reason.

Unfortunately, digital advertising often fails to adequately consider the user experience and is therefore often seen as self-serving or even offensive rather than relevant, timely, or helpful to consumers.

Now that potential customers feel alienated, they often ignore ads or use ad blockers to block them from appearing.

Sound familiar?

Perhaps surprisingly, the ad experience doesn’t have to end this way for your customers or you.

This is not the case for digital marketers looking to increase their reach, ROI, and profits.

To avoid this common pitfall, businesses that want to create a relevant, sustainable, and scalable advertising strategy need to prioritize customer experience.

Here are five key areas that marketers can focus on to optimize their digital advertising initiatives and take into account customer experience.

1. Make the most of targeted opportunities

It’s no secret that one of the biggest mistakes advertisers can make is delivering irrelevant ads to the wrong audience.

To avoid this pitfall, advertisers have access to a wide variety of targeting features, all designed to help them target the right demographics.

The criteria for Google ads are:

  • Place.
  • Language.
  • Device positioning.

But even advertisers who optimize for these factors miss out on significant ad targeting opportunities – highlighted by the fact that more than 70% of marketers fail to target consumers with behavioral data.

Consumers’ online behavior can provide unique, nuanced insights aimed at improving ad targeting effectiveness.

To do this, Google’s Market Audience can help advertisers target users who have recently shown interest in certain topics.

For example, a travel agency can serve ads to people who have recently searched for travel-related content or visited travel-related websites.

Ad targeting becomes more complex when you use third-party behavioral data, which is collected by a network of publishers that rely on data aggregation tools such as:

  • Tracking cookies.
  • IP address.
  • Fill out the form.

Additionally, user intent data can help advertisers identify new and relevant target customers and provide insights into consumers at various stages of the purchase cycle.

Leveraging these third-party data insights strategically can help you better personalize and optimize your marketing messages and find more ways to reach the right audience with the right ads at the right time.

2. Provide understanding and emotional appeals

It’s no secret that many consumers don’t see digital advertising as a means to help or meet their needs.

In fact, many people think that digital advertising is just to meet the needs of businesses trying to get more sales.

And, in many cases, they are right.

However, if advertisers can focus on their audience’s interests, needs, and emotions, they are better equipped to help potential consumers rethink the instinctive responses that prevent them from accepting ads, and may even subvert or completely change their perceptions.

Perhaps not surprisingly, advertisers can effectively harness powerful universal emotions to better target audiences by portraying love, desire, ambition, adventure, family community, and a sense of purpose.

That is, your message should not be monolithic, as your audience is not single.

For example, weight loss ads often talk about people not only looking and feeling attractive, but also losing weight easily and with minimal effort – all of which cater to the multifaceted and complex needs and emotions of a wide and diverse audience.

Although PPC advertisers have less space available in ad copy, there are still plenty of opportunities to provide understanding and emotional appeal.

Consider ad copy, where one of the ad managers asks the question: Why do people search online for information about buying a new car?

The answer is: because they want to make informed decisions and get good deals.

They want to be confirmed that their purchasing behavior is the smartest decision – to offset the regret that may arise when buying a commodity.

Therefore, a headline like “Smart Ways to Buy a New Car” is a good way to express your audience’s emotions and needs.

Marketers should not focus solely on product features and sales, but on buyer personas and create more emotional ad copy.

To truly understand the emotional needs of your target audience strongly and accurately, Adaptive Search Ads (RSA) allow you to create adaptive ads that align with your text to showcase a broader range of emotional and promotional messages while determining which messages resonate best with different audiences.

Once they have identified what their audience not only needs, but also what they want to be, do, and feel, advertisers need to meet those needs in all aspects of their campaigns.

3. Offer what they want

Too often, advertisers spend a lot of effort creating targeted and even dynamic ads that directly meet the needs of searchers, but direct their clicks back to generic landing pages that don’t deliver the same targeted and relevant information.

Needless to say, the relevance of your landing page is another big issue that affects the customer experience.

Relying on a generic landing page for ads can impact customer experience, ad performance, and ad revenue.

So how do people react when they click on an ad and arrive at a landing page that isn’t what they’re looking for?

A significant portion of them will turn to competitors.

Additionally, a poor landing page user experience can also affect your PPC quality score, which in turn affects your ability to rank for certain keywords.

Therefore, when optimizing digital ad performance, it’s important to consider how well the landing page content matches the ad copy and query intent.

A good practice is to use similar words and phrases in your ads and landing page headers, which can help reassure visitors that they’ve navigated to the right place.

If you’re not sure which page performs best, you can use Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) to ensure that your search ads, search terms, and landing pages are consistent.

For example, an ad titled “Same-day Emergency Dental Appointments” – the landing page copy needs to reiterate that customers are available for “Same-day Emergency Dental Appointments” to reassure visitors that they are in the right place and that their needs for same-day dental appointments will indeed be met.

4. Improve the user experience across your website

To truly put the customer first, advertisers must understand that CX optimization is more than just ad copy and landing pages.

Consider how people react to online ads these days – while some people respond to them by clicking on your ads, the vast majority end up visiting your website in other ways.

Therefore, advertisers must improve the user experience across their websites so that users can easily find the content they are looking for, whether it’s products, services, or company information.

Important UX factors include:

  • Mobile optimization: Is your page responsive and mobile-friendly? Is your content easy to navigate on small screens?
  • Website speed: Do your landing pages, sales pages, and homepages load fast? What optimizations can you do for page elements to prevent them from loading slowly?
  • Navigation: Can users easily click and find what they need? If someone sees your ad, searches for your listing, and finds your homepage, can they easily find what they’re looking for?
  • Content: Does your website content answer user questions and facilitate user action? Do you use visual assists, calls to action, and other elements to help people get information and convert?

Overall, improving the user experience across your website is a good practice for many reasons.

But perhaps most importantly, your website is the gateway to your company, business practices, and brand.

If potential customers can’t easily and efficiently navigate your website and get the information they need, they may think they’ll have a similar experience throughout the buying cycle.

5. Provide value when people need it most

As with almost everything else, timing is a key factor in ad relevance.

Not only do you need to provide useful, valuable advertising information, but you also need to provide it at the right time to help your audience make purchasing decisions and potentially drive them to convert.

Using automation to target market audiences through Google Ads is a great place to start, but it’s often not enough.

By the time most people start searching for a product or service, they already have purchase intent and are likely to buy soon.

So, by the time your ad finally reaches them, chances are they’ve already converted elsewhere.

This is where predictive advertising can help.

Utilizing advanced data analysis and statistical algorithms, predictive techniques can help advertisers identify market audiences before they show any purchase intent.

By leveraging historical data and statistical forecasts included in forecasting platforms, advertisers can derive associations between demographic variables, interests, and online behavior, providing insights into the types of people interested in their products and services.

For example, powerful predictive advertising techniques can analyze first- and third-party intent data and find that women who read a certain type of adventure novel are more likely to buy a certain type of hiking boots.

Footwear retailers can leverage these insights to target potential buyers before they show purchase intent.

Predictive advertising tools also leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to not only uncover these data insights but also act on behalf of advertisers to improve ad targeting and deliver value when people need it most.

Perhaps undoubtedly, these features have a huge impact on the customer experience and also solve a major problem advertisers face in their daily remarketing.

So how do consumers feel when they see a display ad for boots 20 minutes after buying them online?

The short answer is that they think it’s annoying.

Or at least they don’t like the obvious evidence that advertisers are tracking their online behavior.

However, by advertising to your target audience before they even consider buying, you will provide unique value that will keep you far ahead of your competitors.

The bottom line

From customer service to help desks to shipping needs, you put your customers first in many aspects of the sales cycle.

Therefore, you should also rightfully prioritize your customers’ experience in your advertising messages.

Among other things, strategies such as leveraging emotional appeal, improving site navigation and ease of use, and providing relevant and consistent landing pages can help drive important campaign goals (e.g., clicks and conversions, higher ROI, and increased revenue).

But beyond that, marketers today do have the opportunity to breathe new life into marketing campaigns and change the negative perception of advertising among consumers.

Advertisers can use tools to deliver more targeted and relevant ads to the right audience at the right time, allowing them to anticipate and meet buyers’ needs before they are fully realized.

Harnessing their full potential and truly improving the customer experience starts with thinking like a customer.