Target the people who have just gained a reason to buy your product. Your target audience is the group of people you choose to show an ad to, and the right group changes with the window: during a build-up, a specific set of people starts looking. Describe them in the terms ad platforms use, such as age, income, location and interests.
Most advice on finding a target audience starts with a customer persona written once and kept for years. A persona describes who bought from you before. It says little about who is about to start looking this month.
Who should I target with my ads?
You should target the people who are starting to look for your product now, and the easiest way to find them is to name the event that gives them a reason to buy. That event is the buyer trigger.
A buyer trigger is something that happens in a person's life or business right before they need a product. Someone who just moved needs new locks. A company that just hired five people needs onboarding software. A founder who just registered a business needs a way to send invoices.
Once you know the trigger, the audience follows. You are looking for people who have gone through that event recently, or are about to. Verdius does this step for you by naming the events behind each window for your product and the people they bring into the market.
Why does your target audience change from one window to the next?
Your target audience changes from one window to the next because each window has a different event behind it, and each event brings a different group of people into the market.
Take storage units. When rents rise for several months in a row, more renters move, and many need somewhere to keep things between leases. When home sales climb for a third month, new owners downsizing or combining households need storage too. Same product, two windows, two audiences with different ages, incomes and reasons.
Onboarding software works the same way. When hiring rises month over month at small companies, the buyer is often the founder or an office manager. When it rises at large companies, the buyer is an HR lead with a specific job title. An ad aimed at one group misses the other.
A demand window is a period with a start and a stop when demand for a specific product is rising. Treat each window as its own audience question. For more on how windows form, see what a demand window is.
How do you describe an audience in the terms ad platforms use?
You describe an audience by translating the buyer trigger into the options each ad platform offers: demographics, interests, life events and, on business platforms, job details. The trigger stays the same across platforms, and the settings change.
Google Ads offers age, gender, parental status and household income as demographic options. Household income comes in tiers, from the top 10% to the lower 50%, and is available in some countries on Search, Display, Video and Demand Gen campaigns. Google Ads also has audience segments for life events, such as moving homes, and in-market segments for people researching a purchase.
Meta lets you choose location, age and gender, then narrow with detailed targeting based on demographics and interests.
LinkedIn describes people by their work. You can target by job title, job function, seniority, company size, company industry and company growth rate, which LinkedIn bases on factors such as employee growth.
Microsoft Advertising lets search ads use LinkedIn profile details: company, industry and job function. These work as bid adjustments, so they raise or lower bids for those people without narrowing who can see the ad.
Which audience fits which window?
The audience that fits a window is the group of people the event behind it brings into the market. The table below pairs common build-ups with the people who start looking and a way to describe them.
| What is building | Who starts looking | How to describe them in ad platforms |
|---|---|---|
| Home sales climbing for a third month | New owners replacing doorbells, locks and blinds | The age bands and income tiers your past buyers fall into, a moving homes life event, interests in home improvement |
| Rents rising for consecutive months | Renters moving and booking movers and storage | Age bands that match your past buyers, a moving homes life event, interests in apartments and moving |
| Hiring rising month over month | HR and operations leads shopping for onboarding software | Job function in human resources or operations, manager seniority and above, fast company growth rate |
| New business registrations climbing for several months | First-time founders who need invoicing software | Job titles such as founder or owner, the smallest company sizes, interests in small business |
| Used car sales rising for several months | New car owners adding dash cams and seat covers | Interests in cars and auto accessories, age bands that match your past buyers |
| Preorders building ahead of a game console's release | Buyers of extra controllers, headsets and storage | Interests in gaming and in that console, age bands that match your past buyers |
Location matters in every row. Set it to the places you can sell and ship to, and to the places where the build-up is happening, if it is uneven.
Which approach to targeting should you use?
Building an audience for each demand window gives the clearest answer to who is about to buy. The other common approaches answer narrower questions.
| Approach | What it answers | What it misses |
|---|---|---|
| A fixed customer persona | Who bought from you in the past | New groups that start looking when the event behind demand changes |
| Audiences modeled on past customers | Who resembles people you already sold to | People with a fresh reason to buy who look nothing like past customers |
| Broad targeting, left to the ad platform | Who responds to your ads, learned from your results | Why they respond, and it needs many conversions to learn |
| An audience for each demand window | Who gained a reason to buy this week and why | Hourly and placement tuning, which you do afterward |
The approaches work together. You can start with the window's audience, then let the platform widen it once conversions come in.
How do you target people who are starting to look?
You target people who are starting to look by combining the trigger with signs of active shopping. The trigger tells you who has a reason to buy, and shopping signals tell you who is acting on it.
On search, people show you directly with the words they type. Raise bids on category searches during the window. On Google Ads, in-market and life event segments add people whose recent activity points to a purchase. On LinkedIn, company growth rate points to companies adding staff.
Leave out people who already bought, unless you sell something they buy again. Past buyers inflate results and cost money without adding new customers.
Should I use broad targeting and let the ad platform find buyers, or narrow my audience to the people in the window?
Use broad targeting once a campaign has enough conversions for the platform to learn from, and narrow the audience while you are still gathering them. A common middle path is to launch with the window's audience, then widen it as results come in and the platform can see who converts.
How narrow can my audience be when I only have a small amount to spend on one campaign?
Your audience can be quite narrow when you spend a small amount, because a small budget reaches only a small group anyway. A tight audience of people with a clear trigger, such as recent movers for a doorbell, puts each dollar in front of someone with a reason to act. Widen it if the campaign struggles to spend what you set.
Do I need a different audience on each ad platform for the same window?
You need the same people described differently on each platform. New homeowners are a moving homes life event on Google Ads, an age band plus home improvement interests on Meta, and rarely a LinkedIn audience at all. Build the audience where those people spend time.
What should your ads say to the audience in a window?
Your ads should speak to the event that put the audience in the market. New homeowners respond to an ad about their new place. A company that is hiring fast responds to one about getting new staff set up by their first day.
A message about the trigger shows the reader that you understand why they are looking. A general product ad asks them to make that connection themselves. See advertising use cases for examples by product.
When should you change your target audience?
You should change your target audience when a window closes or a new one opens. The people who were starting to look have mostly made their choice, and the next window brings a different group.
When a window closes, lower spend on its audience and keep a small campaign for people who visited without buying. When the next window opens, build its audience before the first day. Verdius alerts you when a window opens and when it closes, so you know when to switch audiences. To confirm a window is opening, check the signals in how to tell if demand is rising.
What tool tells you who to target with ads?
Verdius is software that predicts when demand for a product will rise and who to target then. For each product it finds optimal windows to run ads, each with a start and a stop, ranked against each other.
Each window comes with the events behind it and an audience described by age, income, location and interests, in the terms ad platforms already use. Verdius reads your Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn and other ad accounts, plus Google Analytics and Search Console. You build the audience and run the ads yourself. See how Verdius finds windows.
So who should you target with your ads?
Target the people who have just gained a reason to buy. Name the event that sends them looking, find who is going through it now and describe them in each platform's own terms. Change the audience when the window changes.