HubSpot Ad Audiences (2024)

In the vibrant and ever-changing world of digital marketing, targeting the right audience with precision is not just beneficial; it's essential for the success of any campaign. Amid the myriad of tools and platforms available today, it can be daunting to find the most effective way to connect with your ideal customers. HubSpot, a pioneering force in inbound marketing, sales, and customer service, simplifies this process with innovative solutions designed to cut through the noise. A prime example of this is HubSpot Ad Audiences. This powerful feature enables businesses to harness first-party data—data that you own, also known as CRM advertising or CRM Retargeting—to create and manage targeted ad campaigns with unmatched precision. In this guide, we will explore the capabilities of HubSpot Ad Audiences, uncover how they can be used to bolster your marketing efforts and share best practices to maximize your return on investment (ROI).

What are HubSpot Ad Audiences?

HubSpot Ad Audiences is a feature within the HubSpot Ads tool that allows you to create and manage audiences for your ad campaigns. These audiences can be built based on various criteria, such as contact lists, website activity, and lookalike audiences, giving you the power to target specific audience segments with tailored messaging.

Enhance your targeting by leveraging HubSpot’s CRM to create highly targeted ad campaigns based on detailed customer profiles. Use HubSpot’s segmentation capabilities to craft customer list audiences and reach specific groups with tailored messages.

With HubSpot Ads, you can build audiences using your HubSpot data and upload them to Google, LinkedIn and Facebook for targeting. This allows you to:

• Improve targeting by reaching known audiences exclusively or targeting cold traffic separately that has never interacted with your brand.
• Reach warm audiences that already know your brand with unique messaging, leading to more effective advertising campaigns.

By creating more targeted ad campaigns, you can drive better results. You can also exclude specific audiences to refine your targeting further.

HubSpot Ad Audiences enables you to create custom audiences to share with ad platforms using multiple data sources within HubSpot, ensuring your campaigns are highly targeted and effective.

Benefits of Using HubSpot Ad Audiences

Precision Targeting:

Enhanced Personalisation: Tailor your ad messaging to different audience segments, ensuring relevance and resonance with each group, which can significantly improve engagement and conversion rates.

Efficient Retargeting: Reach visitors who have interacted with your website but haven't converted yet, keeping your brand top-of-mind and encouraging them to take the next step.Seamless Integration with Major Ad Platforms:

Automated Audience Updates:

Data-Driven Insights and Optimisation:

Scalable Lookalike Audiences:

Improved ROI:

Streamlined Campaign Management:

Increased Conversion Potential:

By ensuring that your ads are shown to the right people at the right time, HubSpot Ad Audiences help increase the likelihood of converting prospects into customers. These benefits make HubSpot Ad Audiences a powerful tool for any business looking to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of its digital marketing efforts.

Types of HubSpot Audiences You Can Build for Ad Targeting

With HubSpot Ads, you can build audiences using your HubSpot data and upload them to various ad platforms using hashed encryption, which matches the advertising platform users. This feature allows you to leverage your first-party data to create highly targeted advertising campaigns, enhancing both the effectiveness and efficiency of your ad efforts. By creating more targeted ad campaigns, you can ultimately drive better results.

With HubSpot, there are so many types of audiences you can build and share with ad platforms. For example, you could have a different advert for each lifecycle stage. You can upsell to existing customers with specific ads, or show a top-of-the-funnel ad to new prospects.

By leveraging these diverse audience types, you can create highly personalised ad experiences that resonate more deeply with your target audience, driving higher engagement and conversion rates. HubSpot Ads provides the flexibility and power to refine your targeting strategy continuously, ensuring your advertising efforts are always aligned with your business goals. Here are a few examples:

Website Users:

Remarket to individuals who have visited your website, ensuring your ads reach those already familiar with your brand. These users are matched with their website cookie list, which is collected by the Google conversion tracking pixel or the HubSpot pixel.

Email Contact Lists:

Retarget your contact/email lists by segmenting them into audiences based on specific behaviours, preferences, or demographics. For example, you can upload your customer list to upsell or exclude them from cold traffic campaigns.

Lookalike Segment Audiences:

Build a cold audience of people who are most similar to your website visitors, email subscribers, and customer lists by matching them with LinkedIn's user database through hashed encryption.

Lifecycle Stage Audiences:

Tailor your ads to different stages of the buyer's journey. For instance, show introductory offers to new leads and premium service features to marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). Display top-of-the-funnel ads to new prospects who are not yet leads or past website visitors, and create specific adverts for each lifecycle stage of a new contact lead. Upsell to existing customers with targeted ads, encouraging repeat purchases or promoting complementary products and services. This approach ensures your advertising efforts are relevant and effective at every stage of your sales cycle.

Ads Interaction Audiences:

You can segment contacts in lists based on their ads interactions in ad networks including Google Ads, Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads.
Ad interactions include when users click on your ads or submit a form after they engage with your ad. Each ads interaction filter represents a trackable ad interaction, such as identifying which contacts clicked through to your website from a specific Google Ads campaign.

Event-Based Audiences:

Geographic Audiences:

Customise your ads based on the location of your audience to deliver region-specific offers or announcements using HubSpot properties such as city name or postal code to segment targeted lists.

Demographic Audiences:

To effectively use Google Ads with HubSpot demographic targeting, start by collecting detailed demographic information from your audience, such as age, gender, location, and job title, through lead forms and CRM data integration. Next, create segmented lists in HubSpot based on these demographics, allowing for precise targeting. Sync these segmented lists with Google Ads to ensure your campaigns reach the desired demographic groups. Tailor your ad content to resonate with each segment by adjusting visuals, copy, and offers to match their specific preferences and needs.

Buyer Persona Audiences:

You can segment your retargeting lists based on personas that you have created inside HubSpot to create more tailored ad content.

Hyper-Targeting Audiences:

LinkedIn Audience Targeting

Company Names:

Remarket to specific companies that have visited your website, enhancing B2B marketing efforts. You can retarget anyone at the company of the site visitor, identified by their company IP address, or filter down using LinkedIn Ads job title targeting. Use the HubSpot Prospects Tool to create a list of companies that visit your website and remarket to people at the company (not just the individual who visited your website). You can retarget everyone in the company, but it is more effective to focus on key decision-making job titles by overlaying this audience upon your company/account target list.

Website Users:

Remarket to individuals who have visited your website, ensuring your ads reach those already familiar with your brand. The user is matched with their website cookie list as gathered by the LinkedIn Pixel.

Email Contact Lists:

Retarget your segmented email lists to create audiences based on specific behaviours, preferences, or demographics. For example, you can upload your customer list to upsell or exclude them from cold traffic campaigns.

Lookalike Audiences:

Build a cold audience of people who are most similar to your website visitors, email subscribers, and customer lists by matching with the ad platform user database through hashed encryption.

Lifecycle Stage Audiences:

Tailor your ads to different stages of the buyer's journey. For instance, show introductory offers to new leads and premium service features to marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). Display different ads to prospects in the quote/deal/opportunity lifecycle stage. Show top-of-the-funnel ads to new prospects who are not yet leads, or have different adverts for each lifecycle stage of a new lead. Upsell to existing customers with specific ads, encouraging repeat purchases or promoting complementary products and services.

Event-Based Audiences:

Target users based on their interactions with your content or events, such as webinar attendees or those who downloaded a particular resource. For example, send an email automatically using a workflow to contacts generated by HubSpot Ads that return to your website.

Geographic Audiences:

Customise your ads based on the location of your audience to deliver region-specific offers or announcements using HubSpot properties such as city name or postal code.

Demographic Audiences:

By leveraging these diverse audience types, you can create highly personalised ad experiences that resonate more deeply with your target audience, driving higher engagement and conversion rates.

Google Ads First Party Audience Targeting

First-party audience targeting in Google Ads refers to the use of your own data—collected directly from your interactions with customers or visitors—to create customised and highly relevant advertising campaigns. This type of targeting leverages the information that your business has gathered firsthand, such as data from your CRM systems, website analytics, mobile app usage, or any other direct customer engagements. Here's a detailed explanation of how it works and the benefits it offers:

Types of First-Party Data

1. Website Visitors: Data collected via tracking who visits your website, what pages they view, and the actions they take.
2. Customer Lists: Information from CRM databases, including email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses.
3. App Users: Data from users who have downloaded and interacted with your mobile app.
4. Offline Interactions: Information from in-store purchases or direct interactions that are later digitised.

Implementing First-Party Audience Targeting in Google Ads

Customer Match: This powerful tool allows you to upload lists of contact information from your customers. Google then uses this data to match your customers with users logged into Google services. This enables you to target or retarget customers across Search, Shopping, Gmail, YouTube, and Display Network campaigns.

Website and App Remarketing: By implementing the Google Ads tag on your website or the Google Analytics tag, you can collect data on your visitors and app users. This data helps you create remarketing lists, allowing you to serve targeted ads to users who have previously interacted with your digital assets but did not convert.

Offline Data Import: If you collect offline data, such as in-store purchases or direct mail responses, you can import this data into Google Ads. This can be particularly useful for creating personalised ad campaigns targeting users based on their offline behaviours.

How to Create Audiences in HubSpot for Ad Targeting

HubSpot provides three distinct ways to create your ad audience, centered around website visitors, as well as your contacts and company name lists. Understanding the specific requirements of each platform is essential before initiating the audience creation process.

Minimum audience size for targeting:

• Google Search Network: At least 1,000 visitors in the last 30 days.
• Google Display Network: At least 100 visitors in the last 30 days.
• Facebook Ads: Minimum audience size of 20 users.
• LinkedIn Ads: Minimum audience size of 300 users.

Opting to create audiences in HubSpot offers the advantage of utilising your own data if you already have contacts in HubSpot. Additionally, you can gradually build audiences over time that align with specific criteria, allowing targeted focus on these contacts in your ads.

Create a website visitor's audience within HubSpot:

• Navigate to Marketing | Ads | Create audience.
• In the pop-up page, choose Website visitors.
• Under Source pixel, select the appropriate pixel (Facebook, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads).
• Segment the audience based on visited pages with ad time estimation.
• Provide a name and click Create audience.

Create a contact audience list within HubSpot :

• Go to Marketing | Ads | Create audience | Contacts list.
• Check the checkbox confirming the list was not obtained from a third party.
• Choose the relevant ad account.
• Name the list and click Create audience.

Create a Company Audience within HubSpot:

1. Navigate to Marketing | Ads | Create audience.
2. In the pop-up page, choose Companies.
3. Select the relevant criteria for segmenting the companies, such as industry, company size, or location.
4. Choose the appropriate ad account.
5. Provide a name for the audience and click Create audience.