“For Display, Search, Video, Hotel and Standard Shopping campaigns, audiences are made up of segments, or groups of people with specific interests, intents, and demographic information, as estimated by Google. When adding an audience to a campaign or ad group, you can select from a wide range of segments. For example, these segments could include fans of sport and travel, people shopping for cars, or specific people that have visited your website or app.”
How Do Audiences Work on the Platform?
Google Ads lets us apply several criteria, such as:
- Targeting: aiming directly at a specific type of person. In practice, targeting is widely used to reach a particular group of customers. For example, a company selling baby products will target young parents.
- Observation: has no direct impact on ad delivery. This is often used to track how ads are performing with a particular group. Observation can help guide decisions about who to target once the data has been gathered.
- Exclusion: keeping an ad from showing to a group of consumers who have no reason to see it. In a campaign meant to win new customers, it’s best to exclude your existing customers so they don’t see the same message again.
What Types of Google Ads Audiences Can We Use?
Google gives us access to several ready-made audience segments that are already filled with users. Smaller businesses that can’t gather enough of their own data to build campaigns often rely on these ready-made audiences.
First, we can target by area, such as a physical store, a postal code, a city, a region, or a country, either within a set radius or not. For example, a small local retailer with 4 locations might want to target people within 1 kilometer of each store with daily deals to draw in nearby shoppers.
Demographic targeting lets anyone aim at people based on gender, age, parental status, or household income. Note that Google doesn’t allow targeting users under 18 or by a specific age. The same goes for household income, which is broken down by percentage brackets, such as: top 10%, 11-20%, all the way down to the lowest 50%.
Next, the user identity segment lets us target people based on marital status, level of education completed, home ownership status, or industry of employment. For example, a dating app might target single users to grow its subscriber base.
In-market audience segments group people who show an active interest in buying a specific product. A user might be placed in a category based on their interest in real estate, beauty products, a fitness service, a type of software, and so on. A flower shop could target everyone showing interest in buying flowers for Mother’s Day.
Affinity segments, meanwhile, target people who have a strong, ongoing interest in something specific. A user might be categorized based on their hobbies, the type of media they consume, the kind of trips they’ve been researching, the type of vehicle they own, and so on. For example, a local garden center might target people passionate about gardening during sod-laying season. Another example: a travel agency specializing in southern getaways might want to target people interested in exotic destinations.
Here’s a full list of in-market and affinity audiences. It includes more than 800 audiences that Google Ads has built based on its users.
Google Ads Custom Audience Segments
The platform lets us target users based on their interests, purchase intentions, the terms they’ve searched for, the types of websites they’ve browsed, or the apps they use. When it comes to interests and purchase intentions, this tool gets us closer to the in-market or affinity audiences described above. It could make sense for a well-known brand to test an audience made up of people interested in buying from a competitor. For example, company XYZ sells a product similar to the Dyson vacuum and wants to target people who have shown interest in Dyson products.
Building a segment of people who’ve searched for specific terms on Google can be useful when you want to stay in front of users over a long stretch of time. Sometimes, whether organically or through paid search, a user won’t click on the search result. It’s worth knowing that, as things stand, there’s no way to choose keyword match types in this section of Google Ads. For example, say you work for a small, lesser-known lighting shop and want to target people who’ve searched for terms like pendant light, outdoor light, wall sconce, and so on. This approach lets you target users with a clear, specific interest.
You can also build an audience based on the websites a user visits. In practice, this type of audience is used in campaigns aimed at competitors or at services related to a business. For example, an immigration assistance service might target everyone who has viewed an application page on the Immigration Canada website.
Google Ads also lets us target an audience based on the apps installed on their device. When a business offers a similar service, it’s worth testing this type of audience. For example, a strategy board game app that just launched might want to target players of another app in the same category.
What About Audiences from Outside Google Ads?
It’s always worth looking at audiences built from a company’s own data, such as Google Analytics, Google Hotel Center, Merchant Center, Google Play, YouTube, and so on. In practice, you need to figure out what fits your business best based on its needs. And without getting into the weeds, it’s possible, and worthwhile, to connect other platforms like a CRM tool, Mailchimp, Salesforce, Zapier, Shopify, and so on.
By connecting these platforms, you can build much more dynamic audiences to use in your Google Ads campaigns. For example, it’s quite simple to exclude a list of active customers from your campaigns so they don’t see ads meant for new customers, which helps you spend your budget more wisely. On the flip side, there are plenty of ways to target consumers too. The most common one is targeting someone who visited your site but didn’t convert.
Retargeting always works through audiences used for targeting within a campaign. This means showing an ad to someone based on a specific online behavior within a given time frame. Take a transactional website as an example: someone browses products but doesn’t buy. This is a great chance for a business to retarget these people, since they’ve already shown interest in the products. A growing practice is partnering with an influencer and using their audience to promote a product the influencer has been paid to feature.
Remarketing is about reaching out again to existing customers by showing them ads made just for them. This audience is used to keep the brand in front of people so they’ll take a real action, like buying a product. For example, someone who added an item to their cart will be shown an ad for that same item. A good practice here is connecting your platforms to centralize your data. Without that, it becomes very hard to keep your audiences properly separated.
Tips and Tricks
You can combine audiences using AND/OR/NOT criteria to widen or narrow your targeting. This lets us blend internal data with Google’s audiences. A good practice for an online store would be to exclude people who bought a product in the last 30 days.
With Google Ads, you can build audience segments similar to ones already in your account. Over time, Google gathers more data and offers businesses extra options, like audiences of people who behave similarly to those who visited the site or converted. It’s well worth testing this type of audience once your account has enough data to find similar users. In the settings, you can even widen the audience by adjusting the percentage of behavioral similarity (0 to 10%).
Another list worth using is the one called the AdWords Optimized List. It works the same way as the list of people who searched for a term on Google. The difference is that the keywords used come from your best-performing existing campaigns.
