Combined audiences allow you to combine various audience attributes, such as detailed demographics and affinities, to create “personas” that represent segments of your target audiences.
You can create any number of personas to represent different types of users that might use your products, services, or website. By creating personas based on your users’ backgrounds, needs, and goals, you can target the right customers at the right time.
With combined audiences, you can intersect audience segments to express most advertiser personas. For example, let’s say you are targeting your ad to outdoor enthusiasts (affinity audience) or people looking to buy a car (in-market audience). With combined audiences, you can now intersect the affinity audience with in-market audience and target the ad for your SUV to outdoor enthusiasts who are also looking to buy a car. Without combined audiences, you would also show your ad to people who are outdoor enthusiasts and not in-market for a car or people who are in-market for a car and don’t like the outdoors.
You can create a single audience from multiple first- and third-party audience lists, as well as interest-based Display & Video 360 Audiences lists for affinity and in market audiences. Once created, you can target the new audience list in multiple line items, both current and future.
Note that you can only either create a combined audience or target an audience list within a line item at any given time—never both.
Create a combined audience
- From your Display & Video 360 advertiser, click Audiences > All Audiences on the left menu. (Alternatively, you can navigate to Audiences > All Audiences > Combined tab and click New Combined Audience)
- Click New Audience > Combined audience.
- Enter a name and description for your audience list.
- In the "Include" section, click Add to add audiences you want to include.
- Use the Audience type drop-down to select between First-Party, Google, and Third-Party (Other) audiences.
- Use the filter to narrow results by Audience eligibility (Any, Display, YouTube) and Source.
- When you are done selecting your audiences, click Apply.
- To include (OR) additional audiences, click Add audience to expand.
- To intersect (AND) another audience segment(s) in to your audience, click Add group to narrow.
- If you want to exclude audiences from your combined audience, under the "Exclude" section, click Add and then select the audiences you want to exclude. Note that at least one audience must be included before an exclusion is allowed.
- Click Save.
The new audience will appear in the Audiences > All Audiences > Combined tab typically within four hours (but could take longer - up to a maximum of 5-7 days) and is available for you to target in current and future line items.
You can target combined audiences on the YouTube ad group level. Learn more about targeting YouTube & partners line items.
Supported audience types
| Audience types | Display and video | YouTube |
|---|---|---|
| First-party |
|
(RLSA-compliant lists only) |
| PAIR |  |
|
| Third-party | |
|
| Affinity | |
|
| In-market | |
|
| Installed apps | |
|
| New mobile devices | |
|
| Detailed demographics | |
|
| Life events | |
Edit an existing combined audience
- From your Display & Video 360 advertiser, go to the Audiences > All Audiences > Combined tab.
- Select the combined audience you want to edit.
- Make your changes.
- Click Save.
Limitations
- You can include a maximum of 10 intersects (AND).
- Overall maximum of 100 intersects (AND), includes (OR), and exclusions per combined audience.
- The more (AND) requirements, the more limited the audience size, possibly resulting in a combined audience of less than 1000. A campaign may not serve to a small audience of this size.
- Combined audiences with only exclusions are not supported.
- Combined audiences may partially serve if you don't have access to some of the audiences within the combined audience.
- Combined audiences may partially serve if the audiences within it are not supported on display, video, or YouTube.
- Similar audiences are not supported on combined audiences.
- Combined audiences are not supported for YouTube Ad Sequence (VAS) line items.
- Combined audiences containing first-party lists aren't supported for non-YouTube connected TV inventory.
- The system used to forecast numbers shown on the combined audience list tab is not the same as that used for the combined audience editor page and therefore you can expect these forecasts to differ.
- Combined Audiences containing PAIR lists do not support audience summary and breakdown.