About audience customer types

Audience customer types are a way to label your first-party audience lists based on their relationship to your business. This helps Google AI understand how your customers interact with your brand which helps drive better outcomes for your marketing campaigns.

There are three main types of first-party audience lists:

• Customer lists: These lists include customers who have purchased from your business, signed up for your email list, or otherwise engaged with your brand.
• Web visitor lists: These lists include customers who have visited your website, even if they haven't purchased anything.
• App user lists: These lists include customers who have used your mobile app.

After you’ve added customer types to your audience lists, you can use them to guide your marketing campaigns more effectively. For example, you can create a campaign that reaches people who have visited your website but haven't purchased yet.

How customer types work

Audience customer type is a label that you can assign to an audience list to help Google understand what stage of the customer lifecycle the customers in your audience list are at. This feature can be helpful for optimising your campaigns towards specific types of customers.

Common audience customer types:

• All customers
• Purchasers
• High-value customers
• Disengaged customers
• Qualified leads
• Converted leads
• Paid subscribers
• Loyalty sign-ups
• Basket abandoners

The labels that you apply to your audiences are used to determine which customer segments should be used in customer lifecycle goals, for example:

• New customer value mode: Campaigns optimised to bid higher for new customers use the customers in your 'Purchasers' list to identify which customers are new vs existing.
• High-value new customer mode: Campaigns optimised to bid higher for high-value use your 'High-Value Customers' list to predict which new customers are most likely to drive a high lifetime value for your business.
• Customer win-back mode: Campaigns optimised to re-engage lapsed customers use your 'Disengaged Customers' list to bid higher for customers that haven’t recently engaged with your business.
• High-value customer win-back mode: Campaigns optimised to re-engage high-value lapsed customers use your 'Disengaged Customers' list and 'High-Value Customers' list to bid higher for lapsed customers who have a high predicted lifetime value.

Google Ads continuously evolves to support more customer lifecycle goals. Labelling audience types will become increasingly important for meeting your marketing objectives as we expand the lifecycle goal portfolio.

Beyond optimisation, customer types help organise and analyse your audiences effectively.

Google Analytics audience customer types

When Google Analytics is linked to Google Ads, an Ads link is present with Personalisation turned on and your Google Analytics audiences are exported to Google Ads. Google Analytics audiences become available in the Audience manager for use in Google Ads.

You can manually label your Google Analytics audiences in Google Ads with any customer type to guide campaign optimisation.

Additionally, specific types of Google Analytics audiences will automatically be labelled with the relevant customer type in Google Ads, as follows:

Instructions

To apply customer types to your audience lists, follow the instructions below. Make sure that you’re signed in to the account that owns your audience lists. For example, if your audience lists are owned by your manager account, you would need to be signed in to your manager account to make these changes.

How to set customer types

1. In your Google Ads account, click the Tools icon .
2. Click the Shared library drop-down in the section menu.
3. Click Audience manager.
4. From the menu at the top, select the Your data segments page.
5. Select a customer list to associate with your customer type.
6. Click the Customer type drop-down menu and then select a customer type that appears. You can also search for the customer type that you want to apply for.
7. Click Apply.

How to view or remove customer types

1. In your Google Ads account, click the Tools icon .
2. Click the Shared library drop-down in the section menu.
3. Click Audience manager.
4. From the menu at the top, select the Your data segments page.
5. Select the tick box for the audience list that you want to edit.
6. Click the 'Edit' drop-down menu in the blue bar.
7. Click Remove.