You can show your ads to specific audience segments based on who they are, their interests and habits, what they’re actively researching or how they've interacted with your business.
Demand Gen has an audience-first approach to tailored ad experiences, and offers advertisers audience targeting solutions to enable them to reach the right users at the right time. Demand Gen allows you to reach engaged consumers and turn intent into demand with unique audience targeting, including lookalike segments.
How audience segments work
Demand Gen 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. Google Ads will show ads to people who are likely in the selected categories.
Audiences are determined by people’s activity using Google products and third-party websites or estimated based on content certain groups of people are likely to be interested in. Activity and content on third-party websites are primarily used for audience segments on third-party websites, and activity and content on Google products are primarily used for audience segments on those products.
The ability to show your ads online to people with specific interests can help you reach the right customers. You can do this in Google Ads by adding audience segments to your ad groups. Learn more about audience segments
Available audiences
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Audience segments |
Available audiences |
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Campaign-level targeting |
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Google segments |
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Reach users that have interacted with your business. |
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AI-powered targeting |
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Exclusions |
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Audience best practice guidance
Use the following suggestions to increase the success of your Demand Gen audiences.
Ad group-level targeting
Advertisers with distinct targeting strategies and corresponding creatives should separate each target audience into individual ad groups. This will allow easier management and ensure distinct performance reporting using the ad group-level reporting. Set location, language and other demographics at the ad group-level for tailored messaging to those demographics.
Re-engage existing customers
Leverage your first-party data (customer lists, website visitors, app users) by adding them to Google. You can also connect your YouTube account to re-engage viewers and subscribers. Find and re-engage those already searching for you or your product by adding relevant keywords (including your top 10–15 performing Google keywords).
Acquire new customers
We offer several approaches to finding new customers including:
- Lookalike audiences: Find new customers similar to your existing ones. Choose a seed list and expand it (narrow, balanced or broad) to balance reach and similarity. Create separate ad groups for lookalike segments.
- Exclusions: Focus your campaign on new-customer acquisition only by excluding users from your first-party data (website visitors, app users, customer lists etc.).
Explore additional audience solutions
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Optimised targeting: Customers focused on driving conversions and ad performance can opt in to our automated targeting solution to fuel their ad performance. Then, you can optionally add in additional audience hints to indicate where we might find converters.
- Advertisers with depth of audience knowledge can add segments to construct a unique audience by using Google built-in market, life event, demographic, affinity and custom audience segments based on user activity across Google and YouTube (searches, website visits, app downloads).
