To provide a comprehensive and consolidated view of your Audiences and make audience management and optimization simpler, you’ll find the following improvements in Google Ads:
- New audience reporting
Detailed reporting about audience demographics, segments, and exclusions is now consolidated in one place. Click the Campaigns iconand open the “Audiences, keywords and content” tab and click Audiences. You can also easily manage your Audiences from this report page. Learn more About Audience reporting.
- New terms
We’re using new terms on your audience report and throughout Google Ads. For example, “audience types” (these include custom, in-market, and affinity) are now referred to as audience segments and “remarketing” is now referred to as “your data”. Learn more about the Updates to Audience terms and phrases.
While Google Ads creates basic data segments comprised of your website visitors, you may want to create your own lists that are customized to your website and a specific audience segment. These templates help you customize your data segments setup so that you can create lists more efficiently. This article contains best practices to help you use templates.
Before you begin
Start with setting up your data segments that include visitors to your website or app. If you aren't familiar with your website's code, consider working with a developer or someone who has a technical background.
Use the "Visitors of a web page" template to create lists of people who visited a certain page or group of pages. This is the most common template, set as the default option.
Example
An airline creates a data segment comprised of people who visited their website's flight deals section, and decides to show these visitors ads about discounts. They create a data segment with people who visited pages that have a URL which contains "example.com/flight-deals."
After selecting this template, enter the action rules that must be met in order for visitors of a page to be added to the data segment.
Example
An airline wants to create a list of people who searched on their website for flights from or to New York City. In the URL of the search results page there isn't any information about the origin or destination city, but just the IATA codes of the airports. To create a data segment comprising of people who search for flights to or from New York, the airline creates a rule with 3 action rules:
- "URL contains JFK" (for John F. Kennedy International Airport)
- "URL contains LGA" (for LaGuardia Airport)
- "URL contains EWR" (for Newark Liberty International Airport)
Anyone who visits a page with a URL that has any of the following codes would be added to the list: "JFK," "LGA," or "EWR."
You can add more actions to your rule by selecting "Add action (and)", "Add action (or)", or "Exclude action". After adding a new action rule and saving the list, visitors need to match any of the actions in the rule but not necessarily all of them to be added to the list; this is an "OR" relationship. The order of the action rules doesn't affect which visitors will be added.
Example
An airline wants to reach people who searched for flights to or from New York or people who visited the site section about visiting New York City. They create a rule with these actions:
- "URL contains JFK" (for John F. Kennedy International Airport)
- "URL contains LGA" (for LaGuardia Airport)
- "URL contains EWR" (for Newark Liberty International Airport)
- "URL contains example.com/newyorkcity."
In order to be added to the data segment, the website visitors need to match at least one of the conditions in the rule, but not necessarily all of them.
Although you can add as many action rules as needed, keep in mind that the rule should represent your audience. Adding more action rules means increasing the chances for visitors to be added to the data segment, and you could end up with a very large list that includes people who aren't your intended audience.
Narrowing down the conditions
People need to visit a page that matches the action rules in order to be added to your data segment. However, action rules like "URL contains" or "Referrer URL" may not be specific enough to define the characteristics of a page.
Example
An airline wants to create a list of people who are looking for flights from the JFK airport, but not to the JFK airport. The URL of the website for someone who's looking for flights from JFK to Mexico (MEX), for example, would look something like this:
example-site.com/search.php?origin=JFK&dest=MEX
Conditions like "URL contains" aren't specific enough to define that people are looking for flights from JFK but not to JFK. Instead, they need rules to specify that "origin=JFK" is accepted, but "dest=JFK" isn't.
When you set up your segment, use the “Actions” section to build a set of action rules for your segment. You can base these on a single action, multiple actions, and excluded actions. For each rule, choose an action from the drop-down menu and enter a value for “days”. The drop-down menu’s default option is "Web page visit", but other options may be available based on the parameters in your website tag.
Note: Here are other tag parameters that could populate as additional options in the "Action" drop-down menu:
- dynx_pagetype
- ecomm_pagetype
- edu_pagetype
- event
- flight_pagetype
- hotel_pagetype
- hrental_pagetype
- job_pagetype
- listing_pagetype
- local_pagetype
- pagetype
- travel_pagetype
You may have some older global site tags implemented in a few pages. If your setup uses JavaScript from the previous version of the global site tag, it will continue to work. If your setup uses the non-JavaScript image tag, it’s recommended that you use the new tag to have full functionality. The global site tag and event snippet ensure that all of your data segment events comprised of your website visitors are accounted for.
Example
A while ago, an airline added a global site tag to sections of their website about popular routes. Creating a rule based on the URL for those sections would be too complex using rules. The airline could create a data segment comprised of people who visited sections of the website about the popular route by using the "Visitors of a page with a specific tag" template, and selecting the tag that was implemented a while ago on those pages.
When you use the "Visitors of a page with a specific tag" template, you can select existing Google Ads conversion tracking tags as well. Selecting a conversion tracking tag can be helpful if you haven't been able to add the global sites tag to the conversion page but still want to reach or exclude this audience segment.
