How to use combined segments

You can create combined segments to target your ads to a wide range of audience segments based on who might be interested in your products or services. Once you create combined segments, you can use them throughout your ad groups or campaigns, including Display and Search campaigns.

Read the instructions below to learn how to create new combined segments, add audience segments, exclude audience segments or reuse existing combined audience segments.

Create a new combined segment

In the scope of a campaign/ad group:

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. Select an existing campaign or create a new one.
3. Click on Audiences in the page menu.
4. Click Edit audience segments.
5. Then select
   • Targeting: To narrow the reach of your campaign to the selected segments, with the option to adjust the bids
   • Observations (recommended): To view reports on additional criteria without further narrowing your targeting to only show ads for the selected criteria.
6. Select Browse.
7. Click on Your combined audience segments, then New combined segment. A new window will appear.
8. Under 'Audience name', enter a name for your new combined segment.
9. Under 'Include people who match the following', add the audiences that you want to target your ads to. You may enter a term or phrase, or browse based on: Who they are, what their interests and habits are, what they're researching or planning or how they’ve interacted with your business.
10. To intersect another audience segment into your target audience, click Narrow your segment(AND).
11. In the section that appears, similar to Step 10 above, add audiences from another segment that you want to include in your targeting.
12. If you want to exclude few audience segments from your combined segment, click Exclude segments (NOT) and then, enter the audience segments that you want to exclude from your targeting.
    Note: At least one audience segment must be included before an exclusion is allowed. The exclusions only affect the combined segment and does not impact other audience segments targeted in the campaign or ad group
13. Click Create.

To protect our user’s privacy, Google Ads will not serve a combined segment with <= 1,000 members. Google will automatically pause the Campaigns or Ad groups that are being targeted to a combined segment with fewer members.

Use an existing combined segment

Once you create a combined segment, you can reuse it for your other campaigns or ad groups. You can access, edit or remove your existing combined segments from the targeting picker using the pencil icon next to that audience segment.

If you edit an existing audience segment from the picker for a particular campaign, this will affect all campaigns or ad groups using it.

Reach estimates

Reach estimates will show you an estimated number of impressions of your audience for the combined audience segment being created. These estimates are in context of the audience segment creation and don’t consider campaign specific settings. You may select a specific country, language or channel to get more specific estimates. The reach estimates indicate the effect on reach for each component audience segment of the combined segment.

Related links

• About combined segments
• Combined segments: Definition