About Google Ads audience segment targeting in a Search Ads 360 bid strategy

Note: Remarketing-optimized bid adjustments only apply to bid strategies using intra-day bidding for enhanced targeting and control. While Google Ads auction-time bidding campaigns still use audience lists in bid optimization, similar to all bid strategies using audience lists.

When you apply a remarketing list for Search ads to a campaign or ad group, it becomes an audience target that enables you to display relevant ads to customers who have previously visited your site. To reach these customers, you can set a bid adjustment, ranging from -90% to +900%, relative to the keyword bids for the ad group.

Rather than setting the bid adjustment for an audience target, you can let Search Ads 360 use a bid strategy's goal to set or recommend the adjustment based on the historical performance of all the audience targets in a campaign or ad group.

Note: In new custom Floodlight columns, bid strategies, and conversion goals, cross-environment activity is automatically considered when setting or recommending device (mobile, desktop, and tablet), audience target, and location target bid adjustments, unless you choose not to include the cross-environment conversions.

A Search Ads 360 bid strategy can access historical performance (conversion stats) from your Google Ads audience targets in Search Ads 360 only if auto-tagging is enabled for your Google Ads accounts. Search Ads 360 receives conversion stats from the day auto-tagging is enabled. If auto-tagging was enabled before you applied the audience list in Search Ads 360, Search Ads 360 can use the past 90 days of conversion stats.

Supported audience types

Intraday bidding

First-party data: Leverage your own customer data, such as email lists or website visitors, to target specific audiences.
Contextual targeting: Target users based on the content they are consuming, such as keywords or topics.
Demographic and interest targeting: Reach users based on their demographics (age, gender, and location) and interests.

Bid strategies will make automated changes to first-party data, not to other audience types.

Auction-time bidding

Auction time bidding uses audience signals that allow you to add audience suggestions. Learn more about audience signals.

ROI bid strategies optimize audience target bid adjustments

Search Ads 360 bid strategies with a conversion, revenue, or advanced targeting goal can optimize bid adjustments for audience targets when applied to a portfolio of campaigns and ad groups. As with all bid strategies, Search Ads 360 looks at the performance of all the biddable items and audience targets in the strategy to optimize to the selected goal. Then, Search Ads 360 applies or recommends an audience target bid adjustment.

Note: An audience list that is applied to a campaign can be used to target or exclude ads (negative remarketing).

An audience target that excludes members of an audience list from receiving ads is not included in bid strategy calculations because bidding for negative audience targets doesn't occur.

Bid strategy conversion sources and audience target reporting

Search Ads 360 can adjust bids for Google Ads audience targets to maximize Floodlight conversions, Google Ads conversions, or Google Analytics conversions. When you report on audience targets, you can't add columns from Google Analytics. Google Analytics conversions are still counted, but they display in reports at the keyword, ad, ad group, or campaign level or higher.

Was this helpful?

How can we improve it?