Google Ads Custom Audience Segments

We have videos on our channel covering custom intent audiences and custom affinity audiences. Since we made those videos, Google Ads combined those two into one type of audience called a custom audience. And even after that combination happened, they changed the name from custom audiences to custom segments. So, we’re going to go over a few things in today’s video.

First, we’re going to cover how custom segments work. What type of signal does Google use to make sure that we are trying to get in front of the right user? Second, we’re over the inputs that advertisers can use to come up with our own custom segments. Then, I think the most valuable part will just show you some ideas of custom segments you may want to create for your campaigns and then, we’ll go over how you can add them to your ad group targeting.

As I stated in the intro, the original way we could create these custom audiences is by creating different custom intent or custom affinity audiences. Now, with the new custom segments, we don’t have to do any of the separation. It’s all going to be combined within one audience. Now, originally, Affinity was very broad. Looking at the more TV-like demographic audiences of the normal affinity audiences. Then the custom intent audiences were pretty much like creating your own in-market audiences, but with custom segments, they’re all combined into one. We clearly see a difference between affinity and in-market audiences.

So, when you’re combining in the one, you’re probably asking, well, how do they actually work now. And there are 3 signals that Google Ads looks at that really make up your custom segments, and depending on which camp goal and which bid strategy you are using, Google Ad will take those into consideration with these three signals. The first is going to be Reach. Reach is how many people you are getting in front of, and that is totally going to be dependent on what type of custom segment or custom audience you are creating. We will get into options later on.

Next is Consideration and there are definitely signals in terms of previous search history, user behavior on other websites. And depending on which type of custom audience Google will be able to the user intent. Whether they were previously searching for something more specific or just starting the initial discovery phase of what product or service they were looking for. And then Historical Performance. You can pretty much assume they’re going to use the similar or look-alike type behavior and more audience consideration to better match the user you actually want to get in front of.

Now, we just went over three of the main signals that are used to get in front of the right audience when using the custom segment. The advertiser has the majority of the control of what type of custom segment they want to create. So, advertisers can do that in three main ways. First, we can use keywords or phrases that will pretty much represent the ideal customer you want to get in front of. One possible way you can use keywords is to get in front of people who have similar interest or purchase intentions that are related to these keywords or keyword phrases. Or if your Ads are showing up on Google properties, you can use these keywords for people who have searched for these terms on Google or YouTube. I’ll explain that a little bit further later on. But if they search for these keywords before, that show a deeper intent. And to me, these are still more specific than the old custom affidavit audiences that we create.

The next input will be URLs. Think of it as people who browse websites similar to these URLs. We’re not creating a list of remarketing audiences of people who visited these certain websites. That’s not possible unless your Google Analytics or your remarketing codes are on these other websites. Think of it more of similar behavior. Again, people who like to browse or visit websites similar to the URLs we’re creating. And just to confirm, this is placement targeting. Our Ads are not going to be shown on these URLs.

Last is Apps. Similar to the URL input. People who like to use or visit apps similar to the ones that we are using within our custom audience segments. And also like the URL input, this is not saying that our ads will show up on these specific apps if they have ad placements. They could, but we’re using more behavior signals. Now that we have this introduction of how custom segments work, let’s hop into Google Ads and we can go through the setup.

Okay, I’m in the Paid Media Pros Google Ads demo account, and to create a custom segment audience we need to head to the audience manager. To do that go up to tools and settings and then under the shared library column, we see Audience Manager. The initial view will be all of the audience segments you already have created. Some of them will be automatically created by Google Ads, but to start creating your own custom segments we just need the option right next to the default one. Clearly states Custom Segments.

I have a few options here. We’re going to ignore those, pretend that we don’t have any created. So, to begin creating a new one, we need to click the blue plus button, there it says Create a Custom Audience, and then you have the option to name it. But before I do I want to go over the next section right below it, because there is a clear difference between these two. The default option where you see the blue circle right now is, choosing people with any of these interest or purchase intentions.

So, we can still enter in keywords right now and this is going to be more behavioral targeting. People who are actively researching specific products or services based upon the keywords that we will enter look. Now, these interesting behaviors are going to be pretty much more for the display network, not on Google properties. So, you can use these custom segment audiences, like I said, for your display campaigns. I’m not talking about remarketing because when we’re creating these custom segments, there’s no proof that these people have visited your website before or have interacted with your brand before. So, separate those two out.

If we go down and choose the other option, people who search for any of these terms on Google, if you look at the little fine print below, this option is only for you on Google Properties. So, this is going to be for Google Search and your RLSA campaigns, definitely for your YouTube campaigns and also for the Google Discovery campaigns which will include the Gmail placements now. Since we cannot create standalone Gmail campaigns anymore. It’s all part of discovery. So, if you do want to layer in audiences to your RLSA campaigns, you’re running YouTube campaigns and you’re running discovery campaigns, you will want to select the second option. And this is the one I love a lot more, and I talked about it in the initial slides. Because this is the option where you can create audiences based off of search queries that users have typed on Google.com or YouTube.

If they’re searching for this stuff in the past, they’re going to be pretty valuable to me. And that’s why I skipped the segment name initially, because I wanted to show you what the two different settings are. If I was going to pick the default option of people with any of these interests of purchase intentions knowing that I can pretty much use this on the display network, I would call that out. I would make sure this audience name is labeled custom audience. I would say I can only use this for display and then Google ads because that is going to be the bulk of what I add for the search terms but in this case, I selected the Google Property setting.

So, I will call that out in my segment name. This is not something you have to do. I’m just letting you know this is what I do to better call this out. Because if I create a Google Properties custom segment audience, I cannot use that on a display campaign. I would have to pretty much duplicate this audience and choose the other setting. So, that is why I specifically call it out in my segment name but then, go ahead, add all your Google search terms. Once I did that, we see some sort of forecasting stats off to the right. Lot of impressions, some demographic information and we can see this is just for English speaking users in the United States. If I scroll down, I can then click Create.

Let’s go ahead and create another one really quick. I can go up, include my name. This time, I’m going to leave it as the interest and purchase intentions, but let’s go through one of the different inputs and we can see those down below. Remember, I said you can add in URLs and apps. Let’s just stick with URLs, different types of websites. So, here are just a few examples. I’m going in, typing in a bunch of different industry URLs. If you’ve been in this industry for a while, you know that it’s a fairly tight theme. So, in this case, as I mentioned in the slides earlier, I’m creating an audience off of users who typically visit these types of websites. This is not a definitive remarketing audience off of people who do visit these websites.

So, still behavior and interest-related targeting and you can do the same thing with apps. I chose this from an interest or purchase intentions because people aren’t really searching for these domains. These aren’t keywords, these are URLs. So, I’m going to use this one primarily for my display targeting and that’s just another option we can create. So, there are few different options I showed you on how to create them. You can see it’s very easy from the three different inputs we can create and the two examples I went, I kept each of the inputs separate. One keyword type audience, one URL type audience but you can layer on different components together.

So next, I want to show you a few of the different types of audiences you may want to create for your different accounts. So, let’s hop back into some slides and I’m going to give you some of my favorite custom audiences I love to create in my campaigns.

By far, one of the favorite custom audience segments I like to create is from Competitor Terms. If you’ve been doing paid media for a while, you probably know competitive targeting can be expensive especially keyword targeting on the search network. But one thing we know just going through the settings that we just ran over is that if you are targeting custom segments on Google Properties, those are based off of search terms that people have typed in on Google.com or YouTube. So, that shows a clear intent that people are searching for your competitors.

Create a custom segment of your competitor terms. I’ll leave it up to you if you want to combine all your competitors into one or in this example, we’re using one competitor and all their different types of products. And then get in front of those users who have searched for your competitors with Creative that showcases why your brand is the better option. Why are you better than this competitor? It’s one of my favorite ways to try to steal market share. This may not be applicable to everyone but look at Localized Terms. If you have a brick-and-mortar location or people can actually walk into your store, look at some those localized terms. Get in front of users who are searching for near me or calling out specific cities.

This is where I strongly recommend that Creative is going to be important, that you’re making Creative that matches the location that people were searching for. And then help them find ways to actually get into your store to look at your products or services. Another one could be top-selling products. Now, the image right here is just pull from Google Analytics. Just looking at the overall Ecommerce report, we can see top-selling products and the ones driving the most revenue but you don’t have to use just Google Analytics.

If you want to pull product names based on what’s performing with your CRM, looking at lifetime value, do you want to create a custom audience off of the top products that are driving the overall sales? Do you want to create a different custom segment for the products that are having better margins? Maybe you want to have some sort of seasonality and just create a custom segment for all your Black Friday products that are coming up. Depending on what your sales goals are, create different audiences for those specific products. The ones that are better for your business, driving more money, driving more sales, try to get in front of more users who are searching for those specific products that are helping your business. And this is a unique one, Site Search Queries.

So, there is a way in Google Analytics to record Site Search Queries. That is the search function on your specific website. So, when people already go to your website but try to find specific pages, products, those types of things on your own website when they’re already there. So, in this case, we look at specific examples especially for seasonal businesses on when people are searching for specific products. When do they start searching for the specific need? I’m in Milwaukee Wisconsin, we definitely have some cold parts of the year. So, in this case, you can see a specific example where people are looking for ice fishing, heaters, car batteries when those die out in the winter time.

We can switch the date ranges and see when people come to this website, when do they start searching for these products. I can build custom audiences for these product names and then be proactive and get in front of users during these specific seasons and be the first one out there in the market to let users know, ‘Hey, we have everything you need in terms of ice fishing. We have your winter tires. We have your new car batteries.’ And be the first ones out there, because we know when people search for these specific terms on our website.

Besides on-site queries, I like to look at your specific best performing queries within Google Ads. Take your best performing keywords, take your best performing converting queries, and that’s even another custom segment audience you can create. There are variety options you can choose. Just make sure that they’re appropriate for your campaign goals and that you have the creative to back up the audience you are trying to target.

So, the last thing I want to cover is how you can add some of your custom audience segments to your ad group targeting. I’m still in the audience manager tool so I’m going to go back up and head up to the main overview and then I’m just going to choose a random campaign. I’m in a specific Ad group as you can see on the top. So, I’m going to go over to the audience section. You see the top choice is audience segments. So, I’m going to go over and edit the audience segment. Assuming you’re creating a custom audience segment to target, I’m going to leave it as the targeting setting. Not an observation or bid only.

So, I can go to the search bar right here and if you know name of your custom audience segment, you can start typing it in. I typed in URLs. That’s for the one I just created and then I can select it from there. Gonna ignore that, because the second option decides searching for it is to go up and to click browse and then we see the bottom option of choosing your custom audience segments. And there we see the options that were created in audience manager. So, then I can just go up, select my custom audience segments and yes, you can choose more than one and then I can go and save it. But before I view, I just wanted to call out this option right here.

You can start creating your custom segment from this audience view within one of your ad groups. You don’t have to go to audience manager. I’m just so used to going It, because it’s easier to see all my audiences in one place. So, I’m going to go back down and click Save and even though they hide it, you can click on the drop down of show table and then you will see all of your audience segments that you have added to this particular ad group targeting. Now, I know some of the questions I get a lot are, which audiences should I try first for display or YouTube targeting?

I get wanting to ask that type of question but it’s hard for us to answer that. That is because each industry is different and each account is different. And when each industry is different, there are different targeting options by default within the Google Ads platform that could be better for each different type of industry. Sometimes, there are in-market audiences or lifetime event targeting that are perfect for certain industries. In other cases, I work with very niche industries but they will never have an in-market audience or an affinity audience and overall topic type targeting that really fit to what they’re looking for. That’s when custom audiences could be really helpful.

Just remember some of the examples I showed you of different types of custom audience segments you can create. In my opinion, I can always be more specific with my custom audience segments than any of the default audiences that are available within Google Ads. But like I said, you never know what you might find within all of the default options that could be perfect for your industry. You just have to do the research yourself. The goal of this video is to show you what you can do with custom audiences and how you can implement them depending on what campaign type you are using within Google Ads.

If you have different ideas of ones that we haven’t covered within video, let the community know in the comments below. And as always, if you have any questions, we’ll be more than happy to answer them.

Written by Joe Martinez