Types of Audience in Google Ads, Different Between In-market Audience and Affinity Audience

What is Audience Targeting in Google Ads?

You can add audience targeting to ad groups and reach people based on who they are, their interests and habits, what they’re actively researching, or how they have interacted with your business. Audience targeting can boost your campaign's performance by reaching people browsing websites, using apps, or watching videos. Read the personalized advertising policy (formerly known as interest-based advertising) to help improve the experience for users and advertisers alike.
Types of Custom audiences in Google Adwords

How the audience targeting works

For Display campaigns, audiences are 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 categories—such as 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.

The data used to generate audiences (for example, page visit history, past Google searches), may be used to improve the bidding and targeting of your audience campaigns.


See the table below for a brief description of the different audience types to use for targeting in your campaigns:

Campaign typeAudience type
Display
  • Affinity, Custom affinity: Reach users based on what they're passionate about and their habits and interests.
  • Detailed Demographics: Reach users based on long-term life facts.
  • Life Events: Reach users when they are in the midst of important life milestones.
  • Custom intent, In-market: Reach users based on their recent purchase intent.
  • Remarketing: Reach users that have interacted with your business.
  • Customer Match: Reach your existing customers based on your CRM data.
  • Similar audiences: Reach new users with similar interests to your website visitors or existing customers.
  • Learn more by reading Reach the right audience at the right moment.
Search
  • Affinity: Reach users based on what they're passionate about and their habits and interests.
  • Detailed Demographics: Reach users based on long-term life facts.
  • In-market: Reach users based on their recent purchase intent.
  • Remarketing: Reach users that have interacted with your business.
  • Customer Match: Reach your existing customers based on your CRM data.
  • Similar audiences: Reach new users with similar interests to your website visitors or existing customers.
Video
  • Affinity, Custom affinity: Reach users based on what they're passionate about and their habits and interests.
  • Detailed Demographics: Reach users based on long-term life facts.
  • Custom intent, In-market: Reach users based on their recent purchase intent.
  • Remarketing: Reach users that have interacted with your business.
  • Customer Match: Reach your existing customers based on your CRM data.
  • Similar audiences: Reach new users with similar interests to your website visitors or existing customers.
Hotel
  • Remarketing: Reach users that have interacted with your business (website visitors, similar audiences, custom combinations, and customer lists).


Different audience targeting options

Once you’ve identified the interests, needs, behaviors, and goals of your audience, you can define who your audience will be for a particular campaign or ad group. You can create an audience, a combined audience, or select audiences that are preconfigured by Google Ads.

Different audience targeting options

Once you’ve identified the interests, needs, behaviors, and goals of your audience, you can define who your audience will be for a particular campaign or ad group. You can create an audience, a combined audience, or select audiences that are preconfigured by Google Ads.

Affinity audiences

With affinity audiences, you can reach people based on a holistic picture of their lifestyles, passions, and habits. Affinity audiences have demonstrated a qualified passion in a given topic, allowing advertisers to reach the people that matter most with their products or offerings.
Currently, all Google advertisers can access affinity audiences in Search, Display, and Video campaigns, as well as Gmail and Display & Video 360.
Find a curated list of affinity categories by downloading this CSV.

Custom affinity audiences

With custom affinity audiences, advertisers can create audiences that are more tailored to their brands, compared to more broad, TV-like affinity audiences. Custom affinity audiences are created by using a combination of:
  1. Interests entered as keyword phrases.
  2. URLs to create interest categories based on the content of the website.
  3. Types of places that people are interested in, or their lifestyles and passions.
  4. Apps that an ideal customer might be interested in. This doesn't mean that your ads will show on the apps you specified, but rather to users that have similar apps on their mobile devices. For example, if you enter Google Fit, Google Ads will find users that have fitness-related apps.
For example, rather than reaching the Sports Fans affinity audience, a running shoe company may want to reach Avid Marathon Runners instead. With custom affinity audiences, the shoe company can further define this audience by:
  1. Entering interests like "5K in San Francisco," "triathlon athlete," or "long distance runner."
  2. Using URLs of websites with content about running, training schedules, marathon nutrition, and other marathon themes.
  3. Entering places that an Avid Marathon Runner might be interested in like gyms, sporting goods stores, and natural supermarkets.
  4. Entering apps in the Health & Fitness category that an Avid Marathon Runner may likely be interested in like Google Fit.
Adding places will limit the compatibility of this audience only to Video campaigns running on YouTube.
Life events
Engage with viewers on YouTube, Gmail, and Display around important life milestones, like graduating from college, moving homes, or getting married. By understanding when these moments are taking place, you can tailor your advertising to reach the right users with the right messages.
Like other important milestones, life events are infrequent, and as a result, may reach smaller audiences compared to affinities. However, since life events may correspond with many related purchasing decisions, they’re often larger than in-market categories that correspond with a single purchasing decision. For example, someone who’s about to move will likely buy new furniture, moving services, mortgages, and other moving-related items during the months of their move.
In-market audiences
Select from these audiences to find customers who are in the market, which means that they're researching products and are actively considering buying a service or product like yours.
These audiences are designed for advertisers focused on getting conversions from likely buyers. In-market audiences can help drive remarketing performance and reach consumers close to completing a purchase.
Find a curated list of in-market audiences by downloading this CSV.

Custom intent audiences

Note: Custom intent audiences are not available for Search campaigns.

Custom intent: Display

Custom intent audiences allow you to define and reach the ideal audience for your Display campaigns. You can use custom intent audiences to segment your ad groups for a specific vertical or landing page. You can use auto-created segments, or define your own audience by entering in-market keywords, URLs, and apps related to products and services that your ideal customer is researching across sites and apps. Learn more about custom intent audiences.
For now, auto-created audiences are available in English, German, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, French, and Italian. Check back for updates. New languages will be added over time.

Custom intent: YouTube campaigns

Custom intent audiences can help you reach new customers on YouTube based on the terms they use to search for your products or services on Google.com. You can select from 300 to 500 keywords that your ideal audience would most likely use in a search. Focus on general keywords to reach as many people as possible. For example, if you own a sporting goods store, you might want to choose keywords like "basketball shoes" instead of more specific keywords like "discount blue high top basketball shoes."
When entering your keywords, you can use the Keyword Planner to get suggested bid estimates, see how often keywords are searched, and how keyword search volume changes over time. Learn more about Keyword Planner.
If you advertise with Google video partners, your ads will be shown to people with interests or purchase intentions related to your search terms. Learn more about Google video partners.

Audience keywords

Now that Custom intent audiences are the new way to use Audience keywords, you may receive a “No ads serving” error when both targeting options are used in the same ad group. This issue can be fixed only in the new Google Ads experience.
  1. Click the campaign or campaign type in the navigation panel on the left.
  2. Click Keywords in the page menu.
  3. Remove Audience keywords.
    • If you want to reach users interested in these keywords, create a new Custom intent audience that uses the keywords and add it to an ad group.

Remarketing

You can also reach people who have already engaged with your company’s products and services, including past visitors to a website, mobile app, videos, or customers who have given you their contact information. Learn more about remarketing.

Detailed demographics

Detailed demographics enables you to reach broad segments of the population that share common traits, such as college students, homeowners, or new parents. Find a curated list of detailed demographics by downloading this CSV.

Customer Match

Customer Match lets you use your online and offline data to reach and re-engage with your customers across Search, Shopping, Gmail, YouTube, and Display. Using information that your customers have shared with you, Customer Match will target ads to those customers. Learn more about Customer Match.

Similar audiences

Similar audiences take the guesswork out of your search for new audiences, by automatically finding new customers similar to your existing customers. Google Ads uses machine learning to update similar audience lists in real-time to compare new users to your remarketing lists. Using similar audiences targeting allows you to show ads to people who share characteristics with people on your existing remarketing and customer match lists. To avoid overlap, your original list is automatically excluded from your similar audiences list. Learn more about similar audiences.

About dynamic prospecting

Dynamic prospecting is one way to extend the power of your feed-based dynamic remarketing to reach new users with your high-performing products. Unlike dynamic remarketing, which is focused on getting the most value out of your existing customers, dynamic prospecting is used to acquire new users. This difference makes dynamic prospecting the preferable method if you’re a new advertiser or if you’re targeting an audience different from your own first-party data (including your remarketing lists).
Note: If you want to use Retail feeds along with your Smart Display Campaigns, please create a Smart Shopping Campaign or contact your Google Account Representative. Learn more about Smart Shopping Campaigns.

Customer Data in Google Ads

How it works

Dynamic prospecting uses machine learning to predict which feed items prospective buyers are looking for. Using historical feed performance and user behavior, dynamic prospecting predicts which new users are most likely to perform well for items in your feed. Once the system finds statistically significant relationships between feed items and user intent, it combines that possible intent with demographics-based information such as age and gender to match the user’s intent with a relevant product in your feed. The products in your feed are evaluated and selected based on performance, relevance, and other factors to determine which ones are most likely to lead to conversions.
Smart Display campaigns are recommended for dynamic prospecting campaigns since they can simply and easily combine dynamic remarketing users with prospecting users for an effective full-funnel setup.

Example

Imagine you're a hotel provider, and a customer wants to take a vacation in Paris. This customer is researching many topics about Paris, such as its cultural attractions, restaurants, hotels, and flight options. Since you have enabled dynamic prospecting, every new bit of relevant information in this user’s journey that indicates their travel intent to Paris, helps Google's systems know that showing your Parisian hotels to this customer is more likely to lead to a relevant, assistive-style ad that this user may be more likely to convert from.