Targeting & Audiences

Remarketing lists: your warmest audience

Remarketing lists are built from people who have already visited your website or app, segmented however is useful — all visitors, visitors to a specific service page, people who started but didn't complete a form, past customers. These are, by a wide margin, the most valuable audiences available: they already know who you are, which is why remarketing typically outperforms any form of cold targeting. Layer remarketing lists onto Display and Video campaigns, and use Customer Match, uploading your own customer list, to reach past customers directly across Google's properties where account settings and eligibility allow it.

A useful starting structure is three or four remarketing lists rather than one catch-all list: recent visitors overall, visitors to your highest-value service page specifically, and people who abandoned a form partway through. Each of these represents a meaningfully different level of intent, and a Display campaign built on the "abandoned the form" list can afford a more direct, urgency-driven message than one built on general site visitors.

In-market and affinity audiences

In-market audiences are Google's own segments of people showing recent signals of actively researching or comparing a specific type of product or service — closer to purchase-ready. Affinity audiences are broader, longer-term interest-based categories, closer to a lifestyle or general interest than active purchase intent. In-market audiences tend to be more directly useful for a business trying to generate near-term leads or sales; affinity audiences lean more toward brand awareness.

Neither of these predefined categories will ever match your ideal customer perfectly — they're broad, Google-defined buckets, not a description built specifically around your business. Treat them as a way to add a relevant layer on top of otherwise broad Display or Video targeting, not as a targeting method precise enough to stand entirely on its own.

Custom segments: built from your own inputs

Custom segments let you build an audience from your own inputs rather than relying only on Google's predefined categories — specifying keywords, phrases, URLs or apps that describe the kind of person you're trying to reach, for example people who have recently searched terms related to your service, or visited competitor or related websites. These are especially useful for Display and YouTube campaigns, where there's no keyword targeting to lean on directly.

Building a custom segment starts with the same exercise as keyword research in Chapter 3: think through what your ideal customer would actually search for, or which specific websites and apps they'd realistically be using, before this need became urgent enough to search directly for your service.

Demographic exclusions

Targeting isn't only about who to include — excluding clearly irrelevant demographic segments, such as age ranges, household income bands, or parental status where genuinely not relevant to what you sell, can meaningfully cut wasted spend, particularly on Display and Video campaigns with broader reach. Base exclusions on real evidence from your own conversion data wherever possible, rather than assumptions about who your customers "should" be — it's common for a business to assume a narrower customer profile than the data actually shows, and to exclude a segment that was quietly converting well.

Geographic targeting for local businesses

For a business that serves a physical area, location targeting is often the single highest-leverage setting in the account. Rather than targeting an entire city or region, use a radius around your business or service area sized to where you actually operate, and check the location targeting setting itself — "presence" targeting, people physically in or regularly in the area, is usually more relevant for a local service business than "presence or interest," which can also show ads to people merely searching about that location from elsewhere.

A business that only serves a specific radius around one physical location, but leaves the default city-wide or region-wide targeting in place, is often paying for clicks from people entirely outside its realistic service area. Reviewing and tightening this single setting is frequently the fastest wasted-spend fix in a local account, and it's worth revisiting whenever the business's actual service area changes.

• Remarketing list created and applied to at least one Display or Video campaign
• In-market audience layered on as an observation, not a hard restriction, to see performance by segment
• Location targeting set to a realistic service radius, not an entire city or state by default
• Location target type reviewed — "presence" vs "presence or interest"
• Demographic exclusions reviewed against real conversion data, not assumptions