Custom Affinity and Custom Intent Combined into Custom Audiences

As Google streamlined its audience options for Display, Discovery, Gmail, and YouTube campaigns recently, they have narrowed down audiences previously known as ‘custom intent’ and ‘custom affinity’ into ‘custom audiences’. These audiences were previously able to be selected through the audience manager tool within the tools & settings in Google Ads. These changes weren’t made to complicate things but make them easier as many audiences correlate across the custom intent and custom affinity audience options.

We will walk you through these changes further now and ensure that you are able to navigate the newly known, custom audiences, with ease.

Previously Created Audiences

There aren’t major changes made against previously created audiences, but there are a few different ways they will be treated depending on how you have those audiences set up.

• Custom Affinity on all campaigns will be set with the audience becoming ‘People with any of these interests or purchase intentions’
• Custom intent on Display campaigns will become ‘People with any of these interests or purchase intentions’
• Custom intent on YouTube, Gmail, and Discovery campaigns will now be within ‘People who searched for any of these terms on Google properties’

New Custom Audiences

The process of creating custom audiences doesn’t add a whole lot of change as the input keywords of interest are still clues for Google about who you want your ads to target.

As you can see on the right there is now a ‘custom audience’ button for you to input keywords of interest and add specific search terms that align to users who have searched on Google or YouTube for those terms.

Targeting Beyond Keyword Driven Focus

There are three specific options available to target beyond your keyword-driven focus. They are the following:

• People who browse certain types of websites
• People who use certain types of apps
• People who visited certain places

As you continue to add options to each section, the estimated audience size will appear on the right. This is a great way to track whether or not that keyword is the right one for you to target for that campaign. The more impressions that it may project to see weekly may not be the best option for your campaign always.  This is important to do some research to see what keyword the best fit for your campaign is. Top Floor has a group of specialists that helps current clients ensure that their keywords are the best fit on a weekly basis.

Google Choosing the Right Audience

The final step of creating the perfect ‘custom audience’ is to choose that audience appropriately. There are a few different options that they are based on from the goals of your campaign to your bidding strategy. These options will help drive the reach, performance, and considerations as Google narrows down the priority audience choices for your campaign.

This may seem like a simple adjustment that Google announced recently, but there are always different variables that can come through to complicate things. Our team at Top Floor is Google Ads certified and deal with these changes every day. Contact us to get in touch with our specialists to help personalize your goals and bidding strategy to optimize your campaign.