The Ultimate Guide To PPC Audiences, When & Where To Use Them

Undeniably, one of the lesser-known and lesser-utilized functions within PPC is audiences. For video, display, and Performance Max campaigns, audiences are a must-have for success: after all, you wouldn’t want to show your ads to absolutely everyone living in the United States - that would be crazy! 

Let’s take a look at the types of audiences available within PPC, including when and where you should use them.

The best place to start is by addressing the most fundamental question: why should we use audiences in PPC? 

When using outbound forms of marketing such as Display, Video, Demand Gen (etc.), it’s important to specify who you want your ads to show to. Who are they, where are they, and what are their interests, hobbies, and behaviors? But for search - an inbound form of marketing - this is not as straightforward. Therefore,  using audiences for search campaigns is often overlooked.

Put simply: using audiences in search can help drive efficiencies, performance, and engagement from your target audience. You can choose to show your ads more often to certain demographics or interest groups, you can exclude previous customers from engaging with your paid ads, and you can even use audiences to show bespoke messaging to those who have abandoned their cart or are moving from MQL (marketing-qualified-lead) to SQL (sales-qualified-lead).

While the place of audiences and bid adjustments is still contentious in 2024 with such a focus on smart bidding and automated bidding strategies, I firmly believe there’s still a place for them to drive efficient results at scale. Let’s begin by taking a look at the audience types available to us within PPC.

The five types of audiences to leverage in PPC

Demographic audiences

The first audience type is the most basic one: demographics. Generally speaking, demographics include age, gender, income level, race, employment, location, homeownership, and level of education. Fortunately, no PPC platforms allow targeting or exclusions based on race. 

The most fundamental demographics that are used within search are age, gender, and household income (based on a combination of zip code data and user Google property history such as browsing history).  The other demographic targeting options are far more suited to outbound marketing such as Display/Video/Demand Gen and include additional demographic options such as ‘Parent’, ‘Not a Parent’, etc.

On Google Ads, ages are broken down into groups: 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65+, and Unknown. For Gender, the options are Female, Male, and Unknown. The ideal use cases for these are services such as female-only fitness centers, male-only health services, or perhaps retirement advice for those approaching that time in their lives, when it may not make sense to include ‘all’ demographics.  

Demographic targeting and exclusions can be created during the campaign set-up process, or applied once a campaign has been created by viewing your campaign, navigating to ‘Audiences, keywords and content’ >  ‘Audiences’, and then editing ‘Audience Demographics’. 

A quick side note: Although language and location targeting aren’t officially types of ‘demographics’ in the world of Google Ads, it’s absolutely critical to get these right for search campaigns. Check your campaign settings to ensure that your location targeting not only matches the location of availability of your offering but that the settings are that - where relevant - the ads only show to people currently within your target area, rather than those ‘interested in’ your target area. Similarly, even if your offering has global appeal, your ad copy is likely to be in a single language. Make sure the campaign settings reflect this language to keep your ads as relevant as possible to all users.

Custom audiences

Custom audiences are a highly effective way of curating the ‘perfect’ audience to target or exclude. You can create your custom audience based on signals such as interests, behaviors, website viewing history (by URL), and app history. Think competitor brands or products, industry-related websites and apps, and recent relevant generic Google searches.

You could use custom audiences to personalize your ad copy on campaigns where you’re targeting customers of your competitors. For example, use your ad copy to encourage them to ‘switch’ to your brand, product, or service, focusing on the benefits of your product or service over the one they currently have, rather than trying to educate the audience from scratch.

Custom audiences can be created in Google Ads by navigating to ‘Tools’ > ‘Shared library’ > ‘Audience manager’ > ‘Audiences’, selecting the ‘Custom Segments’ tab, and clicking the blue ‘+’ button. 

In-market audiences

In-market audiences are a must-have in 2024. Curated by Google, these audiences are actively researching a specific product or service and are actively considering their options ahead of purchasing. 

While there isn’t a master list of in-market audiences (because many of these are hidden!), head to the Audiences tab on your current Google Ads campaigns, click Edit Audience Segments, click the Browse tab, and navigate to In-Market Audiences. You can then look at all available groupings by industry, and add the most relevant ones to your campaigns. You can also use this function to type in keywords under the Search tab to find relevant in-market audience suggestions to apply to your campaigns and ad groups.

Knowing that these audiences are already convinced of the benefits of the general product or service you’re advertising, you can utilize your ad copy to highlight the USPs of your brand.

In-market audiences can be created during the campaign set-up process, or applied once a campaign has been created by viewing your campaign, navigating to ‘Audiences, keywords, and content’ >  ‘Audiences’, and then clicking ‘Edit audience segments’.

Remarketing audiences 

Now known as ‘your data’ on Google Ads, remarketing audiences are a must-have in 2024. Used to reach those who have had previous interactions with your brand, you can use your data segments to create the following audience types. One thing to remember for all audiences that use your own data is that you’ll need to meet an audience threshold of at least 1,000 members in order to use these within your campaigns. However, it’s 1,000 matched members - where Google can find the profiles of each of these audience members and match them to a Google property user - which means your customer list will likely need to be much higher than the 1,000 minimum.

The first remarketing audience type is website and app visitors, used to “reach people who have visited either your website or your apps”. This can be broken down further into visitors to specific product pages, those who have abandoned carts, or even those who have recently purchased. 

The second remarketing audience type is customer match. Use customer match to “reach your existing customers based on your CRM data”.  This is ideal for including or excluding previous customers from brand campaigns, for example.

Finally, there are similar segments, where you can “reach new users with similar interests to your website visitors or existing customers”. While the applications for similar segments on search are more limited than on Display/Demand Gen or Video, there is value in simply observing the behavior of these audiences (more on this below), such as those who behave in a similar way to your previous purchasers, previous product page viewers, or those who have previously submitted a lead form.

Remarketing audiences can be created and applied in Google Ads by navigating to ‘Tools’ > ‘Shared library’ > ‘Audience manager’ > ‘Audiences’, and selecting the ‘Your data segments’ tab. From here, you can create new remarketing audiences and manage the ones you currently have in place. Once your audience has been created, click the square box to the left of the audience, click ‘Add to…’, and select the ad group(s) or campaign(s) you want to apply the audience to.

Affinity audiences

Finally, affinity audiences. These are audiences who are part of a different audience group based on behavior, who may also have an interest in your brand, product, or service. For example, if you’re a company that sells parts for motor vehicles, affinity audiences such as ‘motor enthusiasts’, ‘DIY enthusiasts’, or ‘Auto enthusiasts’ may be the perfect prospects for your campaigns. 

Or, maybe you’re a brand that offers fast food delivery. Affinity audiences such as ‘Fast Food Cravers’ would be an obvious pick, but in peak periods such as the Superbowl or soccer finals, consider affinity audiences such as ‘American football fans’ or ‘Soccer fans’ too!

Affinity audiences can be created during the campaign set-up process, or applied once a campaign has been created by viewing your campaign, navigating to ‘Audiences, keywords, and content’ >  ‘Audiences’, and then clicking ‘Edit audience segments’.

Audience considerations

There are three main considerations to think about when implementing audiences into your PPC accounts.

Observation vs targeting settings

When applying a new audience to your PPC campaigns, you’ll be given two options: applying as an observation audience or a targeting audience. In both cases, you can add positive or negative bid adjustments. A positive bid adjustment (+20%) tells the platform that you’re willing to bid up to 20% more to show your ad to this group. A negative bid adjustment (-20%) tells the platform to reduce your bid when a member of this audience is eligible to view your ad.

Adding an audience as an observation won’t change your targeting, but you’ll get separate reporting demonstrating how that audience interacts with your ads. This is worth applying for 2-4 weeks to see how audience interaction varies from the baseline. For example, CTRs may be higher from an in-market audience for “Education Supplies” than a broad parenting audience ahead of the back-to-school period. You can then decide whether to apply a positive bid adjustment to this audience if that audience is more valuable to you. 

The second option is a targeting audience. I usually don’t recommend this for generic search campaigns, as you may miss out on potential customers. Instead, this is much more helpful if you’re using RLSAs (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) and when using customer data such as those who have abandoned carts to create more personalized ad copy. For example, previous customers or those in an ‘abandoned cart’ audience could be privy to a unique discount code within your ad copy, or encouraged to return with “Welcome back!” or “Checkout now” messaging tailored to them. By using ‘targeting’ audiences only in these cases, you can ensure that new customers are excluded from seeing these ads.

Inbound: to exclude or not to exclude?

Generally speaking, for both generic and brand campaigns, it’s not worth excluding demographics from anything inbound - unless, for example, there are legislative or practical reasons to do so. For example, if you’re promoting alcohol (21+ only), or your service is a financial service resource for those 55+. Outside of these cases–and particularly within brand campaigns– you’re unlikely to want to exclude anyone who is actively looking for your brand, product, or service on a search engine. 

However, an exception to this is if you see certain demographic cohorts underperforming: perhaps 18-24-year-olds have a weak CTR and bounce off your website more often than 25-34-year-olds, or have a low conversion rate in comparison to all other age groups. In this case, it makes sense to either apply a strong negative bid adjustment or to exclude this age group entirely from seeing your ads.

Applying audiences at campaign vs ad group level

You can apply audiences to the campaign or ad group level. Depending on the structure of your account, it may make sense to apply audience inclusions and exclusions at the campaign level, or to add specific in-market audiences at the ad group level only.

Note: on Google Ads, you can’t apply audiences to both levels within the same campaign. Either apply catch-all audience inclusions and exclusions at the campaign level or apply individual audiences at the ad group level if the audiences differ between groups.

Final Thoughts

In 2024, there is still value in leveraging audiences for your PPC campaigns to help drive a full funnel strategy. Whether you decide to simply exclude previous purchasers, create bespoke content for those between the Consideration and Conversion stages of the funnel, or simply understand the behavior of particular audiences and demographic cohorts, audiences are a data-driven marketer’s dream in 2024 and beyond.