If there’s one area of Google Ads that often baffles even seasoned practitioners, it’s audience targeting.
Within audience targeting, there’s a special option called custom segments that allows us to build our own audiences using Google’s proprietary data. While custom segments can be immensely powerful, they are also immensely confusing.
What is a custom segment in Google Ads?
A custom segment lets you build a targeted audience based on the content a user has recently interacted with.
Think of it this way: instead of saying, “I want to show an ad on a website about running shoes,” you’re saying, “I want to show an ad to a person who has recently shown interest in running shoes.”
The way I like to explain it is that you are turning content targeting into audience targeting.
How to build a custom segment in Google Ads
You can build a custom segment from Audience Manager, or within the Audiences section of any compatible campaign. After naming your segment, you have the option to give it up to four different inputs:
- Interests: People with specific interests or purchase intentions.
- Search Terms: People who search for certain things on Google properties, like Google Search and YouTube.
- Websites: People who browse certain types of websites.
- Apps: People who use certain types of apps.
If you would like to use multiple inputs, I recommend creating multiple custom segments rather than lumping them all together. That way, you can see in your audience segments reporting if, for example, the “search terms” or “websites” perform better.
The best way to use custom segments in Google Ads
In my experience, the most useful type of custom segment is one based on search terms. Note that “your ads will reach people who search for those and similar terms” – so consider these to be Exact Match close variants rather than pure Exact Matches.
Here’s how to get started:
- Get your data: Go into your existing Search, Shopping, or PMax campaigns and pull the Search Terms report. Grab your top 20 to 30 non-branded search terms, either your best converting, or the ones you wish you were getting more impressions and clicks on
- Build the segment: Create a new custom segment and use those top 20-30 search terms as your only input, as “People who searched for any of these terms on Google”.
- Target in Demand Gen: Apply that custom segment to a new Demand Gen campaign, ensuring that optimized targeting is turned off.
Why Demand Gen?
Search term-based custom segments only work as intended on Google-owned properties.
If you use this segment in a Demand Gen or Video campaign, with Display network/Video partners turned off, then your ads are only serving on networks that Google owns (YouTube, Discover, Gmail, Maps), so Google knows who the user is and what they’ve recently searched for.
But if you try to…
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