Edit, pause, or remove a data segment

To provide a comprehensive and consolidated view of your Audiences and make audience management and optimization simpler, you’ll find the following improvements in Google Ads:

• New audience reporting
  Detailed reporting about audience demographics, segments, and exclusions is now consolidated in one place. Click the Campaigns icon and open the “Audiences, keywords and content” tab and click Audiences. You can also easily manage your Audiences from this report page. Learn more About Audience reporting.
• New terms
  We’re using new terms on your audience report and throughout Google Ads. For example, “audience types” (these include custom, in-market, and affinity) are now referred to as audience segments and “remarketing” is now referred to as “your data”. Learn more about the Updates to Audience terms and phrases.

After you've created and tested your data segments, you can edit it to make sure your products or services are reaching the right audience. You can also pause an ad group from targeting your list or remove a data segment from an ad group.

Edit your data segment

While the data segments created automatically by Google Ads can't be edited, you can make changes to manually created data segments. For example, you can edit the name of the data list, change the membership duration, or close the data list. Here's how:

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. Click the Tools iconin the top right corner of your screen.
3. Under the section labeled “Shared library”, click Audience manager.
4. Click Audience lists from the page menu on the left.
5. Select the Audience list you’d like to edit.
   • If you’d like to change the name of your data list only, click the pencil icon .
   • If you’d like to change the membership status of your data list only, click the drop down arrow under the “Membership status” column and select Open or Closed.
6. To edit the other data list options, click the blue list name.
7. Click the 3-dot icon in the top right corner of the data list details and select Edit list.
8. Here you can edit the data list name, initial size, membership duration, membership status, and description.
   • If you want to stop new site visitors from being added to your data list, you can close the data list using the drop-down menu in the "Membership status" section. "Open" means Google Ads will continue adding website visitors to your data list. "Closed" means this data list won't add new members.
   • Make your edits and click Save.

Keep in mind

• When you edit a list, you don't need to replace the Google tag or event snippet on your site again.
• For your data segments on the Display Network: If you change the membership duration, that new duration is applied only to site visitors that are added after this change. The site visitors previously on the list will keep the original duration.
• For your data segments on the Search Network: If you change the membership duration the new duration is applied to both existing visitors and new visitors.
• Data lists that have been created in Google Analytics can only be edited in Google Analytics.

Enable, pause, or remove your data segments from an ad group or campaign

Pausing your segment prevents ad groups from targeting it while still allowing it to add new visitors. Removing your segment will permanently remove it. Both of these actions are done in the Audiences page, where you set your audience targeting.

Note: "Targeting setting" may show as "Observation" for Audiences if your Audiences are paused, and it changes to "Targeting" after they are paused.

1. From the Views bar at the top, select Display campaigns.
   Note: If you prefer to use the navigation panel on the left, click Change view in the top left of your Google Ads account.
2. Select an ad group.
3. Ensure that Audiences is highlighted blue in the page menu on the top.
4. Click on the dot to the left of the name of the audience and select Enable or Pause.
5. To modify multiple lists at once, click in the boxes to the left of the dots to check them. As long as you have boxes checked, a blue bar menu will appear above the list of audiences.
6. From inside the blue bar menu, click Edit and then select Enable, Pause, or Remove.

Note that the following segments can't be removed:

• Segments that are in-use
• Segments that were automatically created by Google Ads
• Segments that are used to generate other in-use segments

Related links

• Create your data segment
• 19 strategies for increasing your audience reach and improving conversions
• Tag your site for your data