Optimized targeting grants your campaign flexibility to explore which customers have the highest likelihood to convert within your campaign goals. When you use optimized targeting, you can optionally provide targeting signals like keywords or audience segments. These signals are used as a starting point by our system to find the best-performing criteria to serve your ads on.
Optimized targeting may reduce or stop serving traffic on your signals if it finds better performing traffic elsewhere.
In this article, you'll learn how to use and review performance for optimized targeting in Display, Discovery, and Video campaigns.
Things to know
Brand safety
Optimized targeting respects your existing brand safety settings (such as content exclusions). You don’t need to make additional changes to your brand safety settings when using optimized targeting.
Bidding strategies
- If you're focused on generating site traffic, consider using optimized targeting with Maximize conversions and using site visits as your conversion type.
- If you're focused on conversions, consider using Maximize conversions or Target CPA with optimized targeting. Using these bidding strategies is recommended for optimized targeting because they use your conversion data to get you the most value for your campaign.
Campaign performance
Optimized targeting needs time to learn and find audience segments that are more likely to convert.
- For new campaigns, wait until the campaign has at least 50 conversions or has been active at least 2 weeks before evaluating performance.
- For existing campaigns, wait a minimum of 2 weeks before evaluating performance.
Instructions
Change optimized targeting settings
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- From the workspace bar at the top, under "Select a campaign", select the campaign you'd like to edit.
Note: If you prefer to use the navigation panel on the left, click Change view in the top right of your Google Ads account.
- Under "Select an ad group", select the ad group that you'd like to adjust targeting for.
- In the page menu on the left, select Settings.
- Click Edit ad group targeting.
- Below "Settings", expand the "Optimized targeting" section.
- Select the checkbox to turn optimized targeting on or off.
- Select Save.
Review performance for campaigns that use optimized targeting
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- From the workspace bar at the top, under "Select a campaign", select the campaign you'd like to edit.
Note: If you prefer to use the navigation panel on the left, click Change view in the top right of your Google Ads account.
- (Optional) Under "Select an ad group", select an ad group to review performance at a more granular level.
- In the page menu on the left, select Audiences.
- From the “Audience segments” or “Demographics” statistics table, click Show table to expand, then scroll down until you find a row labeled "Total: Expansion and optimized targeting".
When reviewing your performance, keep in mind that optimized targeting extends your reach to people who otherwise wouldn't have viewed your ads. The conversions that you get through optimized targeting are additional conversions that you wouldn't otherwise have received.
Your initial average cost-per-action (CPA) may fluctuate. Over time, optimized targeting will learn which targeting works best for you and optimize your reach at a more consistent average CPA to drive the most possible conversions.
If your ad groups have different kinds of targeting, viewing the ad group performance will allow you to compare clicks, impressions, and conversions for each ad group.