Use the Audience builder when creating a campaign

The Audience builder allows you to easily and effectively create reusable audiences with focused segments, demographic targeting and exclusions.

You can create audience segments based on the customer data you collected yourself or from other Google surfaces to enhance the effectiveness of your targeting and campaign performance.

You can use the Audience builder and create a data segment directly using first-party data when creating your campaign.

Before you begin

Follow the steps to create a Performance Max campaign, create a Discovery campaign or create a video action campaign.

Once you get to the 'Targeting' segment of the campaign, click Add an Audience and select + New audience.

Create a new audience and new segment

In the Audience builder, you’ll be able to search, browse and select demographic groups, segments and exclusions. Follow the steps below to complete audience creation.

Step 1: Create a new audience

1. Give your audience a name, which will be its name in your Audience library for all future use.
2. Select the demographic groups that you want to target by clicking on the tick boxes for each group. Age and gender are presented by default, but you can select groups based on household income or parental status by clicking Additional demographics.
   • For age, select one age range as wide as you’d like it to be, but you cannot select more than one age range for each Audience.
3. Select applicable audience segments in the 'Your data' and 'Custom segments' modules.
4. Click Search or Browse to add segments. Suggested segments will appear at the top of the list.
5. Click Save segment when you’ve chosen the segments you’ll use.

Step 2: Create a new segment

You can now choose to create a new 'Custom segment' or a new 'Your data segment' with first-party data.

Create a new 'Custom segment'

1. Under the 'Custom segments section', click + New segment.
2. Add a name for your custom segment.
3. Select:
   • People with any of these interests or purchase intentions. Enter keywords describing your ideal customer’s interests or products and services that they are actively researching to buy. If you’re using an audience with your selection of manual targeting (all campaigns except for Performance Max can use manual targeting), your campaign will reach people with those interests or purchase intentions based on your campaign settings, such as advertising goal or bidding strategy. If you’re using your audience as a signal as part of optimised targeting (Performance Max campaigns use only optimised targeting), your audience selections will inform who will see your ads, but ultimately your campaign will focus on optimising toward your goals and may show ads to people outside of your audience selections.
   • People who searched for any of these terms on Google. Enter search terms your ideal customer is using on Google properties (such as Google.com and YouTube). If you’re using an audience with your selection of manual targeting (all campaigns except for Performance Max can use manual targeting), your campaign will reach people with those interests or purchase intentions based on your campaign settings, such as advertising goal or bidding strategy. If you’re using your audience as a signal as part of optimised targeting (Performance Max campaigns use only optimised targeting), your audience selections will inform who will see your ads, but ultimately your campaign will focus on optimising toward your goals and may show ads to people outside of your audience selections. For other campaigns, the terms will be used as interest or purchase intentions.
4. Click Save.
5. To target audience segments beyond your data and custom segments, such as affinity and in-market segments, click Interests and detailed demographics segments. The 'Google segments' module will appear. There you can add 'interests', 'detailed demographics' and 'life events' to get a list of segments that you can select.
6. To remove any segments in any of the modules, hover over the segment and click the X icon .

Create a new data segment with first-party data

1. In the 'Your data' section, click + New Segment.
2. Select your segment from the available segment types.
3. Add a segment name.
4. Click Continue and follow the steps on screen to create a new segment.
5. Click Save.

Select an existing Audience

When creating a campaign, you’ll need to select an audience. Here are the steps on how to select an existing audience.

1. If you’ve clicked Select an audience, the Audiences selector will appear with suggestions for audiences that match the advertising goal you set for the new campaign. Review the audience summary cards, which includes that audience’s specific segments and exclusions. (You can also view your other existing audiences that are not recommended based on your advertising goal by clicking the Audience not recommended link).
2. If an existing audience in the table is right for your campaign, select it by clicking on it. If you’d rather create a new audience for the campaign, click + New Audience in the top right. Learn more about the Audience builder in the 'Steps to create a new audience' above.
3. Your selected audience will appear under 'Create an ad group'. From there, you can leave the audience as is, edit it by clicking the pencil icon , remove it by clicking the X icon at the top right or change it by clicking Change audience, which will take you back to the Audience selector.
   • When you edit your audience, you’ll do so in the 'Audience builder'. Use Audience builder to update demographic targeting, segments and exclusions by clicking on the Add or create option in any of the applicable modules. Learn more about the Audience builder in the 'Steps to create a new audience' above.

Tip
Editing an audience while creating your ad group and campaign will edit that audience for all the ad groups and campaigns it’s attached to. If you want your Audience edits to only apply to a single campaign or ad group, save the edits with a new name for that Audience.