About audience customer types

Audience customer types are a way to label your first-party audience lists based on their relationship to your business. This helps Google AI understand how your customers interact with your brand which helps drive better outcomes for your marketing campaigns.

There are three main types of first-party audience lists:

• Customer lists: These lists include customers who have purchased from your business, signed up for your email list, or otherwise engaged with your brand.
• Web visitor lists: These lists include customers who have visited your website, even if they haven't purchased anything.
• App user lists: These lists include customers who have used your mobile app.

After you’ve added customer types to your audience lists, you can use them to guide your marketing campaigns more effectively. For example, you can create a campaign that reaches people who have visited your website but have not made a purchase. Or, you can create a campaign that reaches people who have shown interest in a particular product or service.

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How customer types work

Audience customer type is a label that you can assign to an audience list to help Google understand what stage of the customer lifecycle the customers in your audience list are at. This feature can be helpful for optimising your campaigns towards specific types of customers.

Common audience customer types:

• All customers
• Purchasers
• High-value customers
• Disengaged customers
• Qualified leads
• Converted leads
• Paid subscribers
• Loyalty sign-ups
• Basket abandoners

Labelling your audiences with customer types can help inform Google AI solutions, for example:

• New customer acquisition: If you use the new customer acquisition goal to optimise your campaign towards only acquiring new customers, Google will automatically exclude audiences with the label 'Purchasers' from your new customer acquisition campaigns. Likewise, if you add an audience list to be excluded in your new customer acquisition goal, the audience will automatically be labelled 'Purchasers'.
• High-value new customer acquisition: If you use the high-value new customer acquisition goal, Google will use your audience lists labelled as 'High-value customers' to define which customers have a high predicted lifetime value for your business. When you add an audience list to your high-value new customer acquisition goal, it will automatically be labelled as 'High-value customers'.

As Google releases additional customer lifecycle goals beyond new customer acquisition, such as re-engaging disengaged customers, labelling your audience customer types will become even more important.

Beyond being useful for optimisation, customer types are a great way to organise and review your audiences.

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Instructions

To apply customer types to your audience lists, follow the instructions below. Make sure that you’re signed in to the account that owns your audience lists. For example, if your audience lists are owned by your manager account, you would need to be signed in to your manager account to make these changes.

Note: You can only set, view or edit customer types for first-party audiences.

How to set customer types

1. In your Google Ads account, click the Tools icon .
2. Click the Shared library drop-down in the section menu.
3. Click Audience manager.
4. From the menu at the top, select the Your data segments page.
5. Select a customer list to associate with your customer type.
6. Click the Customer type drop-down menu and then select a customer type that appears. You can also search for the customer type that you want to apply for.
7. Click Apply.

How to view or remove customer types

1. In your Google Ads account, click the Tools icon .
2. Click the Shared library drop-down in the section menu.
3. Click Audience manager.
4. From the menu at the top, select the Your data segments page.
5. Select the tick box for the audience list that you want to edit.
6. Click the 'Edit' drop-down menu in the blue bar.
7. Click Remove.

Customer types may also be set in other flows in Google Ads. For example, if you apply a customer list to the new customer acquisition goal, it will automatically be labelled as 'Purchasers' since new customer acquisition is designed to exclude existing Purchasers from targeting.