About audience signals in App campaigns for installs

Audience signals is a feature in App campaigns for installs (ACi) that allows you to provide Google AI with additional information about the type of users who are most likely to install your app. Although adding audience signals is optional, this valuable data helps machine learning models understand your target audience to better optimize your ACi campaign for performance.

Benefits

Audience signals can significantly enhance your ACi campaign’s performance by:

• Reaching more qualified users: Extend your campaign reach to new prospects with similar characteristics to your known high-value users, increasing the likelihood of conversions.
• Improving campaign efficiency: By providing clearer guidance about your target audience, you can expect improvements in the form of higher conversion volume for budget-constrained campaigns or lower cost-per-acquisition (CPA) for bid-constrained campaigns.
• Overcoming cold start challenges: Overcome the initial learning phase, leading to faster optimization and improved results.

Using the audience signals feature offers tremendous value for:

• Advertisers: Expand the reach and performance of your app campaigns by providing valuable insights about your ideal customers.
• Agencies or partners: Help your clients achieve better results with their customer acquisition campaigns by sharing the list of users who are more likely to install an app.

When to use

Audience signals for ACi campaigns can be particularly beneficial for specific situations:

• Cross-property advertisers: If you have multiple apps or websites, you can leverage data from other properties to optimize your ACi campaigns.
  • For example, if you’re a gaming advertiser, you can try to reach users who got to a specific level in another game, or if you’re a retailer, you can try to reach users who have made purchases on your retail website.
• Difficult-to-optimize events: Improve targeting for conversions that are difficult to optimize for directly, leading to improved results.
  • Certain events, like low-funnel conversions or high-value, infrequent purchases, can be challenging for machine learning models to optimize for without additional help from signals.

Instructions

Note: Audience signals can only be applied at the ad group level. It can take up to 2 weeks for Google’s machine learning models to fully integrate and optimize the new audience signals.

To add audience signals, follow the instructions below:

1. Go to the "Audiences" section beneath your asset group.
2. If you have already created audiences, choose Select an Audience. If not, choose Create an Audience.
3. Create a unique name for your audience.
4. Add your data.
5. Add custom segments.
6. Choose Save Audience.

Tip: You can use the “Demographics” section and the “Additional segments” option to further customize your audience. To enhance machine learning, use search term based custom segments.

Audience signal inputs

How they’ve interacted with your business

You can leverage first-party customer and marketing data you already have from desktop and mobile visitors, page and social views, and past converters.

Try adding data from these sources:

• Website visitor lists
• App user lists
• Customer lists (for example, email and subscription lists)
• Video viewer lists
• Firebase lists

Learn more About your data segments.

Note: To avoid issues with audience signals, ensure your lists follow the requirements below:

• Lists should match the campaign operating system type. For instance, an iOS campaign requires a list of iOS device IDs.
• Ensure your lists are refreshed every 540 days to maintain optimal performance.
• Lists must have more than 1000 active and eligible users.

Your custom audience segments

Custom audience segments help you reach your ideal audience by using relevant keywords, URLs, or apps that you add. Add the keywords or phrases that represent your targeted audience. Use URLs from websites that are similar to your website. Enter the names of apps that your ideal customer is likely to use.

Learn more About custom segments.

Demographics

When you use Demographics, you can narrow the focus of your custom audience segment by using certain identifiers to focus your campaign on specific qualities of your audience.

Additional audience segments

Add other segments to reach people based on who they are, their interests and habits, and what they’re actively researching. These signals help you reach the right audience at the right time.

Try adding targets from these areas:

• Detailed demographics: Reach user groups based on long-term life facts.
• Life events: Reach user groups when they are in the midst of important life milestones.
• Affinity: Reach user groups based on what they're passionate about and their habits and interests.
• In-market: Reach user groups based on their recent purchase intent.

Learn how to Create audience segments of your app users.

Related links

• About App campaigns
• Create an App campaign for installs
• Add audience signals