To provide a comprehensive and consolidated view of your content targeting and make content targeting management and optimization simpler, you’ll see the following improvements in Google Ads:
All types of content targeting will be found under “Content” in the side navigation
- “Topics”, “Placements”, “Display and Video Keywords” and “Exclusions” for all types of content targeting are now categorized under the “Content” tab in the side navigation menu. For “Exclusions”, click the drop-down arrow
to the right of the term “Exclusions” to select exclusions for topics, placements, or Display and Video keywords.
to the right of the term “Exclusions” to select exclusions for topics, placements, or Display and Video keywords.Targeting ads is an essential part of a successful advertising campaign. You may have designed the perfect ad, but you'll need to show it to the right people at the right time to better reach your goal. Google Ads offers different ways of targeting your ads.
Before you begin
Audience targeting
Your audience is who you want your ads to reach. You can reach people based on:
- Who they are
- Their interests and habits
- What they’re actively researching
- People who’ve already interacted with your ads, website, or app and may return
Learn more About audience targeting.
Content targeting
- Topics: Target one ad to multiple pages about certain topics at once. Topic targeting lets you reach a broad range of pages on the Display Network. Google Ads analyzes web content and considers factors such as text, language, link structure, and page structure. It then determines the central themes of each webpage and targets ads based on your topic selections.
- Placement: Target websites on the Display Network that your customers visit. If you select this type of targeting, we'll only look at your chosen sites (managed placements) when searching for relevant sites. Unlike contextual targeting (automatic placements), placement targeting doesn't require keywords. A placement might be an entire website or a subset of a site.
- Content keywords: Choose words that are relevant to your product or service to target users making searches using those same terms. You can tailor a set of keywords to manually reach certain demographics or meet specific goals. For instance, you can change your keywords to reflect seasonal interests or make the most of a sale.
- Display expansion for search: Let Google Ads find users for you with a combination of automated bidding and smart targeting. Display expansion works for both Search and Display campaigns, targeting high-performance moments for the best results.
Examples
If you run a dog daycare center in San Francisco, California, you could add the keyword "doggie daycare," and "San Francisco and nearby cities," as the target location for your Google Ads campaign. Then, when people in San Francisco type "doggie daycare" on Google, they could see your ad next to the search results.
If your business sells costumes, you could add the keyword "buy costumes" and the topic "Hobbies & Leisure > Special Occasions > Holidays & Seasonal Events," to target your image ad at iPhones or Android devices. Then, people could see your image ad when they use their Android phones to visit sites on the Display Network that have information about buying costumes, Halloween or Mardi Gras.
Keep in mind
When you select multiple targeting methods on the Display Network, your success depends on your network settings.
Display ads only appear on the Google Display Network. They don't appear on search results pages. Like other Google ads, display ads can be created for campaigns based on cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM), target cost-per-action (tCPA), target return on ad spend (tROAS), and enhanced cost-per-click (e-CPC).