Exclude demographic segments

To provide a comprehensive and consolidated view of your Audiences and make audience management and optimization simpler, you’ll find the following improvements in Google Ads:

  • New audience reporting
    Detailed reporting about audience demographics, segments, and exclusions is now consolidated in one place. Click the Campaigns icon Campaigns Icon and open the “Audiences, keywords and content” tab and click Audiences. You can also easily manage your Audiences from this report page. Learn more About Audience reporting.
  • New terms
    We’re using new terms on your audience report and throughout Google Ads. For example, “audience types” (these include similar, custom, in-market, and affinity) are now referred to as audience segments and “remarketing” is now referred to as “your data”. Learn more about the Updates to Audience terms and phrases.

Just as you can show your ads to people based on their age, gender, and parental status, you can also exclude any of these specific demographic segments to make your advertising more efficient. This article shows you how to exclude selected demographic segments at the ad group level or at the campaign level.

Example

A female-only spa has a campaign that features the available services and hours for their spa centers. They're unable to serve male customers, so they decide to exclude the “Male” category from this campaign. They could set the exclusion at the ad group level. But because the spa wants to apply these settings to all the ad groups in their campaign, they can make demographic exclusions at the campaign level instead of adding them one by one.

Instructions

Note: The instructions below are part of the new design for the Google Ads user experience. To use the previous design, click the "Appearance" icon, and select Use previous design. If you're using the previous version of Google Ads, review the Quick reference map or use the Search bar in the top navigation panel of Google Ads to find the page you’re searching for.

To exclude by demographic segments for your campaign targeting:

  1. In your Google Ads account, click the Tools icon Tools Icon.
  2. Click the Shared library drop down in the section menu.
  3. Click Exclusion lists.
  4. Click the plus icon and select the campaign or ad group that you want to update.
  5. Check the box next to the specific demographic segment that you want to exclude in the ad group.
  6. Click Save.

Notes

Excluding any demographic segment can significantly decrease the amount of traffic your ad group or campaign might receive.

Also, you can exclude people whose specific demographic traits we haven't identified by selecting the "Unknown" segment. However, excluding it might prevent a substantial number of people from seeing your ads. Many sites within the Display Network don't provide demographic data for customers, and we aren't able to estimate demographic information from everyone using the web or mobile apps. This means that many people fall under the "Unknown" demographic segment.

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