Audiences

An Audience is a reusable collection of focused segments, demographic targeting, and exclusions. Audience targeting is supported for Performance Max and Discovery campaigns.

Create audiences

Create and update an audience using the AudienceService. Each Audience must have a unique name. This reusable audience allows a combination of multiple audience dimensions:

• Audience segments
  • User list segments
  • Affinity or in-market segments
  • Life event segments
  • Detailed demographic segments
  • Custom audience segments
• Age
• Gender
• Household income
• Parental status

Only user list segments may be used in an exclusion dimension.

Retrieve audiences

As with other resources, you can use GoogleAdsService.SearchStream to retrieve attributes of audiences.

SELECT
  audience.id,
  audience.resource_name,
  audience.name,
  audience.status,
  audience.description,
  audience.dimensions,
  audience.exclusion_dimension
FROM audience

Target audiences

Audiences can be targeted in multiple ways depending on the campaign type.

Asset group signals

Performance Max campaigns use an AssetGroupSignal to target audiences. See the Asset Groups guide to learn how to target audiences using asset group signals.

Ad group criterion

Discovery campaigns support adding audience ad group criterion with this process. This campaign uses AdGroupCriterion to target audiences.

Here are the steps to set up audience targeting:

1. Enable audience targeting in the AdGroup by setting use_audience_grouped to true on the creation of the ad group if you want to add AdGroupCriterion with audiences. If this value is not set to true, then your request later to target the audience will fail.
2. Create an AdGroupCriterion, and set the audience to the resource name of the audience that was created earlier in this guide.
3. You can optionally set the use_audience_grouped to true on the creation of the campaign. When that value is true, you will receive an error if you try to add criteria that would exclude segments and demographics at the campaign level.