Create and manage audiences

Page Summary

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• Audiences are reusable collections of segments, demographic targeting, and exclusions supported for Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns.

• Audiences can be created and updated using the AudienceService and can combine multiple dimensions like segments, age, gender, household income, and parental status.

• UserListSegments are the only dimension that can be used for exclusion within an Audience.

• Audiences can be retrieved using GoogleAdsService.SearchStream with a specific query.

• Targeting audiences varies by campaign type, using AssetGroupSignal for Performance Max and AdGroupCriterion for Demand Gen campaigns.

An Audience is a reusable collection of focused segments, demographic targeting, and exclusions. Audience targeting is supported for Performance Max, Demand Gen, and App campaigns. If you want to target audience segments directly in a Display, Search, Video, Hotel, or Standard Shopping campaign, see Audience segments.

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 (CustomAudienceSegment)
• Age: AgeDimension
• Gender: GenderDimension
• Household income: HouseholdIncomeDimension
• Parental status: ParentalStatusDimension

Inspect MutateAudienceResult for audience_id

When creating an audience with AudienceService.MutateAudiences, each operation returns a MutateAudienceResult. You can inspect MutateAudienceResult to obtain the audience_id by parsing the returned resource_name, and you can inspect mutable fields (such as name) on the returned audience object when response_content_type is set to MUTABLE_RESOURCE:

# Configure the request to return the mutable resource in the response.
request = googleads_client.get_type("MutateAudiencesRequest")
request.customer_id = customer_id
request.operations = [operation]
request.response_content_type = (
    googleads_client.enums.ResponseContentTypeEnum.MUTABLE_RESOURCE
)

response = audience_service.mutate_audiences(request=request)

for result in response.results:
    resource_name = result.resource_name
    # Format: customers/{customer_id}/audiences/{audience_id}
    audience_id = audience_service.parse_audience_path(resource_name)[
        "audience_id"
    ]
    print(f"Created audience '{resource_name}' with ID '{audience_id}'.")

    # Access mutable fields on result.audience when MUTABLE_RESOURCE is requested.
    if result.audience.resource_name:
        print(f"Audience name from mutable resource: {result.audience.name}")

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 group signals guide to learn how to target audiences using asset group signals.

Ad group criterion

Demand Gen and App campaigns support adding an audience ad group criterion using AdGroupCriterion to target audiences or provide audience signals. You can target audiences at the ad group level using AudienceInfo criteria on AdGroupCriterion.audience by setting the AudienceInfo.audience field (ad_group_criterion.audience.audience) to the audience resource name.

Here are the steps to set up audience targeting:

Enable audience targeting in the AdGroup

You must enable audience targeting in the AdGroup by setting use_audience_grouped to true when the ad group is created. This setting cannot be changed after the ad group is created.

This lets you add AdGroupCriterion with audiences. If this value is not set to true, then your subsequent request to target the audience will fail.

Create an AdGroupCriterion

Create an AdGroupCriterion, and set the AudienceInfo.audience field on AdGroupCriterion.audience to the resource name of the audience created in Create audiences.

Optional: Enable audience targeting in the Campaign

You can optionally set use_audience_grouped to true when the campaign is created. With this setting, you receive an error if you try to add criteria that would exclude segments and demographics at the campaign level.

Best practices

• Use audiences for persona building. Audiences are best used in Performance Max, Demand Gen, and App campaigns where you want to layer multiple segments and demographic criteria to target a specific persona.
• Use audience segments for direct targeting. For Display, Search, Video, Hotel, and Standard Shopping campaigns, or when you only need to target a single segment (like a remarketing list), use Audience segments instead of Audiences.

Common errors

When creating or updating an Audience, the Google Ads API validates the request and returns errors from the AudienceError enum if validation fails.