Create and manage audiences

An Audience is a reusable collection of focused segments, demographic targeting, and exclusions. Audience targeting is supported for Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns. If you want to target audience segments directly in a Display, Search, Video, Hotel or Standard Shopping campaign, navigate to 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
• Age
• Gender
• Household income
• Parental status

Only UserListSegment—a wrapper for a UserList referenced within an Audience— can 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

Demand Gen 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 upon creation of the ad group.

   This lets you 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 use_audience_grouped to true upon creation of the campaign.

   With this setting, you receive an error if you try to add criteria that would exclude segments and demographics at the campaign level.

Common errors