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 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: AgeDimension
• Gender: GenderDimension
• Household income: HouseholdIncomeDimension
• Parental status: ParentalStatusDimension

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 using AdGroupCriterion to target audiences.

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

Create an AdGroupCriterion

Create an AdGroupCriterion , and set the audience field to the resource name of the audience that was created earlier in this guide.

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 and Demand Gen 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.