About targeting for Video campaigns (original) (raw)

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: Go to Audiences within the Campaigns menu for detailed reporting about audience demographics, segments, and exclusions. 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 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.

Video campaigns run on YouTube and across the web through Google Ads. By targeting your Video campaigns on YouTube and Google video partners, you can advertise to people at moments that matter. With a wide variety of targeting methods available to you, such as demographic groups, interests, placements, and your data segments, you can reach specific or niche audiences based on who they are, what they're interested in, or what content they're viewing.

Location targeting works as an intersection. For example, if the targeted location for your campaign is New York and if you’re also targeting a remarketing list, the system will target users who are both in New York and members of the remarketing list.

To help you reach more potential customers, your ads will now show on content that matches any of the topics, placements, or Display, Video, or Search keywords you target. For example, if you targeted “bikes” as a topic and “cycling” as a Display, Video, or Search keyword, your ads will show on content that matches either.

You’ll also notice contextual targeting simplified into a single page in Google Ads, so you can manage all content targeting types (Topics, Placements, Display or Video keywords, and Exclusions) in a single view. You can find the Content page under the “Audiences, keywords, and content” drop-down menu within the Campaigns menu.

Note: To help you find more conversion opportunities for your video campaigns that drive conversions only, you’ll no longer be able to add content targeting to new and existing video conversion campaigns. From early 2023, all existing content targeting settings has been automatically removed from video campaigns that drive conversions. To manually remove content targeting from existing conversion campaigns, go to your ad group settings. Learn how to Optimize your Video campaign for more conversions.

Available targeting methods for Video campaigns

Audience targeting methods

Audience targeting methods let you define who you want to reach. Audiences are groups of people with specific interests, intents, and demographics, as estimated by Google. These include:

• Demographic groups: Choose the age, gender, parental status, or household income of the audience you want to reach.
• Detailed demographics: Reach users based on additional broad, shared traits, such as college students, homeowners, or new parents.
• Interests: Pick from available audience categories to reach people interested in certain topics, even when they may be visiting pages about other topics. Learn more About audience targeting.
  • Affinity segments: Raise brand awareness and drive consideration with your video ads by reaching people who already have a strong interest in relevant topics.
  • Custom affinity segments: With custom affinity segments, you can create audiences that are more tailored to your brands, compared to broad, TV-like affinity segments. For example, rather than reaching "Sports Fans," a running shoe company may want to reach "Avid Marathon Runners" instead.
  • Life events: Reach potential customers on YouTube and Gmail when purchase behavior shifts and brand preferences change during life milestones like moving, graduating from college, or getting married.
  • In-market segments: Select from these audiences to find customers who are researching products and actively considering buying a service or product like those you offer.
  • Custom segments: Built with performance advertisers in mind, custom segments allow you to reach viewers as they’re making a purchase decision based on the keywords they’ve recently searched on Google.com.
• Your data segments: Reach more viewers across YouTube and Google video partners based on their past interactions with your videos, video ads, or YouTube channel after linking your YouTube channel to your Google Ads account. You can also show ads to people who’ve interacted with your website or mobile app.
• Customer Match: Customer Match lets you use your first-party online and offline data to reach and re-engage with your customers across YouTube and Google video partners. Learn more About Customer Match.

Content targeting methods

Content targeting methods let you define where you want (or where you don't want) your ads to show. These include:

• Placements: Target channels, videos, apps, websites, or placements within websites. For example, you can target an entire high-traffic blog or just the homepage of a popular news site. Placements can include:
  • YouTube channels
  • YouTube videos
  • Websites on the Google Display Network
  • Apps on the Google Display Network
    Note: When you add Google Display Network placements, your ad may still run in all eligible locations on YouTube. When you add YouTube placements, your ad may still run in all eligible locations across the Google Display Network.
    If you have "Video partners on the Display Network" selected under "Networks" and you add Google Display Network placements only, your ads may still show on YouTube.
• Topics: Target your video ads to specific topics on YouTube and the Google Display Network. Topic targeting lets you reach a broad range of videos, channels, and websites related to the topics you select. For example, if you target the "Automotive" topic, then your ad will show on YouTube to people watching videos about cars.
• Keywords: Depending on your video ad format, you can show your video ads based on words or phrases (keywords) related to a YouTube video, YouTube channel, or type of website that your audience is interested in.
• Devices: Target users using computers, smart phones, mobile devices, and TV screen devices like Chromecast.

By combining multiple content targeting methods, your ads will target any of the selected content in your ad group and help you reach a broader audience. To manage your content targeting settings in Google Ads, click “Content” in the life-side page menu.

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