Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 72 - Audience Failures
Audience targeting in Google Ads can open up so many opportunities for your business, but it doesn't always work the way you want it to.
As someone who wrote the book about Google Ads audience targeting, I can be first to attest to the fact that you will encounter some major audience targeting failures on your road to audience targeting success.
In fact, I was leading a two-hour workshop last week all about audience targeting, and during the live demo, I found that a specific type of detailed demographic targeting, targeting users based on their company size, was not available in a Display campaign, even though it was still available in other campaign types.
Still, when things don't go according to plan, one of the best skills you can have as a Google Ads practitioner is the ability to quickly pivot. And that's what we're going to learn how to do today. We're going to make Ross proud.
I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you.
This is Inside Google Ads: Episode 72, Audience Failures.
Our first question today comes from Lee White on YouTube and they ask, I've created my Combined Segment, but Google Ads will not allow me to apply it to my YouTube campaign. Any thoughts?
Well, Lee, my thoughts are that Combined Segments are no longer compatible with Video campaigns.
I know. I know! There was no big announcement anywhere, but as I was researching my book, I found out that Combined Segments are only compatible with Search Campaigns and Display Campaigns now. No Video, no Demand Gen, no Performance Max audience signals, nothing else.
A Combined Segment, by the way, is the type of audience targeting in Google Ads where you can layer or stack different audiences together. I delve into this in Episode 24 of this podcast from July 11th, 2024, in case you want to learn more about that.
But since Combined Segments are no longer an option in most campaign types, what can you do?
Your best bet is probably a Custom Segment and since you're using a Video campaign, it's actually going to be called a Custom Interest and a Custom Search Terms.
What the heck does that mean?
Well, a Custom Segment or Custom Interest is a way you can create your own audience segment using Google's data in a unique way. You can tell Google that you want to target users based on their interests, based on things they've recently searched for, based on the kinds of websites they visit or the kind of apps they use.
Custom segments are compatible with Display campaigns and Demand Gen campaigns. But if you're in a Video campaign or a Performance Max audience signal, you're going to see something called a Custom Interest instead.
A Custom Interest is like a Custom Segment. It has three of the four capabilities. With a Custom Interest, you can create an audience segment based on people's interests, the types of websites they visit, or the types of apps they use.
If you're in a Video campaign and you want to target people based on the kinds of things they search for on Google, that will be called a Custom Search Terms. And as of when I'm recording this episode, a Custom Search Term is only a thing in a Video campaign, nowhere else.
An important thing to note about Custom Search Terms or a Custom Segment based on search terms is that it only works as intended on Google-owned properties: websites or apps that Google owns. So think YouTube, Maps, Discover, it'll work well there. But if you're running on the display network or on video partners, then a custom search term or a Custom Segment based on search terms will be treated like interests, not search terms.
I don't know why Google thought this was a good idea, but that's the way it works. Just keep that in mind if you're in a Display Campaign, a Demand Gen campaign with display enabled, or a Video campaign with video partners enabled, then you shouldn't rely on Custom Search Terms or a Custom Segment based on search terms.
Another workaround to use a Combined Segment for video is to run a Display Campaign and then add video creative to it. I'm generally not a fan of the display network. My Search Engine Land article from yesterday goes into detail about that and why I don't like it so much. But that is an option for you to run video ads to a Combined Segment. And in fact, in 2025, it's the only way to do so.
Don't worry, this episode is not going to be all about me. But if you have not yet grabbed Inside Google Ads: Everything You Need to Know About Audience Targeting, it is available on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo Online, and Google Play Books. So be sure to grab a copy if you want to master audience targeting.
Our second question today comes from Flyer Digital on YouTube and they say, I run Google Ads for a community matrimony company.
By the way, I had to Google what that means. It sounds like it's a dating app.
They continue, Google doesn't let us use custom audiences because of the personalized advertising policy. And Google has put us under the dating and companionship policy. So we used to be able to use audiences as audience signals in app campaigns and PMax, but now Google has restricted our ability to do that. We've tried running display audiences, but we failed miserably on a cold audience. Currently, we're only running search, app, and PMax. My manager has told me that if you aren't able to remove this restriction from the ad account, there's no need for you. I don't know what to do.
Flyer Digital, I am so sorry you're going through this. First of all, your manager sounds like a jerk. I'm sure you know that already, but let's break down the issue here, because there's actually a few things all intersecting, which is why you're having such a hard time.
I looked up the dating and companionship policy, which is the first thing you should do whenever you get a policy flag, look it up. And I saw that dating and companionship ads may be restricted based on a lot of things. There are certain countries where you are just not eligible to run. And in other countries, you need to get a certification in order to advertise this way.
There's some general policies that are allowed with certification, some restricted things, which means some features won't be available to you, that also require certification, and then other things that are simply prohibited. So if you want to keep working at this company and not get fired, apply for that certification.
And by the way, this applies to a lot of different industries. Certification may be required by Google as a way for Google to have this extra step to try to keep bad actors and spammers and scammers out of Google Ads.
Next, we have personalized advertising policies which apply to even more industries. If you are a freelancer, an agency, someone who's not just running Google Ads for your business or in-house, you will undoubtedly come across Google's personalized advertising policies.
To get there, just Google "personalized advertising policy Google Ads.” If you scroll down on that page, there's a chart that shows you what kind of audiences you can use and what kind you can't use.
If you're advertising in a sensitive interest category, which means you're subject to personalized advertising policies, you can still use Google's audiences, so that's your In-market, Affinity, life events and detailed demographics. You can still use basic demographics with some exceptions and you can still use location targeting, but you cannot use any kind of remarketing. That's the personalized part of the advertising. That means definitely no customer match or anything like that. You can't use Custom Segments and you can't use Lookalike segments.
Now, although it doesn't say so on this page, I actually double-checked this with Ginny Marvin, who's the Ad Liaison at Google when I was writing my book. I'm sorry I wasn't planning to mention my book again, but it is relevant here! And she confirmed that you can still use optimized targeting and you can still use audience signals, which you asked about in your question. And you can use Combined Segments as long as they only contain Google's audiences and no Custom Segments or any of the not allowed segments.
Now, what kind of industries fall under these policies?
Again, your best bet is to go straight to the source here with Google. But there are things about healthcare, education, identity and belief, finance, all kinds of stuff that can get you flagged. You can even get flagged if you're advertising something that's totally fine, but there's something else on your website that's not fine.
For example, something I've seen is med spas. You know, they may offer haircuts and manicures and facials, which are all totally fine. And Botox, which is a drug. So because of that, their whole ad account gets flagged, even if they're only advertising the manicures and pedicures.
Something to keep in mind if your account does get flagged, it could be because of stuff in your ads, but it could also have nothing to do with your ads and just have to do with your website.
Coming back to Flyer Digital's question, what should they do with all these restrictions? After getting certified under dating and companionship, you can still use all of Google's data, and that's really powerful. You can layer these onto your Search Campaign or you can include these in audience signals for app and PMax.
If you want to try reaching out to cold audiences, I recommend trying that in Demand Gen instead of a Display Campaign because the audience quality in Demand Gen tends to be a lot higher.
But the most important thing you can do, especially in a restricted account like this, is spend most of your time focused on creative. There are so many targeting restrictions, you're going to want to ensure that you have really strong text, image, and video creative that really appeals to your target audience and really doesn't appeal to your not target audience. That is how you're going to supersede all these policy issues and all these targeting limitations to drive exceptional results for the business you're supporting.
And if you're not quite sure how to create exceptional text, image, and video assets, it's one of the many topics we cover in my course, Inside Google Ads. When you join, you get instant access to more than 100 in-platform tutorials with me, plus guest experts like Amy Hebdon, the top expert in the world on Responsive Search ads, and Cory Henke, the top expert in the world on YouTube ads.
You can learn more about Inside Google Ads and join today at learn.jyll.ca. That's J-Y-L-L Dot C-A or follow the link in the episode description.
Our final question today comes from Christoph Gummersbach on LinkedIn. And he asks, how does the size of Google-engaged audiences compare to traditional tag-based remarketing lists?
I'm going to break apart those two kinds of audiences Christoph mentioned, and then I'm going to share my answer.
So the Google-engaged audience is the newest kind of remarketing audience available in Google Ads. This is something every Google Ads account automatically gets, you get one, and Google automatically populates this list with people who engage with your website in search results, whether organic or paid. It's something I've been talking about when guesting on podcasts recently because it's really exciting and not enough small business owners know about this.
Now, the other thing Christoph mentioned is a traditional tag-based remarketing list. And by that, he means your general website remarketing list, people who visited your website, which you can implement using the Google Tag or Google Analytics or both.
So now to the question, how does the size of the two compare? And you know what? I didn't know the answer to that, so I decided to conduct a study.
And I'm excited to share with you today a brand new study, should you use Google-engaged audiences in 2025. Now, I know as a podcast listener, you may not be interested in all the finer details. So I'm just going to share the conclusion here. But if you do want to know more about what the study found and some other takeaways for you, I will include a link to it in this episode description.
What I found is that Google-engaged audiences are similarly sized to Google Analytics audiences. Across the 14 different Google Ads accounts I analyzed, on average, those two were about the same size. Intuitively, this kind of makes sense because while Google-engaged audiences wouldn't include traffic from sources like direct traffic, referral traffic, or social media traffic, they do capture zero-click behavior. That is, users who interact with your brand on Google Search, YouTube, Maps, et cetera, but don't actually click to your website.
I did find though that audiences based on the Google tag are suffering. They were generally much smaller than both the Google-engaged audience and the Google Analytics audience.
To dive deeper into these findings and some bonus takeaways around Gmail, be sure to check out the link in the episode description to my full study about Google-engaged audiences.
To wrap up for today, I want to remind you again that it is commonplace as a Google Ads practitioner to encounter obstacles or have a strategy that fails when you go to set it into practice. That's OK. The key is to make sure you're up to date on current capabilities in Google Ads so that you can pivot, adapt, and come up with creative solutions, whether that's subbing a Combined Segment for a Custom Segment, employing a creative-led targeting approach versus an audience-led targeting approach, or using a different campaign type like Demand Gen or Display to run video inventory instead of only thinking of a Video campaign to run video inventory.
Creativity is one of the top skills you need to succeed.
Today's Insider Challenge is this. Let's say you're running a Demand Gen campaign, remarketing to a website visitors list. Do you add the Google-engaged audience to your campaign? Why or why not?
The beauty of the Insider Challenge is there's no right or wrong answer, just an opportunity to stretch your brain on real life Google Ads problem solving.
Last Episode's Challenge, Episode 71 was this. Let's say that you’re using Maximize Conversions bidding in a Search campaign, things are going well, no appetite to grow. You just want to keep things steady. Your campaign averages about 20 conversions a month, and it's been doing so for six months. Do you set a Target CPA? Why or why not?
My general rule of thumb in Google Ads is if it ain't broke, don't fix it. So that would mean don't touch a thing, just stick with Max Conversions. In this scenario, even though we're not getting 30 conversions in 30 days, we're just a little below that with 20 conversions in 30 days. And we've been doing that consistently for six months. So we are driving consistent results. Because of that, I probably would set a Target CPA and if my CPA has been relatively consistent for the last two to three months, I would set it at my actual CPA.
The reason I want to do this is because auction dynamics are always changing. Google Ads is always changing with AI overviews and AI mode. Google Ads is becoming more predictable. I'm seeing so many people booking Google Ads coaching calls with me to say, “My ads worked really well a year two ago and they're just not working now. Why is that happening? “
It's because the fundamental nature of user behavior has changed and how the ad platform works has changed.
So with all that being said, even though things are working well for us, which is great, I would probably still want to switch to Target CPA because that's going to give me more control and consistency than what Maximize Conversions can offer since I'm now separating my bidding from my budget and I can adjust those as needed independently.
In Episode 40 of this podcast from October 31st, 2024, I shared an example of a low volume campaign that we switched to Target ROAS and were able to drive sustainable results, but the results initially got worse before they got better. Something to keep in mind.
What about you? Would you switch to Target CPA or stick with, if it ain't broke, don't fix it?
I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.