Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 95 - Search Audiences

When we think of audience targeting in Google Ads, we generally think of Demand Gen, Video, Display, maybe even PMax audience signals. But audiences and Search interact in some really unique and interesting ways.

In fact, there's some speculation in the industry that when we do finally get to put our ads into AI Overviews and AI Mode, that it may be more audience targeted rather than query targeted. 

(Okay, okay, it's me. I'm the one who's speculating.)

But I say all this to say there's some really interesting ways that you can leverage Search and audiences together in Google Ads. So we're going to cover that today by answering three of your burning questions. 

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 95, Search Audiences.

Our first question comes from Mohammed Abdelkhalek on YouTube. They say, if I have a Google Ads Search campaign for a fashion brand and SimilarWeb shows my target audience is also interested in the arts, can I add the arts affinity segment to my Search campaign, even though that's not related to fashion? Or is that wrong?

Mohammed, that's exactly what you want to do. Love that you're using SimilarWeb, by the way, I did a sponsored video with them a couple of months ago. I'll drop the link in the episode description if you want to see that. 

If you're trying to advertise a fashion brand, you have Search campaigns or Shopping campaigns that relate to people searching for that brand, or for items like shoes, pants, et cetera. But of course, lots of different kinds of people could be searching for shoes, pants, et cetera.

The kind of person who's interested in your fashion brand though is also someone who's really interested in the arts. So by layering that on top of your Search campaign, you can narrow your reach so you're only showing your shoes, pants, et cetera, ads to people who are both searching for things that match your keywords and are interested in the arts. That's called Targeting Mode, and you can use that in Search and Shopping.

In fact, a common thing I see people try to do is they'll say, I'm a fashion brand, so I'm going to layer “interest in fashion” on top of my Search campaigns. And that's actually pretty useless because of course, if someone is searching for fashion things, they're interested in fashion! You're not going to end up narrowing things down at all. The whole purpose of using audiences with your Search or Shopping campaign, either by targeting or by excluding, is to layer on other things you want Google to take into account besides the query.

For example, someone who's searching for “shoes” and is a luxury shopper would be very different from someone searching for “shoes” and who is a value shopper. Even though the search can be the same, different users means different likelihoods to convert for your business.

Let's use a business example. Maybe you're selling CRM software that's meant for small business owners. So you could target small businesses or exclude large businesses, because someone looking for an enterprise-level CRM solution could also just search for CRM software. And so if you offer an enterprise solution, maybe you want to just target people who work at large companies so you're not wasting your budget on people looking for an entry-level solution.

When you're trying to decide whether to add audiences to your Search or Shopping campaigns and whether to target or exclude, look at how the query intersects with a complementary audience. Don't just repeat the same thing like “B2B software,” in-market for B2B software; “fashion,” in-market for fashion; or “food delivery,” in-market for food delivery. That achieves nothing.

Instead, try “B2B Software,” paired with “large company;” “in-market for fashion,” “interested in the arts;” “in-market for athletic apparel,” “luxury shopper;” or “in-market for food delivery,” “world music fan,” et cetera.

To go deeper on this audience layering topic, I actually spoke about this at HeroConf in San Diego in 2025. I've posted that full talk on YouTube. I'll drop the link in the episode description in case you want to see it. And of course, I also talk about this extensively in my bestselling book, Inside Google Ads: Everything You Need to Know About Audience Targeting, which is available on Amazon, Kobo, and Google Play.

Our next question comes from Vileve on YouTube, and they say, how do I find the people searching for certain products or services? 

This was in response to a video where I show you how to use Google Trends and how to see what people are searching for. So, this person said, okay, now how do I go find those people? 

Obviously, by showing Search ads, but that's not the only way. One of my favorite ways to reach people who are searching for specific things is to use a custom segment.

In Audience Manager, you can build a Custom segment of people who have searched for certain things on Google. If you're planning to use this in a Demand Gen campaign, it'll be called a Custom segment. If you're planning to use this in a Video campaign, it'll be called a Custom Search Terms, but it's the same thing.

This is actually one of the ways that I recommend folks get started with Demand Gen or Video campaigns if you're not quite sure what to do, because targeting a Custom segment based on your top 20 or 30 search terms is going to be a much narrower audience to choose rather than defaulting to one of the Google audiences like an in-market or an Affinity segment.

So go to your search terms report, in Search or Shopping, pick your top 20 to 30 search terms, add them to a Custom segment, and you're ready to get started on visual-based advertising. 

Or if you're using a tool like Google Trends, you see a bunch of stuff that's interesting to you, and you're not currently running Search campaigns, or you see from Keyword Planner that the CPCs will just be too expensive, you can reach those exact same people as they're doing other things online. Build that Custom segment, or custom search terms, add it to your Demand Gen or Video campaign, and then you're going to reach the people who search for certain things as they're doing other things online.

This is honestly one of my favorite audience targeting techniques. It is so slept on. For a full step-by-step tutorial on how to do this, you can join my Inside Google Ads course 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 also comes from Mohammed Abdikalik, and they say, should I upload my customer list if my account doesn't spend $50,000? Is it worth it to give Google the signal? 

Yes, it absolutely is.

As long as you have a good payment history in your Google Ads account and a good history of compliance, you can use Customer Match in your account on observation, as an exclusion, and to inform your smart bidding and optimized targeting. Meaning any campaign that's using a conversion-based bid strategy can use your Customer Match list as a signal, and any Performance Max campaign, or Demand Gen campaign on optimized targeting, will also use your Customer Match list as a signal.

Do it, do it, do it! 

In order to actually show ads to the list, you're going to need 90 days of history in your account and a lifetime spend of $50,000 US. But even if you don't meet that, there are huge benefits to that list just existing in your account because of what I've just mentioned and also because you can glean audience insights from the list.

In Audience Manager, go to your Customer Match list and then in the top right corner, you'll see these like three dots. Click that and choose Audience Insights. And then you'll get to see insights about which Google audience segments overlap with your customer list, which can be a really great way to get audience ideas for future campaigns you may want to run.

Yes, that is another Google Ads audience's tip that is so slept on.

To wrap it up, Search and audiences work so well together. Start with your existing audience insights and use that as a basis to see what you might want to do next. 

To find those, you can go into any campaign or just your account overall. On the left-hand side, choose Insights and Reports, and Insights. Scroll down until you see your Audience Insights box. There you'll see the kinds of audiences that your Google Ads account or campaigns are already over-indexing for. That's a great way to see which audiences you might want to exclude, who you might want to try and do Demand Gen with, and who you might want to test in a new ad group with broader match types on Targeting Mode. The possibilities are as endless as your creativity.

If you'd like a little more specific recommendations for how to get started, I recommend checking out Episode 92 of this podcast, where I shared a Google Ads Audiences Masterclass, including lots of specific tactical ways to use audiences in search together. And of course, this is covered in detail in my bestselling book, Inside Google Ads: Everything You Need to Know About Audience Targeting.

I mean, come on, I wrote a whole book about this topic. You know I think there's tons of untapped potential here!

Today's Insider Challenge is this. Let's say that you look at the audience insights for your Search campaign, and the top audience segment is exactly what you'd expect, perfectly aligned with your search terms, a high share of conversions, and high audience index. What do you do next, if anything? 

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 94, was this. I challenged you to think back to the most recent time you were using Google Ads, saw something, and thought, that's so stupid. Is there a way that from Google's perspective, this could actually be a useful thing and not a stupid thing? And then if you can keep going with the thought exercise, go a step further to think, is there a way this could potentially be a positive for me and not a negative?

To reiterate, the purpose of this challenge was not to gaslight yourself, it was just to expand your thinking because that's how we become better practitioners: when we push ourselves to get outside our comfort zones and consider other perspectives before forming our own opinions.

A recent example I'm going to share with you is a PMax campaign that I saw on a Google Ads coaching call with one of my regular clients. We saw that impressions had skyrocketed over the last few days. And the only explanation is Display. 

A little aside here, the channel performance report hasn't rolled out to all campaigns yet. We don't have it in this one. So the reason I knew that this was likely Display is because we looked at the search terms report and we saw that there's like 100,000 impressions that are not accounted for by the search terms. They're also not accounted for by the image assets. It was only by going to the products in this PMax that I saw that one of the products had skyrocketed to over 100,000 impressions. So while this could be serving on Discovery or Gmail, given how low the CPCs are, it is very likely to be Display by process of elimination. 

Anyway, although I'm annoyed because as I said many times before, I think Display is garbage, I have to think: why would this PMax campaign that's been running for four months on mostly Search and Shopping all of a sudden blast a ton of impressions into Display? 

Well, it's the holiday season. I'm recording this a few weeks in advance of when you're hearing it, but we know that Search demand may be ramping up, but competition is probably ramping up even faster. And while Search and Shopping inventory is limited by the number of queries there are, Display inventory is essentially infinite.

So this campaign is trying something new because a learning period doesn't exist in Google Ads. Your Smart bidding campaigns, PMax and otherwise, are always learning. And so this one probably was running into some trouble getting the same volume or the same click-through rate or the same conversion rate it had been doing. So it's trying something new. It's trying to get me a ton of impressions to see if that sheer volume is going to drive increased sales.

This change only started a few days ago, so we don't know if it's gonna be a good one or not, but wrapping my head around it, I can see that while this may not be a good thing in the end, it is absolutely a worthwhile thing for PMax to test.

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.