Create and manage audiences

Page Summary

• 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

Note: 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 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.

AudienceError
AUDIENCE_SEGMENT_NOT_FOUND	Summary An audience segment in the request was not found. Common causes Referencing a segment ID that does not exist or is inaccessible. How to handle Ensure all segment IDs exist and are accessible before creating or updating an audience. Prevention tips Validate segment IDs before including them in an audience.
DIMENSION_INVALID	Summary An audience dimension is invalid. Common causes Including detailed_demographic in exclusion_dimension. How to handle Only use user_list for exclusions in exclusion_dimension. Prevention tips Ensure only user_list is used in exclusion_dimension when creating or updating an audience.
DUPLICATE_AUDIENCE_SEGMENT	Summary The audience contains duplicate segments. Common causes Adding the same segment multiple times to the same audience. How to handle Remove duplicate segments from the audience definition. Prevention tips Ensure all segments in an audience are unique.
NAME_ALREADY_IN_USE	Summary The audience name is already in use. Common causes Attempting to create multiple audiences with the same name. How to handle Use a unique name when creating an audience. Prevention tips Check for existing audience names before creating a new one.
TOO_MANY_DIMENSIONS_OF_SAME_TYPE	Summary The audience contains too many dimensions of the same type. Common causes Including multiple dimensions of the same type (for example, multiple age dimensions) in one audience. How to handle Ensure the audience definition contains only one dimension of each type. Prevention tips Review the audience definition to ensure no duplicate dimension types are included.
TOO_MANY_SEGMENTS	Summary The audience contains too many segments. Common causes Exceeding the maximum allowed number of segments in an audience. How to handle Reduce the number of segments in the audience definition. Prevention tips Check documentation for limits on the number of segments per audience.