Audiences

Audiences are groups of people. The audience targeting capabilities in Google Ads have become far more advanced in the last few years, and I don’t expect that trend to stop short of legislative or judicial action. Just as Google Ads has many, many topics, there are many, many audiences. Traditionally, Google had two main types of audience targeting: affinity and in-market. Nowadays, the system encourages you to step outside those predefined buckets and create custom affinity and custom intent audiences, but we’ll save those for last.

Affinity Audiences

People have all sorts of interests. If something has a significant enthusiast following, there’s a good chance there’s an affinity audience for it. And if not, you can try creating a custom affinity audience for whatever niche audience you’re looking to reach, but we’ll come back to that. Some examples of affinity audiences are: Motorcycle Enthusiasts, Beauty Mavens, Avid Political News Readers, Dog Lovers, etc.

Let’s get back to our Mexican restaurant advertising example. What affinity audience is directly relevant to Mexican restaurants?

None of them are directly relevant, but that doesn’t mean none of them are useful. Foodies, Frequently Eats Dinner Out, Aspiring Chefs…our target audiences could fall into any of these affinity audiences.

If Google believes that someone frequently eats dinner out, what sort of display ad would you want to serve to them to get them to consider eating at this Mexican restaurant? In the case of restaurants, I always stick with the maxim ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. Personally, I’d love to see display ads that feature beautiful photos of that restaurant’s Mexican food.

In-Market Audiences

If you’re actively considering a purchase for something, you are “in-market” for that something. Google Ads has a wide variety of in-market audiences.