Written by onlineacademy
March 8, 2023

Learn the best practices for using Custom Audience targeting in your Google Display Ads campaigns and the top 3 mistakes most people make when using this with their banner ads. We’ll go through expert strategies for Custom Audiences inside Google ads with detailed walkthroughs in this simple tutorial.
Quick Summary of What You Will Learn:
1. What are Custom Audiences on the Google Display Network and how to set up custom audiences inside the Google Ads Dashboard.
2. Best targeting options to use when targeting custom audiences with Google PPC ads, specifically Display ads.
3. The top 3 mistakes to avoid when targeting custom audiences with Display campaigns.
4. How to use Custom Audiences for better lead generation.
5. How to use Custom Audiences for eCommerce ad campaigns
Our Google Display Ads Training Course covers much more advanced strategies to help grow ROI from Display campaigns.
Learn more in the video training here:
Video Transcript:
okay in this video for Google ads training we’re going to go over specifically custom audience targeting so one thing we wanted to point out specifically is the top three mistakes that people make when targeting custom audiences because if you do it wrong it’ll get thousands of clicks and they’re a penny and they’re on a bunch of apps and games and it’s pretty much worthless like a lot of Display Network ads are if you don’t set them up correctly so we’re going to talk about the top three mistakes how to fix them and how to correctly Target a custom audience or you’re actually getting some profitable display ad campaigns so we’ll go ahead and jump right in this is our test account we use this in all of our training if you look at the links down below we have more info on our master classes where we we break these down and much much more detail but I just want to jump into this quickly so
if you’re not familiar custom audiences is an option it’s an audience targeting option within the Google Display Network so when you set it up you set up your campaign to Target the Display Network and then you’d set up an ad group and then select audience over here now a lot of people know where marketing as an audience but there’s actually a lot of different audiences the Display Network you can either Target by content so what’s on a site specifically uh or the the audience which is more following the person no matter what website they’re on so you just go in here and do edit audience segments and put your audience right into here so first off the the number one mistake people make with custom audiences is targeting too many targeting options at once and we’ll show you what that means here inside the account so when you’re creating your custom audiences again if you’re not familiar it’s up here tools and settings and then audience manager and then you go up top your data segments
that that’s going to be remarketing and things like that custom segments is when you click on here we have a few example ones set up so the number one mistake is people will come in here and and put keywords and websites and interest and apps and so many other things you really just want to focus on one at a time so this one’s going to be a real estate example which there’s a lot of different ways to Target real estate uh or you can even Target you know someone that’s in the in Market shopping for something buy keywords or buy different um uh websites they viewed and things like that but this is just for illustration purposes is just going to be for Real Estate so the segment name is keywords maybe you could do uh buy houses or something like that so instead of doing all these different targeting options at once you’ll just pick one so this word is key this one’s going to be keywords people who have searched for any of these on
Google Now be careful when you click on this it actually shows you a little bit more detail it’s they’ll Reach people who search for those and similar terms whatever that means so it’s kind of like a broad broad match so it’s not they typed buy houses or house listings or something this morning that exact term they may have been looking for houses for sale they may have looked at Zillow they may have been typed something for realtor.com how much are house is selling for in my area it it’s a broad broad category just remember this isn’t exactly what they typed so in this case we’d only use keywords the wrong way to do it would be to Target too many things at the same time Google has the suggestions and you can just keep clicking on this add a ton of keywords and then also people that browse websites and then also people that use these apps uh and just
layering tons and tons and tons of targeting options if this works you don’t know which one is working there’s too many at once if it doesn’t work there’s no way to troubleshoot it because you don’t know where the bad traffic is coming from this is the number one mistake people make when uh trying to optimize or even set up custom audiences for the Google Display Network it doesn’t work well for PPC campaigns it’s not a good Google ad strategy you just you want this is too many things at once don’t do your custom audiences like this you’ll want to pick one at a time so one custom audience will be keywords another one will be websites and a different one if you wanted to would be apps you’d make separate ones and they’d be separate campaigns or separate ad groups that’s the best way to optimize display campaigns in Google so that’s the number one mistake to avoid uh the next one well actually on that note
Google will suggest doing things like this you’ll pretty much want to ignore whatever Google suggests they’re trying to get as much money as possible and as much volume because they’re a for-profit company they want to make more so pretty much any advice you get just get it besides Google they’re not really the best source to go to so number two too many keywords at once people again if you put too many keywords in there you don’t know which ones are working and which ones aren’t so back to the setups uh there’s people with any of these interests or purchase intentions that kind of crisscrosses with interest and uh the Affinity audiences for what what type of things people like and they’re into or purchase intentions which they have in Market uh they already have those I mean you can type those those are really really broad audience but you typically do the people who search for any of these terms which remember
it also says or similar terms so this is a very broad targeting option but typically you’ll do anywhere from two to maybe five at the most you really don’t do that many you could even do one so again this is a realtor one you can do buy houses house listing Zillow home for sale near me uh this is just kind of some a Google suggestions on what we’ve seen but you could really use this for anything if they’re you know looking up cars you know a different type of car or make or model if they’re looking for uh used items or if they’re in the market for software you can put in your specific type of software or business loans whatever it is you could put that in here it’s it’s going Beyond searches you’ll start with Google search and and people type in these exact things and you bid on them I usually phrase an exact match to stay more specific but this this is definitely a good option to have if you uh you’re running an account for a client or it’s your own account and you have a very large budget this is a good thing
to add on in addition to search campaigns so you’ve got people that have searches uh search things related to buying houses so you’ll do about two to five at the most and then that’s it if you get into a different theme completely maybe selling a house in this case or people looking for a realtor that’s that’s kind of a different there’d be like a different ad group or a different campaign uh in a Google search campaign then you would make this into a different group so don’t don’t put too many keywords in a custom audience is it then you don’t know which one’s working or which one’s causing all the problems
so the third one the biggest mistake people make with custom audiences and not optimizing their Google display campaigns correctly too many websites at once because people put in uh competitor websites or popular websites but doing too many at once again it gets really flooded so going back to the example this could be competitor sites or directory sites or something like that for a real estate example maybe zillow.com that’s a popular Real Estate website or uh you can do a a large industry publication if you’re in some type of software or maybe you have marketing software you have investing software uh you help people that with their retirement accounts you can put on a major
website knowing that people again it’s browse websites similar too it is not people that went on zillow.com five minutes ago it’s people that went on Zillow or realtor.com or house listing websites or something about real estate so remember this is a very broad category but it could be a good option maybe you put in uh you know something that that’s all about uh retirement or planning retirement and it’ll it’ll show to people that are browsing websites that are similar to that site or so sites about planning a retirement and you’re a company that helps people plan retirement and manage their accounts things like that so remember it’s it’s more of a theme you can’t type in your competitors websites and it will 100 Target people that just went to your competitor’s sites it’s sites similar to uh and the big thing with this is you’ll do one at a time you’ll just Target one and if you want to do other ones then you’ll
just do one at a time so people browsing sites similar to Zillow and then another one realtor.com and then homes.com just to see what triggers it or whatever major publication you want to do not necessarily a competitor you’d put that in here and you’d Target one website at a time so those are the top three mistakes people make when using custom audiences in the Google Display Network we have a lot more training in our master classes for Google search campaigns and uh Google display campaigns if you click on the link below we have additional free training you can join our newsletter our community get a lot of free training and additional resources down in the
description below so thanks for watching and we’ll see you in the next video all right everyone thanks so much for watching our PPC ads training video uh if you want more videos go ahead and hit the Subscribe button like this video if you found it useful and any questions post them in the comments down below we also have additional training in the description so thanks so much for watching and we’ll see you in the next video
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