Name: Beyond Keywords: Advanced Audience Targeting Strategies in Google Ads
Uploaded: 2025-07-30T15:18:01.291Z
Duration: 1 h 20 s
Description: Beyond Keywords: Advanced Audience Targeting Strategies in Google Ads

Transcript for "Beyond Keywords: Advanced Audience Targeting Strategies in Google Ads": Hey, everyone. Welcome to the webinar today, and, thank you to everyone who is here buying on time for the start of the session and getting involved in the chat, dropping some good memes in there. RIP to Hulk Hogan. I saw him appear there. But we're gonna have a few more people joining us over the next couple of minutes. So while they continue to join, I'll introduce our guest for today. So I'm delighted to be joined by Google Ads coach, author, podcaster, and all around lovely human being. Jill's asking Gales, how are you doing today, Jill? I'm doing okay. Thanks. How are you doing, James? Yeah. I'm not doing too bad. We were speaking, just before we kind of, jumped on stage live here that, this is your first day back in the office, and you weren't feeling the best last week. So really appreciate you taking the time, but I hope things are feeling a bit better now. Thank you. Yes. Getting the flu in the summer feels like a rip off. That feels like it should only be a winter thing. But the silver lining is my children did not get sick, my husband did not get sick, just me. So at least this won't be ricocheting around our household for the next month, touch wood. Nice. And we were actually speaking earlier in the week, about another content project that we're working on at Lunio called the paid media news show, which you kindly submitted some commentary, to us, and it was about smart bidding exploration. So to everyone watching this, be on the lookout for our first episode of the paid media news show, which will be coming out next week. And you said the smart bidding exploration topic was actually quite fitting because you're already starting work on your second book, which will be all about bidding strategy. So how's that process going so far? It's going well so far. Thank you. Yes. I, the way I start with a book project is by writing the table of contents. And once I have an idea, that's, like, my directions for where it's gonna go. So I have written the table of contents for the bidding book. I have a lot of existing kind of thoughts and materials to work with. I think it'll be thicker. Probably, this is my audience targeting book. That's how that's how it goes there. I could see bidding being about twice the size, but, I'm just about ready to start actually, like, filling in that table of contents and writing it there. So really looking forward to it, and, of course, smart bidding exploration will be a part of that. Nice. Nice. We had one person say that they can't hear Jill. I'm hoping that will be resolved. It seems like most other people can hear Jill. Hopefully, that will be, a issue that can be resolved. It's all good. So we are gonna get going now. We've had a few more people join. Again, welcome to everyone. Very glad to have you here either live or if you're watching back on demand, of course. For those that don't know me, I'm James, the content lead here at Lunio. I will be hosting the webinar today, asking the questions, and also passing over to Jill for her to present some of the slides that we've got today. We're aiming for around thirty five minutes to get through the content with some time left at the end for q and a, which I'll say more about in just a second. But just a few other quick bits of housekeeping before we get into today's agenda. So we are recording the session today, and it will be available to watch back on demand. You'll receive an email with a link where you can watch that. It'll also be on Lunio YouTube channel too as of tomorrow, so you can check-in there if you wanna catch that. If you have any questions for Jill about the content as we go through, you can pop them into the q and a tab. We do have a dedicated q and a tab, which you can see there. It's not the main chat which people are talking in right now. You can see there's a docs tab and a q and a tab there. So if you put your questions into the q and a tab, it helps us keep them all in one place so the the questions don't get buried, and we can make sure that we can see all the questions at the end and get run to as many as we can. You also have the ability to upvote questions that you, like yourself. So if there's a question that you'd particularly like to see an answer for, you can upload, questions that other people have asked you, and that that's helpful for us to prioritize which ones to answer. We've also got some resources in the docs tab here in Goldcast, and we'll be directing your attention to our relevant parts of the session today just so you can get a bit more context and a bit more further reading on some of the things that we'll be covering. There's a lot to cover, and there's only so much we can get through in in the time that we've got. So it is helpful to check out some of that, further reading. In the doc section, you can also see a link to Jill's LinkedIn profile. So on the the small chance that you're probably not already connected with her, then you can follow her and stay up to date with her latest updates. We will also be running a few audience polls during the session. And I'm just I'm just going to see now if I can find the polls, and it looks like my polls aren't available here. So I know, Ben, we've got you behind the scenes. So if you're able to see why I can't see the polls, you can let me know. But for now, we're gonna move on without the the polls. So I'm just gonna present our agenda slide and let people know the kind of main topics that we'll be, covering today. So we have got six main points on the agenda, and I'm just gonna run through those. So firstly, we'll look at what audience targeting really means in Google Ads today and how things have evolved over the past few years. Next, we'll do a whistle stop tour through Google's different inbuilt segments, and the kinds of data that you can also be using to support your targeting strategy. I will caveat that we don't have a huge amount of time to go through that, and there's a lot that you could dive into there. But Jill has written some very helpful articles about affinity audiences, in market segments, detailed demographics, and more. So if you do want to drill down into those Google owned segments, and your own data segments, then there's plenty of additional resources you can find in the docs tab. Then we will look at how you can use custom segments to turn content targeting into audience targeting. After that, we will look at the difference between custom segments and combined segments, before moving on to share Jill's handy audience targeting cheat sheet, which sums up all the different options you have available to you. Next, Jill will take us through how you can build a Google Ads strategy that goes beyond keyword targeting only, with a helpful Venn diagram framework for ensuring your product or offer aligns up nicely with the audience you're putting it in front of. Then as we move towards the end of the session, Jill will talk us through what she means by nonlinear targeting and how you can start to think outside the box and tap into audiences that your your competitors are most likely overlooking. Then we'll do a quick recap of the key points and summaries from the session before we move on to the q and a, with Jill so you can ask her your own questions. Again, please put those questions into the q and a tab, and also please upload your favorite questions that have been asked. So that is everything on the agenda today. And before we get into the session, I just wanna very, you know, clearly, this isn't my first time recording with you. We have also recorded a podcast about AI Max not too long ago, which some of you may have seen. It is a really great episode. People really seem to find it useful. So if you are invested in AI Max and you're planning to experiment with it soon, you can scan the QR code, on the slide here with your phone, and you can check that out after this session. We've also included a link to that in the docs tab too. Obviously, I am biased, but I would say that if you find today's session useful, then do consider subscribing to our paid media lab podcast on YouTube to catch all, our latest interviews with brilliant guests like Jill. And I also just want to give a shout out to Jill's own podcast, Inside Google Ads, which, she's been publishing weekly, for quite a while now, which is super impressive because I know all the work that goes into managing a kind of regular content cadence like that, and there is a lot to handle there. So super impressive, super useful. And if you're not already aware of Jill's Inside Google Ads podcast, I highly recommend checking that out. The episode that myself and Jill recorded together about AI Max will actually be dropping in Jill's feed tomorrow. So if you missed that, you'll be able to get it in Jill's feed as well as the Lunio Paid Media Lab feed. And with all that said, I am going to now move on to our first topic slide here, and just pass over to you, Jill, to talk us through how Google Ads has changed in the past few years. Thank you so much, James. I appreciate it, and thank you everyone joining us live and watching this recording as well. So for those of us who remember all the way back to, I don't know, 2020, Google Ads was really focused on keywords. Yeah. You could run a video campaign and you could do some display, but most of what we did was keyword research and running ads when people search for things on Google. Like, remember a time when if you had an exact matched keyword, it would only match to queries that exactly match your keyword? I know. Crazy. And remember a time when you could look at your search terms report and there were no hidden search terms? You could actually see what you were advertising on? Sounds crazy. And remember a time when cookies were cookies and website remarketing just worked? I know. That really existed. If you've joined the industry more recently, I promise all those things used to exist. Remember a time when ad creative was an afterthought? As long as you had the right keywords and the right bid, you could get great results. And, oh, yeah, remember when manual bidding was a thing and as a Google Ads practitioner, most of your time was spent in spreadsheets looking at bid adjustments for location and device and this and that and the other. The world is changing. We know that. And in Google Ads, it's changing very rapidly. Fast forward to today in 2025, and we all know that Google Ads has evolved far beyond keywords. I mean, Performance Max. Need I say more? I will say more. It's not even a shiny new toy anymore. Performance Max is three years old. The newest campaign type in Google Ads is demand gen. And now, most of what we can do in Google Ads is focused on providing signals rather than true targeting. Like, okay. You can give a broad match keyword to your search campaign. That doesn't mean you're actually gonna advertise on anything that has to do with your keyword. Right? That keyword is more like a signal to tell Google the kinds of queries you wanna advertise on. If you have a Performance Max campaign, you can add audience signals, but Google could say, I don't think so. I'm gonna go target those people over here instead. And we have more audience targeting options than ever. Keyword list targeting now like AI Max, lots of other technical barriers like consent mode and enhanced conversions and OCT and server side tracking, and now on the user side AI mode. So there's a lot that's been going on. I know we cannot relate to this. We have less control. We have less precision. We have less transparency. And yet, there are still so many ways that we can drive outstanding results for our own businesses or our clients' businesses through Google Ads. And so first, I wanna focus on the various kinds of audience targeting you can use in Google Ads today to drive exceptional results. And then in the second half, we'll move into how to put these together. So there are four different kinds of audience segments you can leverage in Google Ads. You can use Google's data, your own data, custom data, and then automation. So first is these Google built in audience segments. These have been around for quite some time. We have our detailed demographics, which is showing ads to people based on who they are, their relationship status, home ownership status, employment status, and things like that. We have our affinity segments, which is where you show ads to people based on their interests and hobbies. You know, does someone like world music or heavy metal? Is someone a luxury shopper or a value shopper? There's about a 100 of these to choose from. Then we have our in market segments where you can show ads to people based on the products or services they're currently researching. Super powerful. Probably the most popular, I would say, of Google's audience segments, and so you can target your ads to people who are currently in the market for accounting software or SEO and SEM services or strollers or roofing services, and there's about a thousand of these to choose from. And then last but not least, we have our life events segments where you can show ads to people who are going through a significant life change. There are about a dozen of these life changes to choose from, whether it's college graduation, moving, getting a new pet, etcetera. So from Google's audience segments alone, this is a way that we can take all the data that Google knows about all of us, and just check a box and boom, pick off the people who match exactly what your business is looking for. So that's the first kind and a kind that pretty much any business could leverage, Google's built in audiences. Nice. And just before we move on to I just wanted to very quickly flag that all those, articles that you wrote for search engine land about all those different audience types in the docs tab so you can check those out before we move on to our next topic here. It's a great call, James. So for each of those four types, I've written an article for search engine land, and I have a video on their YouTube channel if you wanna dive deeper into the capabilities and limitations of each of them. So that was our first category, audiences based on Google's data. The next category is audiences based on your data. This used to be called remarketing. Now Google uses the euphemism, your data segments, but these are super powerful. And so, again, there's four kinds of your data segments that you can use in Google Ads. Some that I'm sure you'll be very familiar with and some that you actually might not be as familiar with. So the first, and I would say the most commonly used, is building a data segment based on your website data, website remarketing. So showing ads to anyone who's visited your website or anyone who's visited the pricing page, people who abandoned cart, etcetera. And you can set that up through Google Tag Manager or GA four or a few other methods, but those are the two most common ones. Next is your app data. If you have an app, then you can set up all kinds of different segments of, you know, non paying free tier users or people who've had your app for more than a year, etcetera. So really engaging with people who already have your app installed and are therefore likely to be your most loyal customers. I'm gonna jump to the fourth for a moment because you've probably all heard of that one too. That is your customer data, so where you take first party information that your business has and you share it with Google. That's really different than what we've been talking about because with your website data, you know, you are connecting your website to data, but you're doing it through a Google tool. So even if you have a website, your marketing list of 10,000 people, you as a business don't actually know who any of those 10,000 people are. If you wanna reach them, you have to go through Google to do it. But with your customer data, you actually know who those people are via their email address, mailing address, phone number, etcetera. You're uploading that into Google Ads. Google's matching it to what it knows so you can reach them or build lookalikes off of them or exclude them, etcetera. And then the fourth kind of your data segment is people who have engaged with your content on Google. So, for example, you can build a YouTube remarketing list of people who have viewed your videos, viewed a certain video, subscribed to your channel, and all the different ad platforms let you do this. In meta ads, you can advertise to people who engage with your Instagram. On TikTok, you can advertise to people who've engaged with your TikTok videos, etcetera. But there's another kind of data segment that's a bit newer, and it also has to do with Google engagement. In fact, it's called the Google engaged audience. And this is an automatically created list that every single Google Ads account gets, and it's built based on people who have engaged with your business in search results organic or paid. Organic or paid. So even if you're not advertising on search, maybe you're only running, I don't know, a discovery campaign or a YouTube campaign. If people are interacting with you on maps or through your organic listings, they get added to that Google engaged audience, which is pretty cool. So these are our four types of segments that you can target or exclude or build lookalikes off of based on your data. Nice. I think, Jill, most people probably be familiar with, website visitor retargeting, app user retargeting, customer list, and that kind of thing. But as you mentioned, this is a is a bit of a newer thing when we come to these Google engaged audiences. I'm interested to hear about those, but could you maybe elaborate a little bit more about those and where you've seen them used effectively? Yes. Google engaged audiences are really excellent for small business advertisers and newer advertisers. And the reason I say that is because it is the only kind of remarketing list in Google Ads that you don't need to set up. You don't need GA four. You don't need the Google tag. You don't need offline track. Like, you don't need to send any data or connect anything. You don't need any technical know how. Every Google Ads account will automatically get one. And it's not going to be one to one the same as your website remarketing list. You know, some people may engage with you in search results and not eventually end up on your page. Again, it's only gonna include people who engage with you on Google properties. So if someone visits your website from Meta, they won't be on this list. But for people who are new to Google Ads and, perhaps don't have the option of setting up some of these other kinds of remarketing lists or just haven't gotten around to it yet, a Google engaged audience is a really nice, easy way to fill in that gap. So, look, if you have web survey marketing, if you have a customer list, you don't need the Google engaged audience. But if you're working with clients who are brand new to Google Ads or if you yourself are newer to Google Ads, you just haven't figured out all that stuff yet, then it's a great starting point because it's super easy to use. Nice. So if we just move on here, I'm just going to quickly talk through, specifying some kind of audiences you might want to not target. So as well as signaling who you should be targeting, your data can also be used to identify who not to target, and creating exclusion audiences can be a very powerful way to uplift campaign efficiency. For example, you might want to consider excluding anyone who's visited the careers page in your website signaling that they are in the hunt for a job rather than to purchase your product. You might want to exclude your existing customers, and you might wanna exclude staff or employees. Of course, you can exclude certain geographic locations or regions if you only want your ads to be shown to people in a particular country. And you can also tighten up the efficiency by excluding your retargeting audiences from your non retargeting campaigns. If you'd like more information about those different types of users and exclusions that you can make to improve efficiency, then we have written a blog about that, which is on the Lunio website. Again, that is linked in the docs tab. I've also included a link to a helpful video to the team or sorry. It's from the team, at Paid Media Pros. So shout out to those guys. They create a lot of super helpful content on YouTube. They also take you through a few different ways that you can exclude irrelevant users from your campaign, so it's well worth giving that a watch. On sales campaigns, you also have the option to exclude, IP addresses as well, which can be helpful if you see some suspicious activity associated with a particular IP. There is a free resource called abuseipdb.com. There's a link to that in the docs tab, but that is basically a large bank of IP addresses, which have been flagged and reported as being associated with malicious activity online. So if you do see an IP address that you're suspicious of, you can cross reference it against the abuse IPDB database, and see if it shows up there. But if you're interested in automating that process, of course, you can use Lunio. Sorry. Lunio does automatically generate exclusion audiences and automatically update your IP block list based on interactions that our algorithm has flagged as invalid, And this process of continually filter filtering your traffic and removing bots and other forms of invalid users can minimize waste to spend and uplift performance over time. If you wanna know more about how Lunio works and the kinds of results people are achieving, I've included two relevant case studies in the docs tab. One of those is with the luxury jewelry retailer, Graff, who used Lunio to reduce IBT rates on Google by more than 40%, and the other is from the home water filter supplier, Culligan Harvey, who used the new to reduce their invalid traffic rate by 54% on Google, which led to a 10% improvement in MQL conversion rate when they compare pre and post implement implementation data. So if we move on to our next slide here, Jill, I'm gonna pass back to you to talk us through how you can use custom segments to target based on content. Thank you. And by the way, I completely agree. I actually didn't hear that before I was gonna present, but it's true that exclusions can be just as important, if not more important, the one you include. I liken it to, you know, a sculptor who starts with a piece of marble, and they're chiseling away the parts they don't want there to reveal the sculpture at the end. So that's a great call out. Thank you, James. So we've talked about Google's data, and we've talked about your data. And then this magical mythical piece in the middle is something that I refer to as custom data, building custom segments. Now importantly, if you're like a meta or LinkedIn ads practitioner, custom audience, not the same thing. Over there, a custom audience means remarketing. But here in Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, custom segment means something different. A custom segment is where you can build your own audience based on what Google knows about people. So it's taking Google's data, but then you get to slice it and dice it in a way that's uniquely powerful to your business. And you can do that in four ways. You can show ads to people based on things they've searched for on Google. You can show ads to people based on their interests. You can show ads to people based on the types of websites they visit and based on the types of apps they use. And so that's why I say and I've never heard anyone else explain it this way before, but a custom segment is a way to turn content targeting into audience targeting. Because today we're focused on audiences, but content targeting is where you can target based on the content people are engaging with through keywords, topics, or placements. So let's look at that for a sec. With content targeting, you can target based on keywords, what people are searching for. In a custom segment, you can target people who have searched for certain things. Right? Then in content targeting, you can target based on topics, the topics of the kinds of websites and apps people are using. And then here, in a custom segment, you can target people based on things they're interested in, the kinds of topics they're interested in. And last but not least, with content targeting, you can target specific placements, specific websites, or apps you can put ads there. In custom segments, you can show ads to people who have visited certain websites or apps. So if you do have any kind of content targeting strategy already and you have not yet tested custom segments, you are missing out because this is a great way to take those content engagement factors and turn them into powerful audiences you can target. So that is my favorite kind of audience in Google Ads. I will say there have been some changes to custom segments recently. So depending what campaign type you're in, these may be called custom interests or custom search terms, but it's all the same functionality. And then last but not least, on the next slide, we have our combined segments. So I also consider this custom data because, again, you're taking various audiences and slicing and dicing them in a way that's unique to your business. Combined segments in Google Ads is the way that you can stack or layer audiences together. So, for example, I wanna reach people who are outdoor enthusiasts and people who are in market for a car purchase. By using a combined audience, you're only gonna target that intersection. So it's a way to create much more narrow audiences. However, big however here, as of right now, you can only use combined segments in display and in search. That's it. You used to be able to use combined segments in video, not anymore. You used to be able to use them in discovery, now demand gen, not anymore. Can't use them in Performance Max audience signals. So although combined segments can be very powerful, I mostly ignore them now because I hate display campaigns, and there's not much utility for them in search, in my opinion. So I wouldn't be surprised if combined segments get fully deprecated soon. But custom segments or custom interests or custom affinity or custom market are the various names they've had over the years. Those, I think, are definitely here to stay and you should experiment with if you haven't already. Nice. So here is my handy dandy audience targeting cheat sheet. This is adapted from my book, Inside Google Ads, everything you need to know about audience targeting. So feel free to screenshot whatever you like. But these are the various kinds of audiences that you can use in Google Ads. So I actually have this up on my wall right here, so that when I'm on a call with a coaching client and we're talking about their strategy, I can quickly go down. Okay. Detailed, affinity, etcetera. So we have Google's data, your data, custom data, and then the fourth bucket, which for time purposes, we didn't dive into today, all the automated and AI driven features you can also use for audience targeting in Google Ads. Nice. Before we move on to the the next part of the the presentation, Jill, I just wanted to touch on one of those things that we haven't really covered much today in in that automation segment, and you touched on it in your introduction about audience signals and the kind of idea that the algorithm might look at your signals and go, okay. I'm just gonna disregard those signals, and I think better performance can be achieved here, and I'm gonna chase these users instead. Is there anything you would say about, creating audience signals that are more likely to be given credence or paid attention to by the algorithm, or is it really hard to know which signals are gonna be effective and and which aren't? I think audience signals and search themes are pretty useless. Brilliant on Google's part, but as a practitioner, like, I use them, but I don't think they have much impact. Because with an audience signal and a search theme is like an audience signal, the difference is with an audience signal, you give Google audiences that you say, here's what I think will work well. With search themes, you give Google specific searches, queries that you think will work well. Google will consider that, but at the end of the day, your Performance Max campaign wants to achieve your goal as defined by your bid strategy. And I use that language very carefully because your real life business goal may not be the same as the goal as defined by your bid strategy. So for example, if you have a max a maximize conversions bid strategy, that tells Performance Max to spend your budget to get you as many conversions as possible. And if you have a lead form on your page with no spam protections in place, guess what? You're gonna be full of spam leads, which does not meet your business goals, but that's not PMax not working. That is PMax doing exactly what you told it to. Get me as many conversions as possible where a conversion means someone submitting this form. Boom. It's gonna do that really well. And to do that, probably not targeting the audiences or search teams that you chose. So bit of a tangent there. My apologies. But with your audience signals and search teams, you can absolutely tell it what you think. But once your PMax has been running for a few weeks, you can check your insights tab. On the left, you go insights, reports insights, scroll down a bunch, and you'll see the audience insights box. And their PMax will show you what audiences and what demographics it's optimizing towards. And if they were included in your audience signal, it'll say signal. If they weren't included, it'll just say optimized. We're doing this anyway because all it cares about is achieving that bid strategy goal regardless of what you did. So if it makes you feel better, include them. Again, I include them just to feel safe. But, like, even if you don't add your customer list to an audience signal, it's still going to be used as long as it exists in your account because smart bidding strategies use customer lists as one of their many signals. So feel free to use those signals if you like, but I wouldn't spend too much, time or energy on them, and I wouldn't bother revisiting them once your campaign is already launched. Nice. Thanks for that, Jill. So we will now I'm gonna move on to our next slide and just pass back to you to present this kind of Venn diagram framework that we'll we'll progress through over the next couple of slides. Yeah. This is something that was a big moment for me as I was writing my book, and so I love to share it now because there's all these different audiences to choose from. That's great. So, like, how do we choose? And more importantly, how does that actually help us achieve our goals of reaching our target customers? So what this actually comes back to is marketing one zero one. So before we start building out what our targeting strategy is going to look like, you need to be able to answer two things very clearly. What is your offer and who is your audience? And again, I know that sounds basic, but I would say more than 90% of the Google Ads accounts I see, the business owner or agency or freelancer does not have a good clear answer to these questions, which is why the targeting strategy is not working. So how can I sell offer? An example of an offer could be Google Ads courses. It could be cybersecurity software. It could be plumbing services. Right? But, like, what's the thing you sell? And that's usually where keywords go. Right? People searching for the offer. But that's just one part of it, the offer that people are looking for. The other part of it is the audience that you're looking to reach. And so as an example, in my own business where I'm a Google Ads coach and I offer Google Ads training, one of my audiences is small business owners who've never used Google Ads before and wanna get started. Another one of my audience is is people who are the head of paid search in an agency and wanna have someone they can consult with so they can continue to upscale. Those are two very different target audiences. My offer is a fit for both of them, but I will reach those two audiences through very different means, and my messaging will have to be very different for each of them even if the offer is ultimately the same. And so that's another place I think people mess up a lot. When you're going through and building a a targeting strategy, pick one of your audiences, build a strategy around them. And then if you have a second, a third, a fourth potential target audience you wanna reach, they each need to have their own separate strategy. So let's go through a practical example here with a real life, startup that I consulted with a few years ago. So let's say that your offer is you're launching an authentic Indian food delivery service in Toronto. And so let's say the people you wanna reach are people who live in Toronto but are from India. Either, like, they physically moved here from India or maybe their parents or grandparents did. For those who are not Torontonian, you may not know we have a very large Indian diaspora in Toronto, which means we get great Indian food. But importantly, the point here is that this is, not the kind of Indian food that's like, oh, tikka masala, it's Indian. Like, this is authentic Indian food. They're offering, you know, tiffin's and different dishes that would not be in the sort of, like, Anglo sized Indian restaurant we have here. So they wanted to make sure that they could reach not just anyone searching for Indian food, which is where they started on the left hand side. But, like, how do we use Google Ads to reach people who are Indian, who live in Toronto? And the reason I think this makes such a great example is because for very good reason, you cannot target people based on race, nationality, sexual orientation, and a variety of other things that Google considers sensitive interest category. There is no box to tick for Indian. Right? There's just not. But that doesn't mean that we can't reach people in Toronto who are from India. What we need to do is employ what I call a nonlinear strategy. And this is where we instead of saying, okay. I wanna reach people who are Indian. There's no audience for people who are Indian. I can't reach them. False. Instead, we say, I wanna reach people who are Indian. What else do I know about my audience besides the fact that they have Indian heritage? What else about them? Let's look three sixty degrees around my target audience. What else might we know? And you can do this for both sides of your Venn diagram. So let's start with people in Toronto from India. What options do we have available to us? Well, I went audience hunting like I always do consulting my cheat sheet. And first, I noticed there's an affinity segment for fans of South Asian film. Now look, is every single person in Toronto who is a fan of South Asian film gonna be from India? No. But a lot of them are going to be. A lot of them are going to be. That's a really good indicator. Like, I occasionally like to go see a Bollywood film, but I probably would not be on this affinity segment because I maybe see one every three years. So this is one nonlinear way we can say, well, this audience we're trying to reach is likely interested in South Asian film. We could target that to reach them. Or another one I looked at, we have in market audiences for trips to all kinds of places. You can target people in market for a trip to India, and then underneath that, it's people in market for a trip to 11 different cities within India. So someone's in market for a trip to Mumbai, like, okay, that could be anyone going to India. They're probably gonna go from Toronto to Mumbai. But if someone is in market for a trip to Ahmedabad, that's a city I personally had never heard of in India, I'm going to bet that that's someone who has strong cultural ties to India if they're going to travel there from Toronto. And then the third example is, of course, using custom segments. So I thought, okay. If someone is living in Toronto and they have strong cultural ties to India, I think it's likely that they're going to be consuming Indian news, whether that's, like, the daily, you know, Indian news or maybe it's news about Indian culture, Indian music, Indian film, Indian celebrities. So I'm gonna go to Google or AskChat GPT, you know, what are some of the top websites and top news sites in India, add those to my custom segment, and then target that to people in Toronto. Because if someone in Toronto is visiting those sites, again, they're very likely from India or have strong ties to India. And, again, these are the three audiences I came up with with five minutes of thinking on this topic. If this for your business or your client's business, you could do a lot more in-depth audience research to find all the different nonlinear ways to reach people in Toronto from India. But it's not just the audience side, even for the offer side of people looking for authentic Indian food delivery. Yes. We can achieve that with keywords. How else might we achieve that? And so firstly, there's an in market for restaurant delivery and takeout. Is that Indian specifically? No. But everyone who wants Indian food delivery would be contained on that broader restaurant delivery audience. So if we target that audience and then our ad creative is really specific to the kinds of unique, authentic Indian dishes we have, that could be super powerful. Again, custom segments, I lean to heavily here. Of course, any of the top search terms or top keywords we wanna use in search, we could add to a custom segment to reach those same people as they're doing other things online. And then another way is to let's say that our, restaurant is going to be on, like, a few of the different delivery apps. So we could build a custom segment of people who use apps like Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Get The Dishes, etcetera. So we know it's someone who's likely to be able to order from us because they have one of those apps installed. And then, again, make sure that the creative does the job of narrowing from food delivery to Indian food delivery. So these are just some examples of how by employing this nonlinear approach, you can make the seemingly impossible possible, and you can find additional ways to increase your reach and find people who would be very interested in your offer even if they're not actively searching for it right in this moment. Nice. Thanks for that, Jill. And, in the interest of time, I'll keep this quite brief. But, again, like, I I sound like a broken record referring to the doc stuff, but there is another helpful resource in the doc stuff which Jill has written, which kind of lays out her philosophy and thinking behind this kind of nonlinear targeting in more detail. So I highly recommend you go and check that out. But, basically, to reiterate what what Jill was just saying, it really is worth setting aside some time to sit down, think through this, brainstorm all the different ways you might be able to reach those ideal audiences, based on the kinds of things they're searching for, the apps they're using, the content they might consume. And I think with a little bit of creativity there, you can find so many ways to connect with your ideal customers on Google Ads. And, of course, that's gonna give you an advantage over competitors who aren't doing that kind of nonlinear targeting. So there's a lot to explore and dive into there. But for now, we will move on to the next slide. And, Jill, I'll pass back to you to kind of take us through this this summary of of a lot of what we just covered there in on the near targeting. Definitely. So my takeaway here, should you throw keywords to the side and leave search? No. Search is still powerful. Okay? Search is really changing and reaching our target customer wherever they may be online. There's so many more ways to do that than there used to be. So when you want to build a Google Ads strategy that goes beyond just keywords, first, clearly lay out exactly who it is you wanna reach. What is your offer? What is your audience? Let's work to find those magic customers that sit in the middle. Then spend time researching and brainstorming all the ways to reach them, all the audience targeting ways, which we touched on today, all the content targeting ways, which for time we did not touch on today, and remember to lean into nonlinear targeting to find the non obvious ways to reach that target audience, especially if you operate in a very competitive space, in a sensitive interest category, or somewhere else where you have targeting restrictions. And then the last but not least thing I wanna say is you really need to make sure for any of this to work that you craft messaging that appeals to your target audience, but just as importantly, doesn't appeal to your not target audience. So, for example, with the Indian food delivery app I mentioned, maybe they would target everyone in Toronto in market for restaurant delivery and takeout, but then the ad itself should have Hindi writing on it. In that way, it's not gonna appeal to me and that's okay. I'm not the target customer. But if their target customer is likely to understand Hindi, then the ad creative itself becomes that narrow precise filtering mechanism that we used to have in Google Ads, but just don't have in the same way anymore. So ensure that whether it's your text, image, or video ads, that it appeals to your target audience, duh, but just as importantly, does not appeal to your not target audience. That's how you're gonna find success with this strategy. Nice. Thank you, Jill. So before we we close out the content and we move on to the q and a session, just shout out to Ben who is managing the live chat here for us. And, yeah, just to reiterate Ben's reminder, if there are questions in the q and a tab that you are interested in hearing the answer to, please do upvote those questions as we'll use that to kind of prioritize the list at the end as we go through. There is also a QR code here if you'd like to grab a copy of Jill's book, which dives into audience targeting in much more depth. So if you find today's session useful and you're keen to try out some of these approaches yourself, yes, Jill's got it there herself, hard copy. I've got one here. Unfortunately, it's not the hand. It's there on the bookshelf, but it is in my house. Well worth grabbing a copy if you wanna take your audience targeting strategy to the next level. We've got a recap of the kind of main points that we touched on, today in terms of looking beyond keywords, using a variety of different audience types, custom segments, clearly defining your offer and audience, and as Jill just gave us the recap on, nonlinear targeting. And, again, there's the the full article that she's written on nonlinear targeting, which I recommend checking out. But, Jill, before we kind of close and move on to the the q and a, is there anything else that you wanna leave people with in terms of insights, tips, or or takeaways before we we wrap up? I think we've covered it here. I'm really excited to look at your questions and see what we can clarify or expand on for you today. Sounds good. So my I am just going to get our q and a tab up here, and I'm gonna filter these. So we have it looks like I'm unable to show these questions on screen, so I'm just gonna read them to you if that's okay, Jill, from here. So I have a question, first of all, from Kirsty. So she says, I've always thought it best to add on these audience signals as observation audiences for search so that I don't narrow my audience too much. Jill, are you suggesting that this is not very effective as the algorithm will likely ignore this and that I should rather use straight targeting option for use the straight targeting option for search? Thank you for this question, Kirsty. So we're conflating two things here. So one is the option to add audiences on observation to a campaign, and you can do that in search and shopping and display, but not really a use case for it there. And so that's not an audience signal. When you add an audience on observation, it just means your campaign is gonna keep doing what it was doing. But if the user that that impression click etcetera came from matches one of our audiences, it collects data, but it has no impact on your actual targeting or performance versus if you target an audience in search or shopping or any campaign type except PMax, then it means you explicitly only wanna show ads to that audience. So in search, that would mean they would have to meet your keyword requirements and also meet the audience requirements to show an ad. So this is a great tactic. I highly recommend. What I recommend you do if you're thinking of targeting audiences in search is to first add them on observation. And two important tips for you. One, don't add, like, a 100 audiences on observation. You're just not gonna gather useful data. Add five to 10 audiences on observation and pick the most narrow one possible. So don't do in market for travel. Pick, like, in market for trips to Los Angeles or whichever one is most specific to you. Second tip for that when you're observing audiences in search is, observe a few audiences you think will work well and a few audiences you think won't work well. Right? And then if you're proved right about the ones that don't work well, you can exclude them. If you're proved right about the ones that do work well, then you can use that in other campaigns to target. You can expand your keyword list, lots of different ways to use them. But don't just think about what do I think my best audiences are. Think also about what audiences do I think are not my target audience, and then you can potentially exclude them only in search. For whatever reason, you can't exclude audiences from shopping campaigns. Nice. So I think, Ben, if you're able to assist me, I'm gonna move on to the next most uploaded question from Tara. And and Tara asks, is there any resource we can access for the automation section of the, targeting cheat sheet, that we didn't get a chance to go through today, Jill? Yes. So for time, we were not able to cover all of it. So, of course, I go into lots of detail on automation as well as the other ones in my book, Inside Google Ads. And I also explore all these audiences in detail and show you how to actually use them in my course, which is also called Inside Google Ads. Nice. So we will next move on to our question. Oh, Veronica. So, her question is, can I exclude audiences from PMax? As of right now, no, but sort of yes. And the reason I say sort of yes is, PMAX is one of the campaign types that has the new customer acquisition functionality and also the customer retention functionality. So, for example, if you're using new customer acquisition to only target new customers, essentially, that's excluding your customer list. And then vice versa, if you use the new customer retention, that means you're only targeting your customer list and not anyone else. Newly, you can exclude, certain demographics from Pmax, like, age for sure, gender, I think so. That's brand new. And I have heard rumblings that audience exclusions are coming from PMax. I have not been able to independently confirm that. I will go on record and say, like, I think that's a bad idea. I even think the search terms in the channel reporting in PMax is a bad idea. I think it defeats the whole purpose of PMax, but I know that's an unpopular opinion, so we can move on. For the most part, Veronica, no. You can't exclude audiences from PMax. You can't exclude audiences from shopping, but you can exclude audiences from the other campaign types. Yeah. We are. I'm really tempted to get you to elaborate a little bit more on that too, but I'm not gonna do it. We're just gonna we're gonna move on to our next question. So our next question comes from Will, and he asks, is there any golden egg audience inclusions that you'd add to almost any campaign, despite the obvious fact that every company can have widely different offers and audiences? Not everyone, but a few of my, like, ones that I go to again and again. I have a lot of clients in my coaching practice who are, like, home services businesses, you know, plumbing, roofing, flooring, either the business owners. I also work with a lot of agencies and freelancers who specialize in those type of businesses. And so ones that we look at a lot are under detailed demographics. There's homeownerships, so you can target or exclude homeowners, and you can target or exclude renters. So if you're advertising a home service that, like, only a homeowner would do, I wouldn't target homeowners. I would exclude renters in order to reach homeowners. And the reason I say that is because there are some people Google knows are homeowners. There are some people Google knows are renters, and then there's some people that Google has no idea. And so if you only target homeowners, you miss the whole unknown. Whereas, if you just exclude the renters, then you're still targeting homeowners and unknown. So that's one that at least for those kind of industries that I tend to use a lot. I guess one more I'll mention is in YouTube ads, I should say video campaigns. An issue that a lot of advertisers tend to have is, like you know who views YouTube ads? Children. And so if you're running a video views campaign, you could end up showing ads to children again because the campaign is doing exactly what you told it to. You're trying to get views. Kids don't skip ads as much as they view. And so there are various ways to address that through account level content exclusions, or through excluding various audiences like parents. That would be a really drastic one, but that's an option there. Family focused things. So that's another one that comes up a lot when we're trying to optimize specifically video view or video reach campaigns. If you're running video through demand gen, it doesn't tend to be as big of an issue. Nice. So I will move on to our next question. Another question from Kirsty here. So she asks, which type of campaign works best with this nonlinear targeting strategy? You mentioned you don't like display ads in PMax, as they only use the targeting of signals, but often ignores them. Is search and demand gen the best campaign type? Yes. With the nonlinear targeting that I mentioned, I'll usually use that in demand gen or video campaigns. You can use them in search, but, like, with search, you do still have keywords. Arguably, that's targeting. Arguably, that signals, you know, conversation for another day. But, like, search is still there and powerful, and there's absolutely a place for audiences in search. But with nonlinear targeting, that's like you trying to reach your ideal customer in a different way. And so, generally, that means demand gen or video because that's you proactively putting ads in front of someone at a moment when they're not actively searching. Nice. And I've just had another question which has just received a lot of upvotes in the past couple of minutes. So we have a question from Kashif, and he asks, any tips in refining audiences using segments, keywords, such as business payments, to be more b two b? I often struggle with balancing refining the audience to be more b two b, but keeping it big enough to be effective. And that's something that I run into at at Lunio quite a few times is really small b to b audiences. So be interested to hear your take on that, Jill. Yeah. It's always a trade off. So in b to b, I will very often use audiences layered on top of search. I will not use the Affinity business professionals. It's too big. Like, one in four people is a business professional. I will instead go to the oh, sometimes I'll go to detail demographics because there's certain industries and certain company sizes there that can be very helpful if one of them happens to fit what you're looking for really well. But, otherwise, I will go to the in market segments under business services, and there's a lot of different things there. But here's the really important one. So there's one that's, like, in market for payment processing, whatever. If you sell payment processing, that's a useless audience for you in search because anyone who searches for a payment processor is going to be added to the in market audience for payment Right? That's, like, linear and doesn't do you any good. So when you are choosing audiences to layer in search, that's where this nonlinear is really helpful because you can say, okay. If the thing could have either b to c or b to b intent, what are other things I know that that b to b audience may be in market for? So good example of this is, let's say, you sell accounting software. You know, there's things like FreshBooks and QuickBooks, and then there's, like, NetSuite and really advanced enterprise ones. So if you're trying to reach enterprise, you can think about, okay, what else would my target customer who would be researching and buying enterprise accounting software be in market for. And so maybe it's things like in market for office supplies, in market for commercial loans or commercial properties, in market for event planning. Like, look at those other business audiences that intersect with the thing you sell rather than just picking the thing you sell. If it's demand gen video, then sure, target, you know, in market for accounting software, in market for payment processing. But for search, you wanna think nonlinear, kinda zig to the side to help with narrowing down. And then you can also do the opposite for exclusion. You might think, okay. Maybe I want to can't exclude life events in search. Darn it. So it's gonna say exclude people who recently started a business. Can't do that. You can't exclude life events at all for whatever reason. But what are some other audiences that might suggest that this is more like b to c or small business intent? What are some of the other audiences that would fit like a small business owner that wouldn't fit a large business? Let's exclude those. So it definitely takes them just, like, sitting down and thinking about it and researching, to help you do that refinement, but it's well worth it. Nice. So our next question, is from Atida. Apologies if I have mispronounced your name. But the question is, when do you think we're going to enter a keywordless advertising ecosystem when when signals have more importance than keywords? I know the keywordless future of PPC is something that comes up a lot, Jill. And, is this something that you see It's here. Arriving. It's here. Yeah. We've been talking about this for quite a few years now, but I thought it was really telling that the announcement of AI Max is the first time, to my knowledge, that Google used the word keywordless. If they didn't talk about it that way beforehand, now it's keywordless, keywordless, keywordless. But, again, like, if you've used an exact match keyword in 2025, it works like broad match did in 2020. So that's why I say jokingly, but also not jokingly, keywords are already signals and not true targeting. They're becoming looser and looser. And now with moving more towards broad match and going even further than that into AI max, that's only accelerating. So when are we gonna enter keyword list? We've entered. We're in it, which is why a keyword alone cannot be relied on to drive your Google Ads strategy forward. Nice. It's so great, but it can't be relied on alone. Good point. Good point. So we have we've got through, all our uploaded questions. Now I'm gonna we have time for a couple more questions, so I'm just gonna move on to, next question from Darren. So Darren asks, do you have any tips for seeing volumes on search demand when going with targeting over observation? I think what there means is when you switch from just observing audiences to targeting audiences, it's almost like a combined segment in a way and that it really narrows down your reach. So starting with observation should give you an idea because it's like, if you had been on targeting, then that observation line of your data is all you would have gotten. So it's really gonna shrink. And when you do that, like, your CPCs will probably go up, your search impression share will skyrocket, your, CTR hopefully will go up, and conversion rate hopefully will go for a bit, but, like, it's more expensive to target more niche things. So tips for seeing demand would be just to test an observation first. And then if you are gonna target, keep in mind, like, your reach is gonna go way down. Is that worth it to you? For some businesses, it is worth it. For some, it's not. Nice. And if I just look through the next questions, we have a question here from Sebastian, and Sebastian asks, if I've got a new account, does it make more sense to run PMax or Demand Gen? And I guess there's a lot of it depends there, but, I like to say it depends but. Or, like, it depends and. So if you have a brand new account, I probably would not launch PMax on day one. In a new account, you wanna make sure your conversion tracking is set up correctly. You want to make sure that your audiences, like your data segments, excuse me, are set up correctly. You want to make sure that people want what you're selling. Like, just because you're running ads to your website, it doesn't mean you're actually gonna get customer. And I say Google Ads is 20 to the equation. Your landing page and your offer is 80% to the equation. So, usually, I will recommend starting with search. For most businesses, that's what makes sense. Between PMax and DemandGen, I would choose DemandGen first, probably. And once you've proven those things out, your conversion tracking works, you have a good conversion rate, people want what you offer, Google understands your business, is placing you in the right places, you know, then, I would consider testing PMax next. Nice. So I'm gonna move on to our our final question. And big thank you to everyone who submitted all the questions today, and big thanks to you, Jill, for for giving so many great responses to to all the questions that we've had through. So our final question comes from Kian, who I can only assume from his name. He's a fellow Irishman, so shout out to Kian. But he asked the question, so what would you say would be the best way to decrease the likelihood of the wrong or unqualified audience from seeing your ads? Creative. You're creative itself. And I know the people on the meta side of the house have been saying this for years, so I a 100% stole it from them. But I call it creative led targeting. You know, if you have an ad that very clearly appeals to your target audience and doesn't appeal to your not target audience, you could launch on optimized targeting. On day one, is it gonna drive good results? No. On day four, is it gonna drive good results? Probably not. But Google will learn who interacts with that ad and who doesn't and and take it from there. So I would say, you know, like, even though I wrote a whole book about audience targeting and I talk about this topic all the time, I actually am coming around to the hypothesis that your creative is actually more important than your targeting. Perfect targeting with bad creative won't work. Great creative with no targeting can work. So that's my, working hypothesis right now. Yeah. So best way to decrease the likelihood of unqualified audience is ensuring your ad creative is spot on with your ideal audience. Nice. Thank you so much. So we're gonna leave it there for questions. Ben, we're okay to close down the q and a, and we will wrap it up there so we don't run over time for too much. We've done very well, though. We're we're bang on time. But, again, big thanks to Jill for joining us today and giving us all plenty of food for thought there. Always a pleasure to speak with you, Jill. Before we go, is there anything else that you'd like to mention or point people towards before we before we wrap up? Sure. Thanks so much for having me, James. Thank you to everyone joining us here live today and on the recording. If you would like to learn more about how to work with me, buy my book, etcetera, you can find all of that at jill.ca. That's j y l l dot c a. Nice. Likewise, if you have any questions for also, Lunio, you can contact us directly via hello@lunio.ai, and we'll be happy to help you there. As I mentioned before, if you're interested in getting a demo of Lunio to see how it can auto automatically build out your IP block list and exclusion audiences full of users that have been marked as invalid, then you just need to click on the link in the docs tab. And lastly, big thanks to everyone for tuning in, submitting questions, uploading questions. Thank you for tuning in live and or if you're watching back on demand. Hope to see you again at our next webinar. But for now, take care everyone, and all the best with your audience targeting strategies.