Introduction to Audience Targeting in Google Video Campaigns
Audience Targeting: Google Video campaigns, particularly on YouTube, provide one of the strongest ad platforms for brands to create visibility, drive conversion, and enrich user engagement. But it all depends on one important choice: whom you display your video to. This phase is where audience targeting enters the scene.
Understanding and leveraging Google’s audience solutions is not just about reaching more people—it’s about reaching the right people at the right time with the right message. Google provides an evolving toolkit of audience segments powered by real user behavior, intent signals, and demographic insights, allowing advertisers to go far beyond generic targeting and create laser-focused campaigns.
If you’ve been questioning which audience solutions can make your brand more noticeable and convert better, this guide explains all the audience solutions you need to have in mind when designing and executing a Google Video campaign.
Demographic Targeting: The Building Block of Personalization for Audience Targeting
Demographic targeting is the easiest but most critical level of audience segmentation. Inside Google Ads, you have the ability to target your viewers on video by age, gender, having kids, and household income. For many, this is a good starting point—particularly when introducing a product or service with an easily identifiable user profile.
Let’s say you’re launching a premium baby product. You’ll want to target new parents, particularly women aged 25–34, and perhaps limit it to the top 30% income bracket in your geography. This basic filtering helps your video message reach those most likely to relate to the content and take action.
In addition to traditional demographic segments, Google also permits more specific filtering by education level, marital status, and even homeownership. These points are derived from users’ behavior and profiles, and while they’re not 100% accurate, they make a solid starting grid for your campaign’s reach.
Affinity Audiences: Reaching People Based on Lifestyle and Interests
Affinity audiences are intended to enable advertisers to target users who have actively shown a long-term interest in an area of interest or lifestyle. They are not determined by what a person has searched for in the recent past, but by general online activity over time—rendering them the perfect choice for brand awareness campaigns.
For instance, a vacation company rolling out a new upscale cruise vacation may opt to reach individuals in the “Luxury Travelers” affinity group or “Avid News Readers” who regularly venture abroad. These groups reflect not just behavior, but a kind of mindset and desire, making your video more likely to connect emotionally.
Affinity audiences perform best at the top of the funnel, where exposure, awareness, and emotional engagement are the goal. They might not necessarily convert immediately but lay the groundwork for downstream performance within remarketing and search campaigns.
Custom Affinity Audiences: When One Size Doesn’t Fit All
At times, Google’s built-in affinity audiences are too wide. That is where custom affinity audiences become useful. Here, you can define your own audience segments according to user-specified interests, URLs, locations, and apps.
Suppose you’re a vegan protein bar brand aiming at urban fitness-conscious people. Instead of reaching a general “Health & Fitness” audience, you can build a bespoke affinity audience comprised of users visiting CrossFit gym sites, downloading apps for intermittent fasting, or engaging with niche influencers in the plant-based diet community. By making the signals bespoke, your message is hyper-relevant and gets greater watch-through and engagement.
These audiences come in handy particularly for challenger brands, niche markets, and products with a very unique USP that doesn’t fall neatly into Google’s pre-existing audience groups.
In-Market Audiences: Targeting People Who Are Ready to Purchase
When they’re actively looking or thinking about a product or service, they fall into in-market audiences. It’s one of the most useful performance marketers’ tools because it measures individuals with high intent—already on the path to a buying decision.
In-market audiences may vary from “Business Software” to “Used SUVs” to “Wedding Planning.” Google’s machine learning algorithms pick this up from search history, recent website visits, video views, and comparison behavior. For example, a person looking at various car dealership websites and viewing review videos of sedans will likely fall into the “New Vehicle Buyers” segment.
When your video ad is created to generate traffic or lead conversions, in-market audiences are a great way to break through the clutter and engage with warm prospects.
Custom Intent and Custom Segments: Built to Precision by You
Custom intent audiences (now combined under “custom segments” in Google Ads) enable you to create an audience by focusing on certain keywords your target customers are searching for or apps and sites they’re engaging with. It’s similar to combining aspects of search intent with display/video behavior.
Let’s say you’re a B2B SaaS software playing in the project management category. You might build a custom audience that people who search for phrases such as “best Trello alternatives,” “Monday.com vs Asana,” or “team project tracking software” belong to. Your video ad could then lead them through a case study, demo, or engaging feature summary.
The best thing about custom segments is that they walk the line between intent and interest. They provide a great deal of targeting control as well as allowing you to test various combinations of signals and determine what most appeals to your target audience.
Remarketing: Reconnecting with Your Warmest Leads
Remarketing remains one of the most powerful audience strategies in Google Video campaigns. By targeting users who’ve previously interacted with your brand—visited your site, watched a video, filled a form, or engaged with your app—you’re speaking to a warm audience that already knows you.
The magic is in timing and message relevance. Perhaps a user stopped by your product page but didn’t purchase. You can show them a video testimonial ad from a happy customer. Or someone viewed 75% of your brand movie last week. This week, they get a retargeted ad enticing them to try the service at a discount.
Remarketing allows you to extend your narrative and push people further down the funnel with content that builds on what they’ve already viewed or experienced. And since it generally includes fewer impressions with higher relevance, the ROI can be great.
Similar Audiences: Scaling What Already Works
If you already have a remarketing list or customer match list that is high-performing, you can utilize Google’s “Similar Audiences” option to identify new users who are similar to those on your list in terms of behaviors and characteristics.
Suppose you upload a list of previous buyers from your DTC skincare website. Google will examine their behaviors and bring to the surface the same type of audience who are unaware of your brand but behave similarly—comparable searches, site visits, video views, etc. Then your video ad appears to them.
This is a fantastic tactic when you wish to scale without sacrificing targeting accuracy. It works best when paired with robust creative that replicates the hook or message cadence that performed well in your original audience.
Customer Match: First-Party Data at Its Best
If you have email addresses, phone numbers, or app user IDs for your current customers, you can upload them into Google Ads through Customer Match. Google then tries to match those users with signed-in users on Google properties such as YouTube and Gmail.
This is a high-end, privacy-friendly method of reaching your high-value customers or repeat buyers directly—and of excluding them from awareness campaigns if you don’t wish to overbuy on those already aware of you.
Customer Match is also very handy for loyalty campaigns, upsells, win-backs, or special offers. It’s an approach that gets your CRM data doing more work and synergizes well with Google’s vast reach.
Life Events: Targeting People at Significant Milestones
Google’s life event targeting allows you to look for people experiencing significant life events—getting married, moving, going to college, purchasing a home, having a baby. These events tend to trigger new shopping needs, so they represent critical windows of opportunity.
For instance, a furniture company can target “Recently Moved” users with a home essentials-themed video ad. A financial advisory company can target “Recently Engaged” users with tips on combining finances or wedding savings. These users aren’t typed by interest, but by timing—and in advertising, timing is everything.
Life events work wonderfully as time-sensitive promotions, seasonal promotions, or products and services most directly related to life transitions. The success lies in writing creative that addresses the emotion or issue of the moment.
In-Depth Demographics: Bigger Than Skin-Deep Segments
Aside from general demographic information, Google Ads also offers deep demographic segments like education level, employment industry, homeownership status, and even marital status. These richer layers of targeting have the ability to refine your reach to areas that are very much in line with the value proposition of your product or service.
For example, a mortgage lending service might wish to target users who are “homeowners” and also “in a certain income range.” Or a continuing ed service might want to target users who are “college graduates” but “not enrolled in a higher education program currently.”
These segments are more focused on fitting the audience profile as closely as possible for performance purposes rather than broad awareness. Layered with additional tactics such as custom intent or remarketing, they provide robust granularity to your video strategy.
Conclusion: Combining the Right Solutions for Maximum Impact
No single audience solution is a silver bullet. The magic happens when you combine them based on your campaign’s goals—whether that’s awareness, consideration, or conversion.
Begin with a high-level strategy such as affinity or custom affinity to establish top-of-funnel visibility. Progress to more precision-targeted solutions such as custom intent, in-market, and remarketing to encourage consideration and action. Along the way, amplify your first-party data through Customer Match and augment your reach through Similar Audiences.
Each video campaign must be a dialogue with your audience—and Google’s audience solutions enable you to choose precisely whom that dialogue is with, where they are in the process, and what they must hear next.
With a deep knowledge of all the targeting tools available to you, you can engage passive viewers and turn them into active customers, and make sure your video marketing spend is driving metrics you can see, measure, and optimize.