2.3 Targeting your audience

Showing your ads to the right prospective customers is a key part of a successful advertising campaign that helps you reach your goals. Below, we'll review the different ways that you can use AdWords to show your ads.

Keyword targeting

As you learned in a previous module, on the Search Network, AdWords will use your keywords — words or phrases that are relevant to your product or service — to show your ads to people searching for similar terms. On the Display Network, when your keyword matches a webpage's concepts or central theme, your ad is eligible to show on that webpage (we call this an automatic placement).

You'll want to choose high quality, relevant keywords that can help you reach the customers you want, when you want. We'll go over more tips on how to build a great keyword list later, but let's start with a few important details about keywords.

Keyword match types

You can use keyword match types to control which searches trigger your ad. Each match type, which is specified by a special symbol, will trigger your ad to show for a customer's search in different ways.

This chart serves as an introduction to the different match types, ordered from broad to narrow.

Match type	Special symbol	Example keyword	Ads may show on searches that:	Example searches
Broad match	none	women's hats	include misspellings, synonyms, related searches, and other relevant variations	buy ladies hats
Broad match modifier	+keyword	+women's+hats	contain the modified term (or close variation, but not synonyms), in any order	hats for women
Phrase match	"keyword"	"women's hats"	are a phrase (or close variation)	buy women's hats
Exact match	[keyword]	[women's hats]	are an exact term (or close variation)	women's hats
Negative match	-keyword	-women	are searches without the term	baseball hats

You can use broad match, for example, to show your ad to a wide audience, and you can use exact match to show your ad to specific groups of people. In general, we recommend using a "broad-to-narrow" strategy — start with broad match keywords and then monitor your keywords' performance over time. You can make your keyword match types more specific if you find that your ad is showing for too many irrelevant variations of your keywords.

Keep in mind that you can use match types with campaigns that show ads on the Search Network. On the Display Network, keywords are treated as broad match.

Negative keywords and keyword exclusions

You can also add negative keywords for campaigns that shows ads on the Search Network, and keyword exclusions for campaigns that show ads on the Display Network. Negative keywords prevent your ads from showing to people searching for those terms or visiting sites that contain those terms. When you choose negative keywords, you'll want to choose terms that are similar to your keywords but signal that people are looking for a different product or service.

Display Network targeting

In addition to keywords, you can use different targeting methods to match your ad to places or audiences on the Display Network.

Let’s take a look at three categories of targeting methods:

Contextual targeting: Match relevant site content

You can target based on relevant website content in two ways: Keywords: AdWords looks for sites with content related to your keywords where it can show your ads. Your ad may also show on websites that someone visits after they’ve visited another site that is related to your keywords. Topics: Similar to keywords, this lets you place your ads on website pages about the topics that you choose. Instead of developing a list of words or phrases, you choose categories of information, such as “Autos and Vehicles.”

With keywords and topics, Google selects relevant placements on the Display Network, based on website content and other factors, where it can show your ads.

Audiences: Reach specific groups of people

You can target your ads based on audiences in these ways: Audiences: Depending on your advertising goals, you can choose the audience that best matches your prospective customers. To drive brand awareness, use affinity audiences to reach TV-like audiences on a broad scale. To reach as many potential customers as possible who have an affinity for a specific product area, you might try addingcustom affinity audiences. To reach specific audiences actively shopping for a product or service, use in-market audiences. Interest categories: This allows you to reach people interested in products and services similar to those your business offers. When you target interest categories, you can show your ad to people who've demonstrated specific interests, regardless of whether or not your ad correlates with the particular topic of the page they're currently on or the app they're using. You’ll find interest category targeting alongside remarketing in your account. Remarketing: This option can help you reach people who've previously visited your website while they visit other sites on the Display Network. You’ll find remarketing alongside interest categories in your account. Demographics: This option allows you to reach people who are likely to be within the age, gender, and parental-status demographic groups that you choose.

With audiences, you don't manually select places to show your ads.

Managed placement targeting: Select specific websites and apps

Managed placement targeting allows you to pick individual sites and mobile apps where you want to show your ads. For example, if your typical customer spends a lot of time on a specific website and you want your ads to appear there, you can add it as a managed placement.

Location and language targeting

With location settings, you can target the geographic areas where your ads can appear. You can select entire countries (like the United States or France), individual regions or cities within a country (like the state of California or city of Paris), or a certain distance around your business location (like 20 miles around San Francisco).

Why use location targeting? It can help focus your advertising on the areas where you'll find the right prospective customers, and restrict it in areas where you won't. It's a good idea to choose the region where potential customers live and where your business can serve them.

For example, if you run an e-Commerce business in the United States that ships to certain states, you can target only those states. Or, if you own an Italian restaurant in San Francisco, you can show your ads only to customers within a few miles of your restaurant.

If you're trying to communicate with customers who don't speak the same language, you can use language targeting to show your ads to customers who speak a particular language. Your ads can appear for customers who use Google products (such as Search or Gmail) and on third-party websites that are part of the Display Network.

Language targeting helps make sure your ads will appear on sites that are written in the language of the customers you'd like to reach. Keep in mind that your ads and keywords should be written in the language that you target — AdWords doesn't translate ads or keywords.

Let's say you're an international women's apparel retailer, and you want to show your ads to Spanish-speaking customers. You can create a campaign that's targeted to the Spanish language, and show your Spanish language ads to potential customers who have their Google interface language set to Spanish when they search for dresses.

Device targeting

You can also reach prospective customers while they're on the go by showing your ads when people are searching or visiting Display Network sites on their mobile phones that have full browsers, like iPhones and Android devices. Depending on your goals, you might want to target one or multiple devices.

Mobile devices with full Internet browsers, such as smartphones, can display websites similar to the ones you'd see on a desktop computer and mobile-optimized sites. High-end mobile devices can also host apps, which people can download from the app store on their device or from a website. This wide variety of media available on mobile devices means that you can show your ads in many different ways, and tailor your message to be compelling to potential customers on mobile devices.

Example

Antoine targets Fiona's Search campaign to people in the United States, since her company doesn't offer shipping outside of the U.S. Using language targeting, Antoine sets up the campaign so that only English-speaking people will see Fiona's ads.