3 changes coming to Google Ads audience features

Google Ads is reminding advertisers about some changes to its audience targeting and reporting features. These changes, which were shared via email with advertisers, are fairly minor and some have already started rolling out to accounts. 

Reuse audiences. Advertisers will be able to reuse audiences across campaigns. When you build an audience to use in a campaign, Google Ads will save it so you can use it again in a future campaign.

This feature is now available for use as an audience signal on Performance Max and is coming soon to Discovery, Video Action and App campaigns. The ability to reuse audiences will be expanding to more campaign types in the coming months, according to a tweet from Ginny Marvin, Google’s ad products liaison. 

New terms. Google Ads is renaming some key terms in your audience report and throughout Google Ads. You may have seen this already in some accounts. Google revealed this via this help documentation in September 2021.

For example, Audience types (e.g., similar, custom, in-market, affinity) are now audience segments and Remarketing is now Your data. Here’s the full list of name changes:

New audience reporting. Google is consolidating audience reporting into a new Audiences tab. Located in the left-side navigation menu, you’ll find reporting about demographics, audience segments and exclusions. Google said this is a “simplified view” of all the same reporting features. This is another change you may have seen already in some accounts.

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Why we care. Instead of rebuilding audiences manually in each campaign, new reusable audiences will allow advertisers to save time while keeping targeting consistent across campaigns. The experience should be similar to how custom segments act currently, where once an audience is created, it can be applied to any campaign instead of manually checking off types in each campaign. Changes to the audience segments will then be distributed to all campaigns targeting the audience segment. 

Here’s the email from Google, shared on Twitter by @PPCGreg: