Google Will Retire “Other Interests” Display Network Targeting Feb 17

An Upgrade Center will roll out to manage bulk campaign changes to affinity or in-market audience targeting.

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Google announced last month that “Other interests” targeting on the Google Display Network would be going away. The change was supposed to go into effect January 15, but that date has been pushed to February 17, 2015.

If you’ve got campaigns with “Other interests” targeting, you should plan to update those to target affinity audiences, custom affinity audiences or in-market audiences by May 15th unless you want Google to do it for you.

A quick refresher of what each of those targeting features does (in Google’s words):

  • Affinity audiences – For brand awareness. Reach TV-like audiences on a broad scale to drive brand awareness.
  • Custom affinity audiences – For consideration with niche audiences. Reach as many potential customers as possible with an affinity to a specific product area (for example, “Marathon runners” vs. just “Sports fans”).
  • In-market audiences – Reach specific audiences ready to make a purchase in a specific product or service area

Google says it will be launching an “Upgrade Center” for users to manage campaign targeting updates in bulk.

You will still be able to access historical performance data from Other interests targeting. Other interest targeting was used to target people by inferred interests based on the types of web pages they visited across the Google Display Network.


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About the author

Ginny Marvin
Contributor
Ginny Marvin was formerly Third Door Media’s Editor-in-Chief, running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin wrote about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

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