For those of you looking for more options on the Google Display Network (i.e. using Google Ads to put your adverts on millions of third-party sites), the ‘Custom Audiences’ option introduced last year is looking interesting. This combines what used to be called ‘custom intent’ and ‘custom affinity’ audiences, and is easier to understand.
Custom audiences enable us to show ads to prospects based on their interests and behaviour, the types of websites they’ve browsed, the types of apps downloaded, and the types of physical location visited. We don’t find the last two particularly exciting, but we do like adding to our audience based on their purchase intentions and the places they like to visit online.
For campaigns running on Google sites, such as YouTube and GMail, you can even use Custom Audiences to do search retargeting: there’s an option to target “people who searched for these terms on Google”.
We particularly like the way audiences can be expanded by choosing ‘people who browse types of websites similar to…’ followed by a website of your choice. We find this works well with quite specific industry-sector sites.