Poor ad targeting wastes your Google Ads budget by putting your ads in front of people who have little reason to buy. You might still get clicks, but if those visitors aren’t interested in what you sell, you’re spending your budget without bringing in leads or sales.
Fortunately, you can reduce wasted ad spend by identifying Google Ads targeting mistakes and adjusting your campaigns. But before you can fix those mistakes, you need to understand how they affect your results. Let’s start with what happens when your targeting misses the mark.
What Happens When Your Audience Targeting Strategy Goes Wrong?
As we covered earlier, poor targeting wastes your budget by showing ads to people who are unlikely to buy. But wasted clicks aren’t the only problem. Poor targeting can also hurt your Google Ads performance in other ways:
- Wasted Spend on Clicks: Every click costs money, whether or not the visitor becomes a customer. If too much of your budget goes toward unqualified traffic, you’ll have less to spend on audiences who are more likely to convert.
- Lower Click-Through Rates: An ad that doesn’t match someone’s needs gives them little reason to click. For example, someone searching for free accounting software probably won’t click an ad for an expensive enterprise solution. If many people who see your ad ignore it, your click-through rate (CTR) falls.
- Skewed Performance Data: Your traffic figures might look healthy even as leads and sales remain low. Without comparing clicks and impressions with conversion data, you could mistake high traffic for strong performance and keep spending on audiences that deliver few results.
- Missed Sales to Competitors: Your ads might reach people who have little interest in your offer while missing potential customers who are actively looking for what you sell. Those buyers could click a competitor’s ad instead, giving another business the chance to win a sale you could have made.
Getting your targeting right helps you spend less on irrelevant clicks, make better decisions based on campaign data, and reach more potential customers. The first step is understanding who you want to reach and what makes them a good fit for your offer.
Ads Targeting Options: The Main Audience Categories in Google Ads
Google Ads gives you several ways to reach potential customers beyond simply choosing keywords or locations. You can target people based on their interests, what they’re researching, their demographic characteristics, or previous interactions with your business.
Google groups these options into audience segments, which help you reach people who fit your campaign goals. Google’s audience documentation covers the available segment types in detail. Below, we’ll give you an overview of the main options and explain when to use each one.
How Affinity Audiences and In-Market Audiences Work
Affinity and in-market segments both help you reach people based on their interests or buying intentions, but they serve different purposes.
Affinity segments help you reach people based on their interests, passions, and habits. For example, a business selling camping equipment could target outdoor enthusiasts to introduce its products to people who enjoy camping and similar activities. These users don’t necessarily intend to buy camping gear right now, so affinity targeting can help build awareness among a relevant audience.
In contrast, in-market segments help you reach people who are actively researching products or services and considering a purchase. A camping equipment retailer, for example, could target people comparing tents, sleeping bags, or other outdoor gear. Because these users are showing purchase intent, in-market targeting can be useful for campaigns focused on generating sales.
The right choice depends on what you want the campaign to achieve. Use affinity segments to reach people with relevant interests, and consider in-market segments when you want to connect with people who are closer to making a purchase.
Narrowing Target Audiences With Demographics and Household Income
Sometimes, a person’s interests or purchase intent aren’t enough to define your ideal customer. Demographic targeting lets you refine your audience using attributes such as age, gender, parental status, and, in eligible countries, household income.
Google Ads also offers detailed demographic segments based on characteristics such as education, homeownership, and parental status. These options can help you focus on groups that fit your offer. For example, a business selling premium outdoor blinds might investigate whether homeowners in particular income brackets generate more qualified leads.
So use demographic targeting when you have a clear reason to focus on specific groups, rather than excluding people based on assumptions. Review lead quality and conversion data before narrowing your audience too aggressively, since restrictive targeting can also prevent you from reaching potential customers.
Using Custom and Lookalike Segments to Find New Customers
Affinity, in-market, and demographic segments help you reach broad groups of people based on shared characteristics or purchase intent. But what if you want to reach people who match a more specific profile or find new prospects similar to your existing customers? Custom and lookalike segments give you more ways to do that.
Custom segments let you define an audience using relevant search terms, websites, and apps. For example, a running-shoe retailer could use terms related to marathon training and long-distance running to reach people interested in those topics. This gives you more control over the interests and behaviours you want to target.
Lookalike segments, available in Demand Gen campaigns, take a different approach. Rather than defining an audience around specific interests or search terms, you can use an existing audience as a starting point to find new people with similar characteristics. This can help you reach potential customers beyond your current audience.
Common PPC Mistakes That Drain Your Paid Advertising Budget
Knowing your Google Ads targeting options is only half the job. The wrong settings can still put your ads in front of people who are unlikely to buy or prevent you from reaching potential customers. Here are the targeting mistakes to watch for.
1. Using Audience Segments Incorrectly in Search Campaigns
Google Ads lets you use audience segments in Search campaigns to observe performance or restrict who can see your ads. Choosing Targeting rather than Observation limits your ads to people in the selected segments. This is useful when you want to focus on a specific audience, but it can also cut off potential customers who don’t fit those segments.
2. Using the Same Audience Targeting Across Every Ad Group
Different ad groups can serve people with different needs and levels of purchase intent. Applying the same audience settings across all of them can limit your ability to tailor campaigns to those differences. Review each ad group’s purpose and use audience targeting where it supports that goal.
3. Choosing the Wrong Location Targeting Setting
Your location settings can determine whether ads reach people in your service area or people outside it who have shown interest in that area. For a business serving customers in a specific region, the wrong setting can lead to clicks from people it can’t serve. Review Google’s location options and choose the one that fits your business and campaign goals.
4. Failing to Exclude Existing Customers From Acquisition Campaigns
When a campaign is designed to acquire new customers, continuing to target existing customers can use budget that could reach new prospects. Customer exclusions can help reduce this overlap, although they aren’t appropriate for every campaign. For example, a campaign promoting a complementary service or repeat purchase may still need to reach existing customers.
5. Leaving Targeting Settings Unreviewed
Audience selections, exclusions, and location settings should reflect your current campaign goals. Review them regularly to catch settings that no longer fit, audiences that aren’t converting, and exclusions you need to add. Use campaign performance data to guide changes rather than assuming a setting is wrong simply because it hasn’t been updated recently.
How Targeting Differs Between Google Search and Display Ads
The targeting mistakes discussed above can affect Search and Display campaigns in different ways. Search ads reach people based largely on what they search for, while Display ads can reach audiences across websites and apps based on audience signals, content, and other targeting settings.
The table below compares the main targeting options for Search and Display campaigns:
| Setting | Google Search campaigns | Google Display Network campaigns |
|---|---|---|
| Targeting settings | Keywords and search intent, with audience segments as an additional targeting option | Audience segments, content and placement targeting |
| Audience segments | In-market segments and Customer Match, where available and relevant | Affinity segments, custom segments and remarketing audiences, depending on campaign setup |
| Targeting vs observation | Observation lets you monitor audience performance without restricting reach. Targeting limits ads to selected audience segments. | Audience and content targeting settings help control who sees your ads and where they appear. |
In Search campaigns, selecting Targeting instead of Observation restricts your ads to people in the selected audience segments. Use Observation when you want to measure how different audiences perform without excluding potential customers who fall outside those segments.
Display campaigns offer more ways to reach people based on their interests, previous interactions with your business, and the content they view. Choose the settings that fit your campaign goals, then review performance data to see whether your ads are reaching relevant audiences.
Effective audience targeting means reaching fewer irrelevant people while keeping the audience relevant to your offer.
Get Your Google Ads Targeting Back on Track
Pick one campaign this week. Check its audience settings against what you’ve read here, then change the single setting costing you the most. Small corrections compound faster than a full rebuild ever will.
Ready to stop paying for clicks that never convert? Talk to SlamStop for paid advertising and AdWords management that helps you reach more relevant audiences.