The Ultimate Guide to YouTube Ad Audience Targeting in 2024 ??

There are many different Audience targeting options for YouTube Ads - the key is to test out which ones will work best for reaching your ideal clients – Today, I want to break down the key types & how you can use them to reach your ideal clients & skyrocket your leads & sales! ??

Here’s some of the key Audience Targeting Options on YouTube:

- Custom Interests & Purchase Intentions Audience

- In-Market Audiences

- Life Events

- Detailed Demographics

- Affinities

- Custom Google Search Intent Audiences

- App Audiences

- URL Audiences (based on sites your ideal clients visit!)

As you can see there are a LOT of different ways to reach your ideal client with your YouTube Ads!?

The trick is knowing which ones you should test & how each of them work. (That’s where this guide comes in play)

I’ll give a quick overview of each of these audiences with some quick recommendations based on what we’ve seen when we help our clients with their campaigns.

???) ???????????? ?????????????????? & ???????????????? ???????????????????? ????????????????

You can setup Custom Audience Segments within Google by creating a custom segment based on Interests & Purchase intentions - this is similar to Facebook’s interest based targeting, so those of you familiar with Facebook ads should be right at home setting up these audiences.

Although, as you’ll learn later, Google has access to FAR MORE data-points than Facebook…

These custom built audiences allow you to create a seemingly infinite number of possible audience combinations.

Unlike Facebook, you can actually target any interest you can think of - that’s because these are not pre-built interests, they are instead keyword based interests you manually setup in Google as an Audience!

I recommend doing Keyword Research to help find potential keywords for these Interests & Purchase intentions.

I actually co-founded a YouTube keyword research tool KeywordSearch .com that our clients and I use to find the best YouTube Ads keywords – that’s how serious I am about the importance of keywords; I built my own software to make that process seemless!?

You then take these new keywords that you found & put them directly into your Custom Segments in paired groups.

Pay close attention to the Impression Size & Demographic data in the Custom Segment builder so that you can make sure you’re reaching a good sized audience (without targeting too broad).

??) ????-???????????? ??????????????????

These In-Market Audiences work extremely well for targeting people who are likely to convert,

because Google is pulling its data points to not only signify someone is interested in what you do…

But also that they are Right Now, “In the Market” for what you’re looking to promote This means they have Buyers Intent!

We’ve seen a lot of success with the “In-Market for Advertising & Marketing” Audience personally & our clients see a lot of success with the In-Market audiences most relevant to them.

You definitely want to test several In-Markets! Sometimes, ones you wouldn’t think of immediately can do exceptionally well (for example, In-Market for SEO & SEM works AMAZING for us, but this isn’t always immediately obvious!)

??) ???????? ????????????

This audience is more use-case specific depending on who you’re looking to target.

But if you’re looking to target people “Moving Soon,” “Recently Married,” “Recently Graduated,”

“Started a New Job,” etc.?

This is a great way to reach people at the perfect time!

For example we worked with a Financial Planner focusing on people looking to retire soon with a last-minute game-plan, a great option for him was the “Retiring Soon” audience.

???) ???????????????? ????????????????????????

Similar to Life Events, this is very case-specific, but those of you who are looking to target with more detailed demographics & you find an audience that fits your avatar - this works really well!

One key audience here is “Parents of kids age ____” which is very valuable for specific offers,

products or services that cater to parents of kids a certain age.

For instance one of our clients targeting College/SAT Prep can target “Parents of Kids 13-17” &

effectively reach their ideal audience!

Lots of possibilities with these Detailed Demographic audiences!

???) ????????????????????

Affinities are some of the most broad-based Audiences within your YouTube Ads targeting.

Honestly, these usually aren’t the audiences you want to target because they’re often too broad & there are better options available.

There’s a bunch of big scalable audience here that you can use. Like “Luxury Shoppers” “Mobile Enthusiasts” etc.

For more mass-market Products or Courses etc. this can work quite well - especially for scalability. But I wouldn’t start with these audiences & they’re not the best for Direct Response.

???) ???????????? ???????????? ???????????? ??????????????????

Google Search Intent audiences actually allow you to target people on YouTube who have recently searched Google or YouTube for your desired keywords!

(NOTE: It says “Google Search” when you set it up, but I’ve read the fine print & can 100% confirm this lets you target both Google Searches & YouTube Searches)

This is incredibly powerful & often times is one of our highest performing audiences within campaigns.

Because it allows you to target someone who has been recently searching Google for exactly what you do!

Similar to the Custom Purchase Intentions & Interests audiences, you can build your own custom segments, but this time you build them with Google Search keywords.

We typically find some of the best keyword searches on YouTube using KeywordSearch .com and then add those into the audience segments based on search volume & relevancy.

These audiences work extremely well! I would recommend creating different Search Intent Audiences for different angles – so that you can split test which works best (because after the intent audience is made you have to take the results as a whole for the audience vs. finding specific keywords that work well within it)

So what we’ve found works best is to create multiple Search Intent Audiences around different angles / themes that your ideal clients are searching on Google.

(Pro-Tip: If you already run Google PPC ads, copy your best performing keywords into a Custom Search Intent Audience & watch the magic happen!)

???) ?????? ??????????????????

Next, we have App Audiences!

You can target people based on the apps they have installed on their devices!

Now, this is the one audience that is most affected by Apple’s privacy policies – (since it relies on 3rd party data vs. most of the other audiences above which have 1st party data from Google)

But these campaigns still produce some pretty great results when you find some solid app audiences to target!

For instance we target anyone with Meta Ads Manager or Google Ads installed on their phones, haha!

???) ?????? ??????????????????

Internally we’ve dubbed this audience the “Industry Secret” because of how powerful this audience is, yet many don’t know of its existence!

You can literally target people who are visiting your competitors websites (or similar sites) by creating a URL Audience!

This allows you to enter the URLs of sites you know your target audience is visiting & put them all together into one audience.

This effectively allows you to Retarget OTHER Websites Traffic! – It’s really incredible!

For instance we have a URL audience that works quite well around ClickFunnels website visitors – because we know people who use ClickFunnels are a perfect fit for YouTube Ads – think about that!

Now you may be asking yourself, “How does YouTube/Google know what sites people have visited?”

It’s because of not only Google Search & YouTube, but also Google Analytics & Google Chrome?

which a large portion of people use every day – it’s all sending data back to Google…

After all… Google Analytics is installed in over 55.49% of ALL Websites Online!

And we have access to all of that Data – IF we know how to leverage it!

All the better for us to Target with our ads!

—

????????’?? ?? ???????? ???? ?????? ???????? ???????? ???? ???????????? ???????? ?????????????? ?????? ???? ????????!

If you’re looking for help with YouTube Ads - My team is offering complimentary 20-minute YouTube Ad Discovery Calls - we’ll take a quick look at where you’re at with your marketing & point you in the right direction!

I’ll Drop a link down below - feel free to grab a spot & I’d love to help you maximize your YouTube Ads in 2024!

I’ll also share a link to my KeywordSearch software that lets you use AI to build YouTube Ad Audiences automatically & conduct deep YouTube/Google keyword research - specifically for YouTube Ads!

I hope you found this post valuable!