What are negative audiences?
Google uses various tools to help advertisers segment and target users for ad delivery generally referred to as audiences. Various audience types can also be used to exclude users from seeing your ads. This is a very powerful way to eliminate unwanted ad impressions and subsequent click spend. Thus emphasizing more spend towards users with a higher probability to click and convert.
How are Negative Audiences Built?
Negative audiences are just audiences by default. They are called negative audiences once they are added as an exclusion to a campaign or ad group. Therefore, you can use existing google defined audiences, existing user-defined audiences, or create a new user-defined audience for use as a negative audience. An audience could be used in one campaign as an excluded audience and in another campaign as a targeted audience.
How to Implement Negative Audiences
For audiences defined as “Audiences” by Google, to add an audience exclusion, access your ads account and extend the audiences selection and select “Exclusions”. You will see a list of all current audience exclusions and can add (or remove) exclusions. Now click the blue plus button. This will allow you to select the target campaign or ad group you would like to add an audience exclusion to. If we’re inside a campaign or ad group and then navigated to audiences, the campaign or ad group has been selected for you. You will then be able to toggle between “Search” and “Browse” views to select your audience exclusions. The “Search” function allows you to select from recently used audiences or search among all available audiences. The Browse feature allows you to dive into various audience categories such as Detailed demographics, Affinity, In-market, Life Events, Remarketing, and Customer Lists.
There are a couple of other audience segments in Google Ads that are referred to differently and located in different sections of the Google Ads UI. These are “Demographics” and “Locations”. Exclusions work in a very similar fashion as with “Audiences”.
To exclude “Locations”, navigate to the locations listing and expand the selection. Again, select “Excluded” and then click the blue pencil button. You will be able to select a campaign or if you navigated to locations within a campaign, the campaign will have already been selected. You will then be able to search and select locations to exclude from your campaign. Additionally, there is a checkbox to allow you to add locations in bulk. There is a map visual of both included and excluded locations to help you through the process. Build a list of locations (or remove currently excluded areas) and then click “Save”. Note that exclusions work the same as targeting for locations. You can only exclude locations at the campaign level.
The steps for excluding demographics are again very similar. However, you must navigate a little differently to exclude at the campaign or ad group level. For campaigns, navigate to and expand the demographics listing. Next select “Exclusions”. Again, if you have navigated to exclusions from an existing campaign that campaign will be selected for you. Otherwise, you will be able to select a campaign. Google has conveniently built all demographics exclusions into 1 view. From this view, you can see demographics that are currently excluded or not. Simply check any you wish to exclude or uncheck boxes to remove as an exclusion. For ad groups, the process is the same, but you must navigate to “Exclusions” through an ad group. From either the campaign or ad group level, you can also select an individual demographic (age, gender, household income or parental status) instead of “Exclusions”. From this view, you can adjust any existing demographic to “enabled” or “Exclude from ad group/campaign”. However, you cannot add exclusions (or targets) from this view.
Negative Audience Usage Examples
There are an infinite number of instances where negative audiences can be helpful to improving campaign performance. This is a quick look at how various audiences can be excluded to help improve a campaign.
Suppose you are offering a coupon that allows a user to get a discount on replacement windows. The coupon can be used one time per visitor. You’ve created a Google Ads campaign and targeted users appropriately with keywords and ad copy. As the campaign matures, you probably don’t want users who have used the coupon to revisit that ad. You would set up the audience to track all users how have downloaded the coupon as a remarketing list in Google Analytics or Google Ads. Then you would add that list as a negative audience. Because this offer is targeting possible homeowners, you would exclude renters (Detailed demographics). Further understanding your potential customer’s demographics, you may also want to exclude users in the 18-24 age demographic further paring down the audience that sees your ad.
Make Use of the Negative Audience Tactic Where It Makes Sense
Now that you understand what negative audiences are, proper implementation, and potential tactics for usage, you are ready to start leveraging this powerful tool within your Google Ads campaigns. With a good plan of attack, you can improve the efficiency of your campaigns and increase your overall performance in Google Ads.