Google Custom Intent Audiences (Display and Video) - Quick guide - By Sarang Kinjavdekar

Are you running a campaign and want to reach the audience who is actively searching your product /services , in a consideration phase or in the midto lower funnel. Then, you can target them by using custom Intent audiences.

This guide will cover how to do the set up and some use cases.

What is Custom Intent Audience(s)?


Custom intent audiences help you define and reach the ideal audience for your business. Built with performance advertisers in mind, custom intent audiences allow you to go beyond pre-defined audience categories and reach people as they’re making a purchase decision.


How do I set up Custom Intent Audience(s)?


Custom Intent audiences can be st up in 2 ways (i) In Google Ads ,Go to shared Library >Audience Manager > Select Custom Audiences> Click on + Button and start the creation (ii) This can also be created once you have selected the campaign goal (or campaign type and under the Audience selection area <<<< We will see the this method here


Step by Step- Creation Guide

*Click on the images to enlarge

Step 1

Start creating the campaign and reach till the Audience section, select as seen below

Step 2

Click on New Custom Intent Audiences

Step 3

This is the overview and some explanation of the screen that opens up

Step 4

Name your audience and then enter keywords and URLs related to products and services that this audience is actively researching


For example, lets say we added few keyword keyword , on the right hand side we will see some suggestions based on the keywords we added


Lets see the 1st part of the Right hand scree which is the "IDEAS"

Now lets have a look at the Audience size section

We have clicked on ADD ALL and then we clicked on the AUDIENCE SIZE

We can also see the Demographics data and it will look something like below-it has Age, Gender and Parental status details

Now lets see, if we target by URL, how does it looks like. In this case, I am taking an example of Amazon

Lets add all the keywords (or you can select the ideas that you like which I recommend)

Now you can see the keywords on left and then the total available audience size on the right hand side

What are the benefits of using Custom Intent Audience(s)?

Custom Intent Audiences are very powerful and below are some the advantages and use cases for you.

Targeting competitors 

Performing a simple competitive research and traffic analysis into your competitors’ most visited (and most valuable pages), as well as the keywords driving traffic to those pages. Based on this you will gain some insights, which can then be used for a custom intent audience campaign.

Case specific Targeting

Get creative, play around with different options- think about your audience first-what are they interested in, where are they spending time, what are they reading. For keywords- you can use Branded, generic, long tail or a mix of all. Really depends how well it aligns with your strategy

Define your own categories ,Experiment and Combine it 

As Custom intent is better than the Custom affinity and slightly lower as compared to in Market audiences. You can take advantage of this, you can go as broader you want (in terms of keywords) or as specific as you want (competitors URL).You can define your own keywords and categories which are presently not available to target.

Thanks for Reading!

Sarang Kinjavdekar