What Google Doesn’t Tell You About Their Audience Targeting

When it comes to advertising, Google is the undisputed king. The search engine giant has a nearly unmatched monopoly on online advertising, and its algorithms are used by most of the major players in the industry. With all this clout comes nearly unlimited access to the user’s data. As a small business owner, you may think that advertising on Google to their pre-defined audiences is a no-brainer – clearly your customers use some sort of Google product! But before you turn your ads over to Google’s black box target audiences, please participate in a little data accuracy test.

Navigate your browser over to Google’s Ad Settings portal. This is a catalog of all the interests Google associates with your Google account. Take a look at those and look at how many of them are not accurate at all. Here are some highlights from Mike’s personal ad profile: Extreme Sports (nope!), Kentucky, Pickup Trucks, and Rugby. All these topics that he has zero interest in yet somehow Google has dropped him into their black box. Now advertisers who are selling things like pickup trucks or trips to Kentucky wll have their ad dollars spent trying to reach Mike’s uninterested eyes!

Google doesn’t tell us how or why or even for how long a user has been in their pre-defined target audiences. As advertisers we have no control over what constitutes a “rugby” audience – all we can do is check the Rugby box when we’re setting up our ad campaign and hope that Google knows best. Sadly, the “best” thing Google knows how to do is spend whatever budget you give them so savvy advertisers need to know when to be warry of their black box targeting and pump the brakes on their suggested targeting automations. If you give Google a wide breadth, you’re going to find a lot of your ad spend going to the wrong places.