Google’s Custom Intent Audiences: A welcome step forward in audience targeting

Creating custom intent audiences is fairly straightforward. Below is a step–by–step walkthrough to help you make the most of this feature:

• Select a display campaign in the new AdWords interface then select the Audiences tab
• Once you’re in audiences, select the Edit/Target button and choose "intent" it should be nestled between the "affinity" and "Remarketing" tabs.

In Google’s auto-generated audiences, if you hover over the name of the audience you can identify the key characteristics of your audience, including: 

• What it’s based on. 
• Associated keywords from your account. 
• Common keywords and URLs related to products and services that the audience is actively researching. 

You'll be given the choice of either using Google’s Auto-Generated intent audiences or creating your own. If you hover over the name of the audience you can identify the key characteristics of your audience. After you launch your campaign, remember to check the audience tab to see which audiences are getting conversions, and where you can optimize your campaign further. A good place to start is with your top placements on the display network.

Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) knows more about our prospective customer’s behavior than we as marketers could ever wish to know. While intent and predictive audiences still lack the laser-focused precision of Search, Custom Intent Audiences are an exciting new feature that gives us the ability to target specific cohorts of people, that are highly relevant to our business, at the right time.