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Google Ads: Does ‘targeting expansion’ ignore your audience targeting?
Posted by on September 10, 2020 at 2:21 pmGoogle continues to recommend this to me, and it actually goes against my optimization score (I don’t care, but my boss looks at it).
### Use targeting expansion
+23.6% *increase*
**Reach additional customers at a similar cost per conversion**
*Recommended because your Display Network ads can reach a larger audience with targeting expansion*
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Now I have always been under the impression that if I enable this, it will completely disregard my audience targeting, hence I have never wanted to try it. But is this the case? Can anyone confirm how much more ‘broad’ targeting expansion goes?
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4 Replies
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It doesn’t really ignore your targeting; it will find users that are similar to it. So it’s not like the users are completely irrelevant to your targeting, but obviously it’s a lot more broad than your original targeting. I would only use this if the targeting is maxed out and you want to scale your campaign, but don’t know how. Just dismiss the recommendation if your boss looks at the percentage… 🙂
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You’d just need to test it. It can work for sure. But not always. Also depends on your definition of conversions. I’ve seen it do exactly what it is supposed to do bring in more conversions but those customers are crap quality.
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Yes it does by design. You target something and then Google finds something outside your target that has probability to convert.
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Tried it in the past with some issues. Had excluded my retargeting audience originally, but once I turned this on it started going after my retargeting audience and my actual retargeting campaigns suffered. Makes it kind of hard to keep reporting accurate at that point.
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