Audience targeting: remarketing, in-market, and custom segments

Every technique so far targets a search — someone actively looking, right now. Audience targeting is a different axis entirely: reaching specific people based on who they are or what they've already done, independent of what they're currently searching.

Remarketing: the highest-converting audience most accounts have

Audience: "Visited /checkout but didn't complete purchase" — last 30 days

Remarketing shows ads specifically to people who already visited the site — for Bright Leaf Coffee, someone who added a subscription to cart and left without completing checkout is about as high-intent an audience as exists: they've already shown real interest, and simply didn't finish. A Display campaign (part 3) targeting exactly this audience, with an ad reminding them what they left behind, typically converts at a meaningfully higher rate than any cold-audience targeting, since it's re-engaging existing, demonstrated intent rather than creating it from scratch.

Setting up a remarketing list

<!-- The base Google tag from part 11, already installed site-wide, is what
     powers remarketing list membership — no separate tag needed -->

The exact same Google tag installed for conversion tracking in part 11 is what builds remarketing audiences automatically — visiting /checkout adds a visitor to a "reached checkout" list; completing a purchase can exclude them from it, so a Bright Leaf Coffee subscriber isn't shown an ad for the same subscription they already bought.

In-market audiences: people actively shopping in a category

Google's own machine learning identifies users showing recent behavior consistent with actively researching or comparing products in a specific category — "In-market for Coffee & Tea," in Bright Leaf Coffee's case — based on signals like recent searches and site visits across the web, not just on this specific site. This reaches people with real, current purchase intent in the category, without requiring they've ever visited Bright Leaf Coffee's own site first.

Affinity audiences: broader, longer-term interest

A step further from in-market — affinity audiences group people by general, longer-term interests and habits ("Coffee Enthusiasts," as a lifestyle category) rather than active near-term shopping signals. Better suited to broader brand-awareness Display or Video campaigns than to a direct-response goal, since affinity reflects general interest, not necessarily active current buying intent.

Observation mode vs. targeting mode

Targeting: only show ads to this specific audience
Observation: show ads to everyone the campaign already targets, but report
             performance broken down by whether they're in this audience too

This is a genuinely underused, high-value setting: adding an audience in observation mode doesn't restrict who sees the ad at all — it adds reporting visibility, showing whether a specific audience (in-market coffee shoppers, say) converts better or worse than the campaign's traffic overall, without any risk of over-narrowing reach. Switching to full targeting mode is the next step only once observation data actually confirms an audience is worth focusing on directly.

For GreenDesk: custom segments built from real signals

Custom segment: people who searched "project management software for remote teams"
                or "asana alternative" in the last 30 days

Custom segments let an advertiser define an audience directly from specific search terms, URLs, or apps associated with genuine buying intent for that business — for GreenDesk's B2B lead-gen campaign (part 17), a custom segment built around competitor names and category-specific searches reaches people actively evaluating exactly the kind of product GreenDesk sells, even outside a direct search for "GreenDesk" itself.

Next: Google Shopping campaigns — the format built specifically for Bright Leaf Coffee's kind of e-commerce business, and how it actually works underneath.